NATO Making Careful Preparations To Keep Baby Trump Entertained During Tomorrow's Big Summit
Wouldn't want him to get bored or stomp out and demand to go home or anything!
This morning, Donald Trump was angry. One would imagine that after ending all wars forever with his flawless execution of the ceasefire between Israel and Iran, he just wanted to have a nice celebratory night, while SecDef Pete Hegseth drunked and belched around the White House residence in a sexy teddy singing “Nobel Peaaaaaaace Biiiiiiiiirthday, Missssteerrrrr [HIC!] Prezzzzdinint!”
Alas.
Instead it appears Israel and Iran stopped shooting long enough to let President Dumbass get on Truth Social and declare flawless victory, before they got right back to shooting at each other. It’s gotta be tough pretending to be the leader of the free world when none of the world, free or otherwise, has any respect for your leadership.
So yeah, bitch was CRAN-KAY this morning.
But oh well, his presidency must go on, there are more people out there ready and waiting to humiliate Trump!
And as it happens, Trump is off to the annual NATO summit at The Hague today, for just such a purpose. And NATO leaders are trying to do everything they can to make sure the baby doesn’t shit his pants and make a scene.
The Financial Times reports that the summit was originally supposed to be three days long. (Some people say it was originally to happen over three days total, with two days of meetings, so that’s why some quotes say three and others say two.) Now it’s just one two-and-a-half hour meeting, focused on mostly One Thing — more on that in a second — so as to minimize the risk of the baby stomping out mad and going home in the middle like he did at the G7 meeting in Canada last week. Also Trump gets bored easily, and they know that.
(They made an excuse last week that Trump had to rush home from the G7 immediately to handle BIG ‘PORTANT ‘MERGENCY! with Israel and Iran, but that’s a lie. FT reports that it was more like he was mad at Emmanuel Macron for going to Greenland and undermining Trump’s stated desire to rape and pillage it, and also if he stayed he was going to have to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy the next day, and he didn’t wanna. Hey, guess who’s going to be at the NATO dinner with the King and Queen of the Netherlands tonight? That’s right, all the men in this paragraph!)
To recap what we just had to type, NATO turned a three-day summit into a 2.5 hour meeting, because they didn’t want the American president to shit his diaper and have a meltdown like he just had at the G7, or literally die of boredom. We guess all NATO country leaders said “Not it!” when they were looking for volunteers to feed Trump and pretend his spoon was a helicopter.
“The entire point is to make it as small, and as focused as possible,” said one of the officials. “With as little scope for disruption.”
“It has gone from two days to one two-hour session . . . so it should be feasible, and my hope is that it will work,” Claudia Major, senior vice-president at the German Marshall Fund, told an FT Live event in Berlin on Thursday. “But I gave up trying to predict Trump.”
What a proud moment for our once-great nation.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte also sent Trump this text message in advance of the two-hour “summit,” in apparent hopes that it will put the baby in a good mood. (Yes, it’s real, according to the New York Times.) Trump posted it on Truth Social this morning, so maaaaaaaybe it helped?
They all know exactly how to manipulate him, isn’t that comforting?
But record screeeeeeeeeeeech! About that five percent.
As the reporting has explained, Trump had been set to go to The Hague victorious, bragging about his ceasefire, and boasting that Europe has finally agreed to his hostage demand that they all spend five percent of their budgets on defense, in order to calm and assuage Trump’s obsessive 24/7 fears that somebody, somewhere is taking advantage of him. (That’s the One Thing they’re focusing on.)
Trump has always fundamentally misunderstood how NATO funding works, just like he misunderstands how tariffs work, seemingly believing that there’s a joint NATO bank account out there somewhere and the US is the only one making deposits.
“NATO was broke, and I said, ‘You’re going to have to pay,’ and we did a whole thing, and now they’re paying a lot,” he said.
Right.
