Trump airing Macron’s private message was designed to hurt and intimidate

The US president uses mass communication to destabilise his rivals, but the risk is that frank exchange may dry up

The words “private and confidential” have never meant a great deal to Donald Trump. In his discussions with other world leaders, he has never operated much of a filter, happy to provide not just the facts of a conversation but also its content and tone, with descriptions all the way from beautiful to nasty.

But it is a new development (barring bits of mildly solicitous correspondence from Volodymyr Zelenskyy last year) for him to simply copy and paste the entirety of private messages on to social media, as he did in the case of Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to set up a G7 meeting in Paris to discuss Greenland, Ukraine and Syria.