Former Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger spoke about his meeting on
Friday with President-elect Donald Trump on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS"
on Sunday. About Trump's election, he said: "Not enough attention was
paid to the fact that [Globalization] was bound to have winners and
losers, and that the losers were bound to try to express themselves in
some kind of political reaction."
"This president-elect is the most unique that I have experienced in one
respect," he said: "No baggage. He has no obligation to any particular
group because he has become a president on the basis of his own strategy
and a program he put before the American public that his competitors
did not present. So that is a unique situation.”
"I'm not here as a spokesman of the president-elect," Kissinger said.
"I'm here to answer questions of my impressions of [him]. There is the
impact of globalization, and I wrote minor things about that earlier.
Not enough attention was paid to the fact that it was bound to have
winners and losers, and that the losers were bound to try to express
themselves in some kind of political reaction."
"In my view in the present situation, one has to --one should not insist
on nailing him into positions that he had taken in the campaign on
which he doesn't insist. If he insists on them, then of course this
agreement will become expressed, but if he develops another program and
leaves the question open of what he said in the campaign, one should not
make that the desired development."
"I think we should give him an opportunity to develop the positive
objectives that he may have, and to discuss -- and to discuss those. And
we've gone through too many decades of tearing incumbent
administrations apart, and it may happen again, but we shouldn't begin
that way. And we shouldn't end up that way, either, but -- so that would
be my basic view," he said.
