PARTY ANIMALS

Trump’s Unhinged NATO Stunts Turned a World Summit Into a Zoo

When I say the president showed his ass, I really mean it. He’s a baboon.

Opinion

“America, get your boy. He’s broken. He has lost his mind. He needs to be under a doctor’s care back home.”

Looking into the eyes of NATO leaders and guests like Volodomyr Zelensky who had to endure meetings with President Trump at the North Atlantic alliance’s latest summit in Turkey, you could almost hear their pleas. You could see their pain.

Also, their anger and frustration.

“How much longer of this do we have to endure? Please keep this lunatic away from sharp objects. Please keep him away from me.”

Trump’s trip to the NATO summit was not just the latest fiasco in his all-fiasco-all-the-time agenda for his second term. It was a shocking display of his ever more egregious unfitness to be president. Or walking around in public.

Doesn’t anyone love this man? Doesn’t anyone care about his well-being? Won’t anyone stop grandpa from doddering across the sixteen-lane freeway of public life he’s currently attempting to navigate?

Unfortunately, we know the answer to that question. No one cares about him. Those who defend him publicly only do so to ensure they get that last little droplet of power or grift out of their association with the man who holds what once was considered the most powerful job in the world.

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If anyone had an ounce of compassion for Trump, they would be ensuring he got proper mental health care—or at the very least, they would tuck him away in the same undisclosed location where zombie Mitch McConnell is currently being refrigerated.

Instead, we are left with a report on his trip that looks more like a casualty list than the readout of a diplomatic summit.

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Perhaps the biggest headline out of the summit was Trump asserting that the ceasefire with Iran was over. He also called the leaders of Iran “scum.” Instantly, global oil prices went up. Stock markets went down. He approved new waves of attacks on Iran and has said more will soon follow. He also lamented attacks on U.S. ships by “the Islamic Republic of Japan.” Which you probably already knew was not a thing…

While the unraveling of the Iran “peace process” comes as no surprise to observers (who also expect Team Trump will soon be in damage control mode to create the illusion it is back on track), the consequences of the ongoing war are becoming clearer to all. A just-released IMF report said the conflict and higher energy prices would result in a sharp global economic contraction this year. In other words, this is a war that will not just result in the deaths of thousands, the suffering of millions and billions in expense; it will also negatively impact the lives of virtually everyone on the planet.

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Trump also used the occasion of the gathering to attack America’s allies because, well, of course he did. He said they did not support his Iran war sufficiently. He singled out Spain and said he wanted to cut off all trade to the country. It’s not his call, of course. It’s actually a totally bonkers thing to threaten. But hey, he’s Trump, and within minutes he had moved on to other lunacies like his assertion that the U.S. “needed” to annex Greenland and that it was unreasonable for Denmark and other NATO members to resist his administration’s new doctrine of nutsoimperialism.

Even photo ops with his colleagues went badly. Italy’s Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni, was obviously deeply uncomfortable in his presence and couldn’t get away from him quickly enough. Other photos showed Trump isolated and glowering.

He met with Zelensky and insulted him to his face, calling him “difficult.” He suggested, as he always does, that there was a moral equivalency between the positions of Russia (the aggressor, war-criminal instigators of the war) and Ukraine (the heroic victims, defending the interests of America and the West). Why? Because when it comes to Ukraine, he reads as always directly from Kremlin talking points.

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When he offered something to Zelensky, it was the idea that the U.S. would grant a license to Ukraine to produce its own Patriot missiles—despite the fact it seems highly unlikely this was an offer he was in a position to make or one that might come to pass. As military analyst Phillips O’Brien noted in a Bluesky post, “People still do not get it. Trump saying today that Ukraine will get a license to build Patriot missiles means that Ukraine will get no new Patriots for years. It means Russia can attack Ukraine until 2028 (at the earliest) and Ukraine will get no new interceptors.” In other words, on this as with Trump’s stance on the Ukraine war from the get-go, he has undermined U.S. interests, cut U.S. support for Ukraine, weakened our allies, and strengthened the position of his patron and mentor, Vladimir Putin.

Trump also surprised the Turkish strongman host of the meeting, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, by saying the U.S. was now willing to lift sanctions on his country and consider resuming the sale of F-35s to its air force—without explaining why or how it was now in our interest to do so. (The sanctions came as a result of Erdogan buying Russian air defense systems. So, you know, any friend of Vlad, right?)

That said, the concession was only fair; Erdogan, as host, ended up having to guide an unsteady, meandering Trump from his plane during arrival ceremonies. The U.S. president looked lost, weak, and out of it—and the fact that it was another frail elderly man who had to step up to help him didn’t much help the optics.

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Admittedly, while some of Trump’s counterparts appeared pained or just avoided contact with him, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte continued his approach of smiling and flattering Trump. Of course, this has no long-term effect on Trump, who has had a long-standing irrational hatred of the alliance and who has actively sought to weaken it time and time again. Indeed, Trump’s record is one of supporting NATO’s greatest ally, reducing U.S. support for the alliance, becoming a less reliable ally, trying to bully NATO, violating NATO rules, undercutting NATO’s interests in Ukraine, and generally serially harming the alliance. As he did, again, repeatedly in Ankara.

Indeed, Rutte’s obsequious posturing has grown so embarrassing that at a press conference on Wednesday, a Danish reporter asked, “You sit next to Trump when he talks about conquering Greenland, lashes out at allies like Spain—things it doesn’t seem like the old Mark Rutte would approve of. Does this have any effect on your self-respect when you sit there and say nothing?"

Rutte has long seemed to think that his smarmy, reality-denying approach to Trump would help. What he is missing, as this latest summit performance proves once again, is that Trump is not a rational actor.

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What Rutte is doing is the equivalent of tossing a bunch of bananas in front of a rabid baboon. The bananas may distract him for a minute. But in the end, you’ve still got a rabid baboon on your hands.

And at the end of the day, Trump’s by turns embarrassing, awkward, reckless, offensive, and dangerous performance—and the reaction of most if not all of the other NATO leaders present—makes clear is that, right now, the central problem in geopolitics is that we have a rabid baboon on our hands.

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David RothkopfChief Global Affairs Columnist

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