Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg says that she wouldn’t have “wasted [her] time” talking to Donald Trump had she been given the chance, Reuters reports.
Speaking on Monday to BBC Radio’s Today program, Thunberg says that she passed on the opportunity to speak with the President of the United States when they were in the same room together at a U.N. climate summit in New York in September.
When the host asked the teenager what she would have said to Trump had she been given the chance, she said that she would have simply passed up on the chance to speak to him at all, finding it a waste of time.
“Honestly, I don’t think I would have said anything because obviously he’s not listening to scientists and experts, so why would he listen to me?” she asked rhetorically. “So I probably wouldn’t have said anything, I wouldn’t have wasted my time.”
The teenager and Donald Trump have not been seeing eye to eye, to put it mildly.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr , Trump has accused Thunberg of having an “anger management problem” and suggested in a tweet that she needs to go see “an old-fashioned movie” with a friend and to “chill.” Greta, for her part, later updated her Twitter bio to read, “A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.” Trump later deleted the tweet.
Trump isn’t the only world leader to take jabs at the teenager. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, for example, called Thunberg a “brat.”
Greta doesn’t seem to mind being publicly attacked by powerful adult men.
“Those attacks are just funny because they obviously don’t mean anything. I guess of course it means something – they are terrified of young people bringing change which they don’t want – but that is just proof that we are actually doing something and that they see us as some kind of threat,” she said.
Her father, Svante Thunberg, who also appeared on the BBC interview, said that his daughter is doing “very well” with the attacks against her, as well as with fabrications about her that have popped up, calling the fabrications “fake news.”
“She laughs most of the time. She finds it hilarious,” he said.
Now that her months-long climate activism tour is winding down, Greta says that she’s looking forward to returning to high school in Sweden this August.