The New York Times notes that the US doesn’t spend actually five percent of its budget on defense — more like 3.5 percent — but Trump says we don’t need to, for reasons. (This is the same guy who doesn’t like to pay contractors and lawyers.)
“A lot of that money goes to rebuilding their bridges, their roads, so it can take heavy equipment,” he said. “And you know, we don’t have any roads in Europe. We don’t have any bridges in Europe.”
Right, sure, whatever. Because the five percent goal for Europe is actually more like 3.5 percent pure military spending and 1.5 percent roads/bridges/infrastructure. Surely America doesn’t need any new infrastructure! (That sounds a lot like Building Back Better, which is woke.)
But as the New York Times and Financial Times and others point out, Pedro Sánchez, the (hot) prime minister of Spain, is throwing a wrench in all this, with a letter to Secretary-General Rutte explaining that fuck that five percent, Madrid will not be participating.
The Spanish premier said a “rushed” effort to meet 5 per cent would slow Spain’s economic growth “through debt increase, inflationary pressures and the diversion of investment from crucial activities with a higher multiplier effect than the defence industry”, such as education, healthcare and technology.
He wrote: “The empirical reality is that, for Spain, as for other Nato countries, reaching 5 per cent defence spending will be impossible unless it comes at the cost of increasing taxes on the middle class, cutting public services and social benefits for their citizens.”
Well? He’s not not making sense. Also:
A dash to meet 5 per cent would force Nato members “into off-the-shelf purchases that could further exacerbate equipment interoperability challenges, and send a substantial portion of their resources to non-European suppliers, thus preventing them from developing their own industrial base”, he wrote.
Hmmmmm, it sounds like Sánchez is saying that making financial commitments based on the temper tantrums of a babbling white supremacist with dementia who thinks he invented the word “groceries” isn’t sound fiscal policy.
So he sounds crazy!
“They’re having a problem with Spain,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday. “Always a problem with Spain. Spain’s not agreeing, which is very unfair to the rest of them.”
Trump is very concerned how the prime minister of Spain is treating “the rest of them.”
The New York Times also asked Trump on the plane this morning if he’s even committed to Article 5, i.e. the agreement that says that an attack on one NATO member nation is an attack on all. He said — get this — that it “depends on your definition” of Article 5, and that he’d say more when he’s not on an airplane.
Yep.
Back on the home front, GOP Rep. Buddy Carter has nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize for his flawlessly executed permanent forever ceasefire between Israel and Iran. (Reuters headline from 15 minutes ago: “Blasts shake Tehran after furious Trump tells Israel to stop strikes to preserve truce deal”)
Pakistan recently buttered Trump’s ass by nominating Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize for permanently forever preventing all wars between them and India, but now they’re criticizing his beautiful perfect flawless strikes on Iran, so the status of that one is unclear.
A Ukrainian lawmaker named Oleksandr Merezhko had nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize back in November, we guess in hopes that he would end the Russia-Ukraine war on day one of his presidency. Now, on day 154, Merezhko has lost confidence and has yanked the nom.
But don’t worry, because Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt used her Fundie Baby Jesus/Husbands And All Other White Conservative Men Know Best Voice to confidently tell Sean Hannity last night that “President Trump is going to win the Nobel Peace Prize, no doubt!” and “Democrats don’t know what to say. I mean, their silence has never been louder, if you know what I mean. And I think it’s because President Trump just keeps winning! And they don’t what to do.”
All of this because he got on Truth Social last week and whined for it.
This is what adult human beings do to manage the president of the United States, because he’s such a whiny ass loser baby.
Cue that fucking Lee Greenwood song, we guess.
[New York Times / Financial Times (archive)]
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I'm no international diplomat but boring him to death seems like a sound strategy to me.
"...while SecDef Pete Hegseth drunked and belched around the White House residence in a sexy teddy singing “Nobel Peaaaaaaace Biiiiiiiiirthday, Missssteerrrrr [HIC!] Prezzzzdinint!”
EVAN! Mercy!