Donald Trump is enjoying his best week in office since he first became president nine years ago. To use Mafia parlance, he is finally getting the “respect” he believes he deserves as capo di tutti capi.
The 31 other nations gathered for the Nato summit this week all bowed down before him as World King – Boris Johnson eat your heart out, Ozempic permitting.
Presidents and prime ministers have always accepted that the leader of the world’s richest and most powerful nation is first among not-so-equals. But until now the president of the United States has played along with the idea of co-operating on a consensual basis with allies and rivals in global institutions.
No longer. Such democratic-style niceties have been cast aside. By force of will and brute behaviour, Trump is not just getting what he wants – he is also forcing the rest of the world to play by his rules, and accept his bullying behaviour as the norm. Never mind United Nations resolutions, Nato and G7 communiqués – what he says goes.
Everything about the summit was tailored to the American Emperor’s tastes. The meeting which usually stretches over several days and many hours was cut short. Trump spent less than 24 hours in total in the Netherlands and that included an overnight stay at the Royal Palace Huis Ten Bosch as the guest of King Willem-Alexander and his Argentina-born Queen Maxima.
The former Dutch prime minister, now Nato secretary-general, Mark Rutte, even outdid his monarchs’ brown-nosing. Trump broadcast Rutte’s private fawning greeting as a fitting tribute: “Mr President, dear Donald, congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do… You will achieve something no American president in decades could get done. Europe is going to pay in a big way, as they should, and it will be your win.”
Unembarrassed, Rutte continued to lay it on thick, calling the President a “Daddy” who “sometimes has to use strong language” to stop the children fighting. Hours earlier Trump had vouchsafed to the international media that Israel and Iran “don’t know what the f**k they are doing”, in threatening to break the ceasefire he had ordered them to observe.
The US air force’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear installations last Saturday night wiped away the whiff of the Taco jibe. Whether Benjamin Netanyahu forced his hand or not, it proved that Trump does not Always Chicken Out. The President flew on to Europe more pleased with himself than ever.
Trump’s fellow leaders excuse their grovelling obsequiousness because they believe it works. Nato members were petrified that he would make good on his previous threat to walk away from the alliance. Instead he assured them at the summit that “he was with them all the way”.
Vain King Donald’s munificence always comes at a price however. In this case he made the other Nato members an offer they could not refuse. They were forced to commit to budget-busting increases to their national defence expenditure. Spain, the only country which broke ranks, was dismissed as “terrible” by King Donald who “threatened to make them pay twice as much” through specially doubled trade tariffs.
In return, all that Trump guaranteed was that the US would shoulder progressively less of Europe’s defence burden. In spite of his “nice” meeting with Ukraine’s president Zelensky, there was no firm American commitment to restore its previous levels of support to Ukraine’s war effort.
square JAMES BALL Trump is the world's Daddy – and it's pathetic
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That is the snag about paying homage to the King in the White House: supplicants come away with less than they arrived with. Keir Starmer pre-empted the Dutch with the British delegation’s fawning performance in the Oval Office. The Prime Minister over-rode King Charles III’s reservations to invite Trump on an early state visit with all the trimmings this autumn. Such a second state visit by a US president is truly “unprecedented”, as Starmer says.
For all the Union Jack wrapped flattery, the much vaunted first “trade deal” agreed between the US and UK actually leaves this country’s businesses in a worse position than they were before Trump returned to the White House. At best UK plc may just be walloped slightly less hard than other economies. In its haste the UK has undermined potential solidarity and resistance against Trump’s trade protectionism, as a senior Anglophile Japanese diplomat pointed out to me, in sorrow, recently.
Back home Trump has long referred to himself as a “king”. The advice passed on at the dinner table by his father was “be a killer, be a king”. Back in 2005 he described the “rich people” who flocked to his Mar-a-Lago club to a biographer: “They all eat, they all love me, they all kiss my ass. And then they all leave and say, ‘Isn’t he horrible.’ But I’m the king.”
Domestically his administration is attempting to brush aside the democratic system’s traditional constitutional checks and balances to rule as an unencumbered autocrat. That is why “No Kings” was the main slogan of the protesters against the military parade he ordered on what just happened to be his birthday. Trump’s frequently issued executive orders carry the authority of an absolute monarch’s royal decrees, as the White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt seems to think.
Like the Sun King, Trump is the master of keeping the public’s attention always on himself; whether he is winning or losing becomes incidental to the show. A radical new leader of the Democratic Party emerged in New York City this week but, in national politics, it is doubtful whether mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani will ever recover from Trump’s immediate characterisation of him as “a 100 per cent communist lunatic”.
The truth is this stuff is irresistible for the watching world. Foreign political leaders meanwhile are going along with Trump’s way of doing business. This is not the way politics has been carried out for the past 80 years, as a former British prime minister pointed out in a speech this week.
Sir John Major went on to ask: “Is barbarism now accepted? Is might now right? Is it only about national self interest? Then heaven help us all!”
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