For a man who has trouble staying awake on camera these days, Donald Trump is really pushing the envelope. After staying up into the wee hours celebrating his birthday last Sunday at the UFC spectacle on the White House lawn, our 80-year-old president hopped on a plane to France for his sixth meeting of the G7. He arrived bearing a “memorandum of understanding” between the U.S. and Iran’s governing regime that supposedly opens the Strait of Hormuz and extends the current ceasefire for another 60 days while the parties hammer out a hypothetical long-term agreement to end hostilities.
According to a draft of the agreement read aloud to White House reporters on Wednesday, the agreement would also somehow bring an end to Israel’s war in Lebanon, create a reconstruction fund of $300 billion for Iran, lift all sanctions on Iranian oil and push discussion of its nuclear program into future negotiations. Some Republican senators have already expressed misgivings, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he won’t be bound by this agreement, so it’s very hard to tell what this actually means.
Trump really looks worn out. On Tuesday, he appeared to have forgotten his usual bronze makeup, which was a startling sight. His energy is notably low, especially for a gathering like this one; meetings with Europeans usually turn him combative and hostile. Back in 2017, he announced his presence on the world stage by lecturing European leaders about their failure to “pay their dues” to NATO and accusing them of unfair trade practices. In other first-term trips, he was generous and gracious to the presidents of Russia and China, making it abundantly clear who he respected and who he didn’t.
At the G7 meeting in Quebec in 2018, Trump demanded that Russia be allowed to rejoin the group. (Vladimir Putin had been 86’d after the invasion of Crimea in 2014.) After being rebuffed on that front, Trump stormed off to canoodle with another favorite world leader, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, with whom he announced he had fallen in love. The following year, 2019, was uneventful by comparison because the Europeans showered him with flattery. That was when he announced that a committee had looked at venues for the next year’s meeting in the U.S., and had — imagine this! —decided that the best possible option was his Doral golf resort in Florida. That act of self-dealing was so blatant he was actually forced to walk it back and schedule the meeting at Camp David instead. Perhaps fortunately, the pandemic forced the entire G7 event to be canceled in 2020.
Last year’s return to the world stage was very bad indeed. Trump stormed into Canada high on his “landslide” victory (with 49.8% of the vote) and insulted everyone, hurling threats of tariffs and otherwise making clear that he had no use for any of America’s so-called allies. Once again, he bailed out early, supposedly to devote his magic dealmaking skills to ending the fighting between Israel and Iran. That clearly did not happen.
It’s abundantly clear that Trump is still smarting from Western leaders’ collective refusal to follow him into that misbegotten war. If he weren’t so visibly exhausted, he’d probably be a lot more belligerent.
Since then, several more events have soured the relationship between the U.S. and its allies to the point where they are scarcely allies at all. Trump’s outrageous “Independence Day” tariffs, his abandonment of Ukraine and his crude, dismissive treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, his outrageous U.N. speech and his threats to seize Greenland by force have finally moved the Europeans to realize that America is unstable and they need to look after themselves. That understanding was validated just a couple of weeks ago when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went to Normandy and proceeded to stomp all over the alliance’s finest moment by insulting Europe on D-Day and then announcing that the U.S. will pull thousands more troops off the continent.
The biggest issue facing the summit this year is the economic upheaval caused by the war in Iran, which will continue far into the future whether or not the war itself is over. Like it or not, that illustrates how interconnected the world still is. All the G7 leaders were relieved that something has been agreed upon that may mean ships can once again pass safely through the Strait of Hormuz. It’s abundantly clear that Trump is still smarting from Western leaders’ collective refusal to follow him into that misbegotten war. If he weren’t so visibly exhausted, he’d probably be a lot more belligerent. As it is, he’s spending his time hyping this deal as the conclusion of a narrative that casts him as a big hero. But between his diminished energy and the obvious fact that he lost the war and is desperate to get out of it, none of that is working.
The other issue on the table is the war in Ukraine. After promising to make a peace deal on his first day in office, Trump has pretty much abandoned it, only reluctantly agreeing to sell the Ukrainians more weapons. The EU and Britain have stepped up, and Ukraine has shown itself to be an immensely resilient country with impressive military cunning, pushing Russia’s mighty military to unsustainable casualties. Trump has made it clear that he’s out, telling the press, “We have nothing to do with it; we sell weapons to them. It has no impact on us. … We’re thousands of miles away.” So says the man who has spent the last three months waging a pointless war in the Middle East.
Trump has agreed to restore the sanctions on Russian oil and proclaimed that he hates to see all the dying and will do whatever he can to get Russia to the negotiating table. His heart’s not in it. He appears to have accepted that he’s never going to get his coveted Nobel Peace Prize, so what’s the point?
There is one bright spot for the weary, spent octogenarian. While German Chancellor Friedrich Merz disappointed him with nothing better than a World Cup soccer jersey with Trump’s name and the number 47 on the back, French President Emmanuel Macron came through with a gift so perfect, Trump actually extended his stay.
Macron invited him to a formal dinner to be held at the one place Trump admires most in the world, other than Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower: the Palace of Versailles. Trump said, “I was leaving in the afternoon and then the French president, who happens to be a very nice man, invited me to dinner at Versailles. Versailles is not a gold leaf. Versailles is the real deal.” The real deal
For just a moment, he was in his happy place, contemplating his ballroom and thinking about how he might compare to Louis XIV, the monarch he might most admire if he knew anything about him. After that dinner, he will fly back to the United States filled with inspiration and will no doubt begin revising his plans for the new White House ballroom by adding something he should have thought of a long time ago: a hall of mirrors. What better tribute to a narcissistic would-be king could there possibly be?
Salon
