NATO’s Secretary General has explained the origin story behind the bizarre “daddy” nickname he bestowed upon Donald Trump, which the president awkwardly took ownership of last month.
Speaking to Politico’s Dasha Burns, Mark Rutte admitted that it was his “insufficient command of the English language,” that had led to the amusing name for Trump and that he realized only later that the word had “a lot of connotations.”
“I have to ask: where did ‘daddy’ come from? Do you have some daddy issues, Mr Rutte?” Burns joked to Rutte, at the tail end of a sit-down interview at the Munich Security Conference Friday.
Rutte, who is Dutch, explained that the nickname had risen out of a meeting with Trump last summer, in which they had spoken of the U.S. bombing of Iran and the president’s ongoing negotiations with Israel.
“And then I said – and here is my insufficient command of the English language –I said, ‘Daddy sometimes has to be tough.’ And of course, later realizing that the word ‘daddy’ has a lot of connotations,” he said.
“Then what he did – and this is to his credit because he is a fun guy and he has a lot of humor – the American side then put this on T-shirts. There was a video when he came back from the Hague Summit where he said, ‘Daddy is home.’
“So there it was born, and it was never intended.”
Trump unashamedly owned the nickname during a cringe-inducing speech at the National Economic Forum in Davos last month, amid European criticism of his apparent attempts to annex Greenland.
During his speech the president claimed he’d been “helping” Europe and NATO, before veering off topic, claiming “they loved me” until he tried to claim the Danish territory, which he then incorrectly named as Iceland.
Referring to Rutte’s offhand remark, which had taken place six months prior, he went on: “They called me ‘Daddy,’ right? The last time? [A] very smart man said: ‘He’s our Daddy. He’s running it.’”
He went on: “I was, like, running it. I went from running it to being a terrible human being.”
Rutte now appeared to find the interaction with Trump comical, telling Burns: “I’m now carrying it, living with it. It’s a fact of life. Now he’s Daddy.”
Elsewhere at the Conference, others were not so positive, with New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez telling attendees that Trump’s administration was “tearing apart the transatlantic partnership.”
