This excerpt from former NATO Secretary Jen Stolberg’s book about dealing with Trump in his first term is something else. You have to read the whole thing. Trump truly is a stupid, puerile bully, which we know, of course, but from the very beginning it was clear that all he really wanted was to have important people bow down and lick his boots with fervor:
“Mr President, you have urged us to spend more, and I agree with you,” Rutte said. “And that is exactly what we are doing. Last year, we spent $33bn more on defence because of your leadership. So this is good news for you.”
Trump liked this. Thirty-three billion. He nodded.
After a while, he took out the thick black marker he always used, jotted something on a sheet of paper, then handed it to me. His handwriting was neat and rather attractive. The note said: “Secretary general, if you can say the Nato allies have significantly increased their defence spending thanks to me, I think we can agree.”
I finally glimpsed an opportunity to bring the meeting home. I took the floor myself.
“At the press conference after the meeting, I will state that the Nato allies have significantly increased their defence spending thanks to President Trump’s leadership and clear messaging,” I said, practically reading straight from his note…
It’s only gotten worse since then.
The whole piece is worth reading because it just reminds us how incredibly stupid and shallow he was then and how he remains today. He had no idea what NATO was and still doesn’t. Reading this, I think he was actually incapable of understanding it. But it didn’t stop him. As long as he had people bowing down to him, it made no difference what he knew.
As I was doing some research for a future piece, I watched his speech before the generals again today and I have to admit that the man has a power that I will never understand but you cannot deny that he has it. Dumb as a post but full of a dauntless audacity — and in recent days, slurring low energy repetition — he has managed to figure out how to create a new reality simply by asserting it and using the power he has to force everyone to embrace it.
This weekend we have masked armed men roaming the streets of America’s cities, abducting people off the streets, causing havoc, destroying communities because Donald Trump created a crisis out of whole cloth. We did not have any kind of emergency going on that required this response. There weren’t any riots or massive uprisings. But due to his ongoing, narcissistic need to prove his withered manhood — and his henchmen’s opportunistic power grab for the future — we are watching something unfold that would have been unthinkable before he came along.
It’s quite a feat. And it’s being repeated in dozens of different ways across our whole society. Not that Republicans haven’t been authoritarian thugs at heart for decades — their paeans to “freedom and liberty” were always contingent on “the right people” having it and others not so much. But the blatant defiance of reality that Trump has perfected is something only he could have done. I don’t think there’s another politician on the planet who has that particular combination of stupidity and shamelessness that allows him to make the most outrageous claims without realizing how outrageous they are.
Having said that, it’s clear that he’s created a new political paradigm which has emboldened the natural fascists among us. They know the limits of our system and realize how much it has always depended on the good faith of those in power. And they now know how hard it is to stop anyone who is willing to knock over all the boundaries. So if we survive this and Trump finally fades into history, there will be imitators for a very long time to come and unless there are strong reforms there’s a good chance they’ll succeed.
Trump is an absolute refutation of meritocracy, a richie-rich nepo baby who somehow, by simple dint of his ignorant willingness to say anything, became a destroyer of worlds.