Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg today accused Donald Trump of being “terrified” of her.
The Swedish campaigner claimed the US President, who once warned the youngster to “chill”, feared change.
Brazilian premier Jair Bolsonaro has previously branded her a “brat”.
Speaking as she guest-edited Radio 4’s Today programme, Greta, 16, said: “Those attacks are just funny because they obviously don’t mean anything.
“Of course it means something – it means they are terrified of young people bringing change, which they don’t want.
“That is just proof we are actually doing something and that they see us as some kind of threat.”
Broadcaster Sir David Attenborough told her she had “woken up the world” to climate change, as the pair spoke for the first time. Greta’s father Svante Thunberg said his daughter battled depression for “three or four years” before she began her school strike, which brought her to world attention.
“She stopped talking… she stopped going to school,” he said.
But her activism has made her happier, he added. “You think she’s not ordinary now because she’s special, and she’s very famous, and all these things.
“But to me she’s now an ordinary child – she can do all the things like other people can,” he said.
“She dances around, she laughs a lot, we have a lot of fun – and she’s in a very good place.”
Asked how she got better, Mr Thunberg said: “We just took a very, very long time to spend a lot of time together and just work it out together.”
He said Greta thought her parents were “huge hypocrites” because they were active advocates for refugees, noting that his daughter would ask “Whose human rights are you standing up?” given that they were not taking the climate issue seriously.
Mr Thunberg said his wife stopped flying and had to “change her whole career”.
He added: “To be honest, she didn’t do it save the climate – she did it to save her child because she saw how much it meant to her, and then, when she did that, she saw how much she grew from that, how much energy she got from it.”
He said he “became vegan” and Greta “got more and more energy” from this.
“I knew they were the right things to do because I understood the facts at that time, but I didn’t do it to save the climate, I did it to save my child,” he said.
On the abuse the teenager faces, Mr Thunberg said: “The hate, quite frankly, I don’t know how she does it but she laughs most of the time, she finds it hilarious.”
