Crunching and shoving
Trump viewed from the vantage point of Jon Henley at the Guardian:
He crunched hands, shoved shoulders and struck poses. He scoffed chocolates, ignored protocol and harangued heads of state. He denied saying things he had said, then said things that showed he did not understand.
In short he was an embarrassing ludicrous spectacle.
First, there were the body language battles. Trump is well known for his efforts to dominate male interlocutors with a firm handshake, often accompanied by an arm wrench: notable victims include the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who survived a 19-second power grip in February.
In Brussels on Thursday for meetings with EU and Nato leaders, he was trumped by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, whose smile and squeeze – reporters present described “knuckles whitening” and “faces tightening” – were so fierce that Trump was forced to yield.
Macron did what Trump does: he kept the hand and yanked it pitilessly back and forth. How do you like it, Donnie? Not so fun when someone else is doing it to you, is it, you cheap bully.
The rematch came at Nato headquarters after lunch, when Macron pointedly embraced German chancellor Angel Merkel, and shook hands with several other heads of state, before finally turning to Trump – who jovially pulled the Frenchman’s arm half out of its socket.
And then the shove.
Then he artlessly betrayed the fact that his opinions about the EU all stem from his experience of opening golf clubs there.
What European leaders did not seem to have anticipated was the US president’s patchy understanding of the bloc.
The Belgian daily Le Soir reported that while eating “a lot” of “the best” chocolates, Trump revealed to prime minister Charles Michel that his frequent criticisms of the EU were due largely to his personal experiences trying to set up businesses there.
“Every time we talked about a country, he remembered the things he had done,” one source told the paper. “Scotland? He said he had opened a club. Ireland? He said it took him two-and-a-half years to get a licence and that did not give him a very good image of the EU.”
Besides reportedly telling EU leaders the Germans were “bad, very bad” on trade, Trump and his team shocked the Europeans by their ignorance of the bloc’s trade policy, according to Süddeutsche Zeitung, repeatedly suggesting America had different trade deals with Germany and Belgium.
Rude, ignorant and domineering – what more could we want?
Not to engage in victim-blaming, but where have they been? How can anyone be surprised by the magnitude of Trump’s ignorance? He has never demonstrated anything but.
Rude, ignorant and domineering – he seems determined to live up to the image of the ugly American.
Re #1 – From over there, in the midst of a culture of thoughtful, professional government (and business, academia, media, etc.), I’m sure it’s very hard to believe that the impression of pure hateful ignorance projected by Trump all the time really can be accurate and the whole story about an American president. Even here, there are a lot of days where I wake up and imagine this must be some sort of nightmare and I’ll wake up sweating any moment now.
Jeff Engel #3: I have that “How can this be real?” feeling _all the time_. I wish I could still feel surprised.
Jeff, I suspect that might be why so many people try to convince themselves, and others, that all of this is part of some elaborate strategic plan of the Trump administration. It’s hard to believe that this could be happening, and that a totally ignorant clown has managed to seize the presidency. (I wrote a short story with just that scenario a few years ago…I really didn’t think we would see a Donald Trump presidency, though. I was thinking more along the lines of a George W. Bush type).
I get the distinct impression that Trump is one of those that scans the box of assorted chocolates for his favourite, and grabs the lot of them before passing the box around.
That’s probably the “experience” which impressed Trump’s supporters. Gee, he’s been everywhere, he knows how things operate, he’d make a good president because he knows the stuff that really matters. As opposed to politics.
Come to think of it, Trump probably sees it that way himself.
There’s also the translator’s dilemma, whereby non-English-writers are stuck between doing their translations ‘accurately’, which is to say literally, or ‘correctly’, which gets the sense across but in words the translator’s target language can understand. With Trump, that can result in his words and positrons getting significantly cleaned up.
Positions*. I don’t even think the LHC could clean up Trump’s positrons.
I don’t know, Seth, I think the world might be better off if someone cleaned up Trump’s positrons.
I’ve just realised why the Duke of Edinburgh has withdrawn from public duties; his reign as the world’s rudest dignitary has come to a crashing halt and he knows there’s no way he can raise his game that much.
Most other leaders are at a disadvantage when dealing with Trump because they are used to dealing courteously with sane, stable adults. Trump is none of these things, and has no sense of decorum, decency or politeness. Most people find it awkward and uncomfortable when confronted with such rudeness and ignorance. I like to think it is beneath most people to sink to his level of behaviour. What to do when you can’t tell the asshole you can’t afford to not invite to your party that he’s an asshole?
Not Bruce, if Trump and the Congress get their way with the budget, the country will become a country of paupers with a handful of super rich men (and a few women) at the top. Then the other countries will be able to not invite us, because we won’t be the world’s powerhouse anymore. Oh, wait, we’ll still have atomic weaponry, right? Because the military budget seems to be the one thing none of them will cut. And a Trump-world nation with nuclear arms is…frankly much scarier than Nixon with the nuclear codes, Reagan with the nuclear codes, and Dubya with the nuclear codes put together.