The Secret Behind Trump's NATO Disaster. They’re not scared of him anymore.
Posted by Sia on July 9, 2026, 12:12 pm ADMIN
The Secret Behind Trump's NATO Disaster. They’re not scared of him anymore.
by Rick Wilson - Jul 9
There is a moment from the NATO summit in Ankara this week that historians will fight over, and it isn’t the communiqué.
Donald Trump, sitting next to Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the NATO summit, mused aloud that Putin wanted to hold peace talks in Moscow. Then he turned to the president of Ukraine, a man whose country has been bled white by Russian missiles striking civilian targets for four and a half years, and asked him if he’d go.
Zelenskyy, a comedian by trade and a brilliant wartime leader by necessity, didn’t blink. “It’s difficult,” he said. “There are a lot of Ukrainian drones there.” His comic and political timing was perfection.
The room exploded. Reporters laughed. Zelenskyy landed the cleanest kill shot of the summit without raising his voice, and Trump sat there slackly grinning like a man who wasn’t entirely of the punchline.
He was the punchline
The President of the United States, the commander of the most powerful military in human history, got worked by a former sitcom actor in front of the world press, and the actor did it politely, with a smile, the way you handle a relative who can’t be trusted with the car keys anymore.
It was a perfect inversion of the silly Oval Office setup where Trump and his meat puppet J.D. (If that’s his real name) Vance attacked Ukraine on Putin’s behalf, and with even Slow Donnie figuring out that the war Russia thought it would fight isn’t the war it’s fighting now: meatwaves of untrained peasant soldiers are being slaughtered wholesale by cheap drones and battlefield robots. Ukraine can target and destroy strategic targets (energy targets, lately) almost anywhere in Russia.
Putin’s economy has collapsed. Fuel shortages are rampant. Crimea, his golden prize, is being evacuated. He’s hiding in bunkers and avoiding windows.
Trump wanted Putin to win. He’s pro-Russia, pro-Putin, and hates Zelenskyy for refusing his dumb 2020-era Burisma campaign play. Still.
But even Trump knows Putin is losing. Everyone else in the room knew it long ago and had worked to empower Ukraine to hold on, build its defense tech stack, and strike Putin’s heartland. We’ve spent the last 18 months watching Trump try to save Russia, and failing. NATO managed Russia and Trump.
NATO leaders won. Trump and Putin lost. That’s the whole story of Ankara, once you strip away the defense-spending-target ranting, Greenland bluster, the Patriot licensing announcements, and the carefully usual tiresomely lawyered communiqué language. The leaders of the Western alliance have stopped treating Donald Trump like a problematic ally.
They’ve started treating him like the drunk Facebook uncle at Thanksgiving.
You know the drill. Many have lived it.
Uncle Don shows up loud, angry about any neighbors darker than a latte, full of opinions about issues and people whose names he can’t quite remember that he read about on Facebook. “I read a post about a guy whose brother-in-law met someone whose second cousin’s best friend’s mom Mahjong partner was healed of scrofula when she touched the hem of Trump’s suit. He was sent by GOD!”
You don’t argue with him. Arguing is pointless. You nod. You say “that’s interesting, Don.” You slide the wine bottle down the table. You let him hold forth about Greenland, again, and you exchange the look with your cousins, the look that says just get through dinner. And when he falls asleep in the recliner before the pie comes out, everyone exhales.
Mark Rutte has turned that look into an art form. The Europeans have built an entire diplomatic architecture around it. Flatter him, nod, and say, “Oh, that’s interesting” when he wails about Greenland. Feed him a trivial win he can announce, keep the adults’ conversation going in the other room, and pray he doesn’t wander in.
And this week, the worst-kept secret of NATO was how Trump’s decline makes him easy to manipulate.
He pointed at Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the actual human being seated beside him, and asked reporters if they had a question for “President Putin.” The press corps snickered. So he did what he always does when he steps on a rake. He picked the rake up and hit himself with it again. Do you have a question for President Putin, not Zelensky, he clarified, still pointing at Zelenskyy.
