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#POTUSAbroad: Trump meets EU presidents, disagreement on #Russia

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Today (25 May) Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, and Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission and Antonio Tajani, president of the European Parliament, meet Donald Trump, president of the USA. This is the first meeting between the leaders, writes Catherine Feore.

After the meeting, Tusk said that many issues were discussed including foreign policy, security, climate change and trade relations.

Tusk indicated that on trade and climate change the United States were not quite "on the same line". He also indicated that on Russia views differed, but that as far as the Ukraine was concerned the leaders were in broad agreement.

Tusk said that what gave the US-EU relationship its deepest meaning was its commitment to fundamental western values of human rights and respect for human dignity. The task both face is the consolidation of the whole free world around values and principles first and interests later.

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Due to a very busy schedule the meeting lasted an hour. Senior EU sources said that since Tusk’s initial conversation with Trump in November, the EU was in a completely different place. At the time, Trump thought that other countries would leave the EU, following Brexit. The source said that following Dutch and French elections we are in a completely different place. Or, to paraphrase from the great American writer Mark Twain, the reports of the EU's death have been greatly exaggerated.

Originally, Trump wanted to negotiate separate bilateral trade deals with EU-28 countries. On her visit to the new administration, Chancellor Angela Merkel allegedly had to say 11 times that Germany could only negotiate through the EU. On finally understanding this, Trump conceded defeat and said “we will do a deal with Europe”.

Senior sources said that Tusk’s who believes strongly that the US and EU are the pillars of freedom and co-operation is anxious to communicate the EU’s strong relationship with the US and desire for further co-operation.

In the preliminaries, Trump said that he had met some great leaders and had observed that the Pope "was really cool!"

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