Dasha Burns Asks NATO Chief About His Trump Nickname: ‘Do You Have Some Daddy Issues?’

Politico’s Dasha Burns spoke to NATO chief Mark Rutte during an event at the Munich Security Conference on Friday. The pair discussed a wide range of issues, everything from President Donald Trump’s threats of taking over Greenland to how Rutte ended up calling Trump “Daddy.”

Rutte brushed aside the idea that Trump had weakened NATO by threatening to take Greenland from Denmark by any means necessary. “I would argue that NATO is the strongest it has been since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Rutte told Burns.

Burns ended the chat with a bit of levity.

“Before I let you go, I have to ask: where did ‘daddy’ come from? Do you have some daddy issues, Mr. Rutte?” she questions.

Rutte let out a long “Ohhhhh,” as Burns prodded, “Daddy issues?”

“No, and this is the thing. We had the NATO Summit in The Hague, and Donald Trump, the President, and I had a meeting before, and there was a press spray. And that was exactly on the morning after the day where he took out the nuclear facilities in Iran,” Rutte began, adding:

And I was very happy with that, and I complimented him on doing that through the B-2s. And it was when he was also having some arguments with the Israelis. 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.

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 intentioned. But again, I’m now carrying it, living with it. It’s a fact of life. Now he’s Daddy.

Burns ended it there, quipping, “I think you can take some ownership of ‘Daddy’ just a little bit.”

Watch the clip above.

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