Haley: No One at the UN ‘Is Talking to Me About the President’s Tweets’

Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told host John Dickerson that no one was talking to her about President Donald Trump’s tweets.

Partial transcript as follows:

HALEY: No one is talking to me about the president’s tweets. No one is talking about any of those issues.

DICKERSON: So should foreign leaders, the president tweets something, they should ignore it?

HALEY: I think the foreign leaders are picking up the phone and calling him if they have an issue. That’s what they’re doing with me. They are calling me, not texting me saying, what was this tweet about.

DICKERSON: In diplomacy, words often get tangled and mixed and people obsess about the importance of words. So say going into the president’s meeting with the president of China, he has in the past said, “we can’t continue to allow China to rape our country.” Those are pretty strong words. How is a foreign leader coming to a visit supposed to weigh those words in advance of their meeting?

HALEY: You have face-to-face meetings. This is all about relationships and trying to find some level of trust. When it comes to the issue of North Korea, it’s something we’re very concerned about. China is very aware of that. I think you saw Secretary Tillerson go to Beijing.  I have talked with my Chinese counterpart and told them we need to see actions on the side of China. I think the president and also the Chinese president will talk about what those actions will be so we are working together and not watching North Korea do their own thing and China support it. These face-to-face meetings are extremely important. These conversations are extremely important. That’s when you get all the chatter out of the way and when you focus on getting things done.

DICKERSON: The president’s tweets are basically chatter?

HALEY: I don’t know, you’d have to ask everybody else. I don’t hear about them. I don’t talk about them. I don’t have them interfere in everything I’m doing. So to me it’s chatter. I don’t focus on.

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