US President Donald Trump’s phone call to President Rodrigo Duterte in 2017 congratulating the latter for an “unbelievable job on the drug problem” was among the calls that “genuinely horrified” the White House staff, the Washington Post said in a report.
Citing anonymous sources, the paper said the call to President Duterte was just one of many that Trump made to world leaders that were not received well by White House officials.
“There was a constant undercurrent in the Trump administration of [senior staff] who were genuinely horrified by the things they saw that were happening on these calls,” a former White House official told the Washington Post on the condition of anonymity. “Phone calls that were embarrassing, huge mistakes he made, months and months of work that were upended by one impulsive tweet.”
In April 2017, Trump called Duterte and lauded his anti-drug campaign which has claimed the lives of thousands of drug suspects in both police operations and vigilante-style killings.
Aside from Duterte, Trump also reportedly called other state leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jin Ping, and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.
“Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders were an anxiety-ridden set of events for his aides and members of the administration, according to former and current officials,” the report said.
