Day 1,048: Trump humiliated himself and got humiliated by others at NATO summit
If there’s been one constant with Donald Trump’s foreign policy, it’s his unique ability to be played and humiliated by every type of world leader.
Trump got conned into giving North Korea multiple photo-ops with nothing in return; he stood next to Vladimir Putin and said he believed Russia didn’t meddle in the 2016 election before trying to backtrack when back on American soil; he has sucked up to dictators, like Rodrigo Duterte, for years; he hasn’t gotten Mexico to contribute a dime towards his border wall; he has lost trade wars with China’s Xi Jingping; he ripped up the U.S.’s participation in a climate deal thinking the world would follow and no one did; he made excuses for and let the Saudis go unpunished for assassinating American-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi; he sold out Kurdish allies in Syria because Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan asked him to; he shredded a nuclear deal with Iran, only to see them begin rebuilding their nuclear program almost immediately; he has a strange handshake interaction with almost everyone he comes in contact with; he cutoff the Queen of England while walking; he canceled a planned meeting with Danish officials after they rebuffed his inquiries to buy Greenland; and, of course, he tried to extort Ukraine into investigating his political rivals.
So with the NATO summit in London this week, it was inevitable Trump would get his pants pulled down numerous times. And it didn’t take long, including for him to yank them himself.
France’s Emmanuel Macron engaged in child-like reverse psychology to get Trump to praise NATO.
Today is another meeting of NATO, an organization Trump has denounced and undermined for years. The keenest minds in what remains of the free world have set themselves to the task of distracting Trump long enough to get through the NATO summit without dissolving the alliance in a tantrum. The Washington Post detailed the efforts leading up to the summit. The plans include flattering Trump with an elaborate dinner at Buckingham Palace, and presenting a series of trumped-up concessions to make it appear the allies have buckled to Trump’s demands by increasing their spending, thereby allowing him to claim victory rather than storming out in a huff.
Amusingly, what seems to have worked instead is Emmanuel Macron’s completely different ploy. The French president gave an interview last month decrying the “brain death” of NATO, which he said had failed to account for America’s shrinking commitment under Trump.
Trump himself has called NATO “obsolete,” openly questioned whether the U.S. would come to the defense of allies under attack (the very foundation of the alliance), and privately told aides on several occasions last year he wants to withdraw from the alliance. But the notion that somebody else would question NATO, and blame its demise on Trump, has enraged him.
Trump responded in exactly the way Macron wanted, saying, “NATO serves a great purpose.”
Macron then insulted Trump to his face for being childish after Trump struggled with criticism.
Meanwhile, Trump couldn’t decide if he supported Iranian protesters or not.
He told obvious lies about domestic policy too, claiming he doesn’t watch the stock market. Yet, he tweets about peaks constantly while ignoring valleys.
He claimed he didn’t know Prince Andrew, who has been implicated in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring and allegedly having sex with underage girls. Yet there are many, many pictures of the two of them together.
And Trump has bragged about playing golf with Andrew.
He accidentally criticized himself from only six months ago.
The NATO summit was pared back to a single day to try and avoid Trump lobbing grenades at anything and everything around him.
Predictably, all he needed was a few hours for that. And by the end, world leaders were openly laughing at him.
1,048 days in, 414 to go
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