He told the world that the “Islamic Republic of Japan” fired 111 missiles at an American aircraft carrier. Japan. Our treaty ally. A country that has not shot at us since 1945. He called the Iran nuclear deal the “JCPOC.” He bragged about being number one on “Tic Tac” twice in one week.
He called Spain a terrible NATO partner. He called our European allies hopeless. He restated his “need” to own Greenland, to the visible discomfort of every serious person in the building. He described a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people as two kids fighting in a park, and sometimes you have to let them fight.
The man is 80 years old, and it is showing, publicly, on the world stage, in front of the leaders of thirty-one allied nations and every camera in Europe. He’s become a clownish figure of eye-rolling and quiet insult.
Now, I want you to run a little thought experiment with me, one that might sound familiar...
Imagine Joe Biden had done any single one of these things at a NATO summit. Not all of them. One. Imagine Biden pointing at Zelenskyy and calling him “Putin”.
Oh, wait.
You don’t have to imagine it, because he did exactly that in 2024, caught himself immediately, and the entire Republican Party and its media apparatus treated it as proof of civilizational collapse. Fox ran it on a loop. Congressional Republicans demanded cognitive testing. The “mainstream” media joined in the pile-on.
Trump did it twice in one press conference, invented a hostile Japan, scrambled his own talking points into alphabet soup, and got caught on camera apparently asleep at the summit table, and the White House response was a statement from Karoline Leavitt praising his “marathon, high-energy performance.”
Marathon. High-energy. He commanded every room, she said.
The rooms were laughing at him, Karoline. Out loud. On camera.
This is the same crowd that built a two-year national psychodrama around Biden’s age, and they were right that it mattered, by the way. Age and a president’s decline matter. Every Republican senator who demanded Biden take a cognitive test and now studies his shoes when asked about the Islamic Republic of Japan knows exactly what he’s looking at. They all know. His staff knows. The allies know.
And here’s the part that should keep you up at night: our enemies know.
In his moment of defeat and terror, Vladimir Putin, a cold-eyed former KGB officer sees an opportunity. The man who has spent his entire adult life reading weakness in other men, got a friendly phone call from Trump on the Fourth of July. He watches these press conferences. He sees an American president who confuses him with his enemy, who vouches for his desire for peace while Russian drones swarm Kyiv, who muses about summits in Moscow like he’s picking a golf course. You think Putin sees a dealmaker? He sees an open door to manipulate Trump the way a sleazy salesman manipulates a dementia patient.
Xi sees it. The mullahs see it. Every intelligence service on the planet has a growing file labeled “Cognitive assessment, POTUS” and none of those files are getting thinner.
The only genuinely good news out of Ankara, and I’ll give credit where it’s due, is that Zelenskyy played a weak hand brilliantly. He flattered, he thanked, he smiled, and he walked out with a Patriot co-production deal and an American commitment to buy Ukrainian drones.
The man managed Trump better in one afternoon than the entire congressional Republican caucus has in a decade. Turns out the secret to Trump diplomacy is the same as the secret to Thanksgiving with Uncle Don: keep him happy, keep him talking, and quietly take the car keys.
But don’t let the drone deal fool you into thinking the Ukraine hostility from Team Trump is over. The pro-Russia faction in the Defense Department, in the Silicon Valley bro set, and in Trump’s own base is large and powerful. They’ll try to unwind what Trump did…and if he can even remember it.
Trump left the summit, managed, manipulated, and mollified between tantrums with pats on the head, all the adult meetings taking place behind his back.
The free world used to look to the American president for leadership. This week, it looked at America the way a family struggling with that problematic uncle does: with the pity and practiced patience one reserves for a punch-drunk clown who was once great.
P.S. We’ll talk more later about Trump having to abandon Bribe Force One, which was a perfect capper on this absurd summit disaster.
Yes, the 'Biden test' does indeed reveal both the failures and failing health of Donnie, and the hypocrisy of both Repubs AND the media. SAY ‘NO’ TO WAR! RESIST!
It unbelievable that more pundits aren't saying exactly that!
Posted by Sia on July 9, 2026, 2:15 pm, in reply to "Great stuff " ADMIN
on July 9, 2026, 12:12 pm
