As the whistleblowers come forward, the lies unravel, and the tantrums escalate, Trump’s foreign policy strategy boils down to one word: profanity.
Mary Geddry
GOOD morning! The NATO summit in The Hague was always going to be a spectacle, but even by Trump-era standards, this one delivered the full package: diplomatic isolation, policy incoherence, adolescent boasting, and of course, a 3 a.m. social media meltdown.
Trump arrived to a chorus of boos in the Netherlands, where European leaders had spent days quietly tightening their own alliances while preparing for the Trump Show to roll into town. Canada sealed a defense pact directly with the EU, a not-so-subtle way of saying, “We’ll handle our sovereignty ourselves, thank you.” And as the grown-ups huddled behind closed doors, Trump did his usual pirouette between self-congratulation and threats. When asked about NATO’s foundational Article 5 commitment to mutual defense, Trump replied, “There are numerous definitions of Article 5. You know that, right?” (For the record, there aren’t.) But later, standing beside Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, Trump declared that he obviously supports Article 5, because, well, he showed up. Presidential leadership apparently boils down to attendance these days.
Then came the “historic” agreement: NATO leaders endorsed a plan to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP. Trump immediately declared victory, gushing that it was “tremendous.” Never mind that several countries are already grumbling about the sheer impossibility of hitting that number, that much of the new target is padded with creative accounting, or that they still haven’t fully met the previous 2% goal they agreed to more than a decade ago. But for Trump’s Instagram audience, facts are irrelevant and the crowd cheers, even if they aren’t.
Behind the pageantry, the Iran strike disaster keeps metastasizing. Trump’s bunker-buster bombing, which he insisted had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites, is now confirmed by multiple intelligence leaks to have done no such thing. Iran had moved much of its uranium stockpile in advance. Key centrifuges remain intact. Iran can likely restore the sites within months. Israeli intelligence has confirmed the same. Yet Trump, with his usual toddler-in-a-sandbox bravado, compared his Iran strike to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, declaring: “That hit ended the war.” No, it didn’t. The war is ongoing. Israel’s military openly acknowledges the campaign against Iran is far from over.
But none of this has deterred Trump’s fixation on his Nobel Peace Prize fantasy. The MAGA machine, Don Jr., Fox, Caroline Leavitt, and the usual gang, has been in full spin mode demanding that Trump be handed his peace prize immediately, preferably before anyone reads the intelligence reports. Trump’s own propagandists posted headlines quoting his own lies as proof of their truth. Iranian state media, meanwhile, is happily circulating propaganda videos of Trump “begging like a dog” before Ayatollah Khamenei. The optics, it’s safe to say, are not exactly projecting strength. Even the prize pursuit itself has become a miniature farce: Republican Rep. Buddy Carter dutifully nominated Trump for brokering his shaky Israel-Iran ceasefire, while on the same day, Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandr Merezhko withdrew his prior nomination in disgust, citing Trump’s refusal to pressure Russia and his growing hostility toward Ukraine. The peace prize that once lived in Trump’s fever dreams is now dissolving in real time.Back in Washington, the cover-up machinery kicked into gear. Trump abruptly canceled a scheduled classified intelligence briefing for Congress, which would have forced his own officials to answer awkward questions about the strike’s actual results. The regime simply doesn’t want Congress, or the American public, looking too closely at the smoking crater that is Trump’s latest foreign policy disaster. After all, how can you hand out peace prizes if anyone is allowed to read the actual data?
Even MAGA loyalists can’t keep the lies straight anymore. Speaker Mike Johnson now admits “you can’t eliminate a nuclear program overnight”, which was literally what Trump claimed he had just done. Intelligence Committee loyalist Mike Turner tried to pretend that Trump never even said the sites were destroyed, despite the fact that Trump spent days screeching “obliterated” in all caps from his hotel suite in Europe. As Ron Filipkowski put it, “the firehose of lies is now so cartoonishly incoherent it borders on parody.” If only it weren’t playing out against the backdrop of nuclear diplomacy.
And then, as if on cue, came the real bombshell: a whistleblower complaint that could blow the roof off the entire operation. Arez Ruveni, a longtime DOJ attorney, has come forward with a 27-page filing alleging that Trump’s own Justice Department instructed staff to flat-out ignore federal court orders in the run-up to the mass deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. According to Ruveni, senior DOJ official Emil Bove, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer and current nominee for a lifetime federal judgeship, told subordinates at a secret March meeting that judges should “go f*** off” if courts intervened. Bove will testify this week at his Third Circuit Court of Appeals confirmation hearing. The Senate may soon have the chance to elevate an attorney who openly suggested the Department of Justice defy judicial authority by force.
If you’re having trouble keeping up, you’re not alone. Between the NATO grift, the Iran debacle, the unraveling ceasefire, the whistleblower bombshell, the canceled intelligence briefings, and the increasingly unhinged late-night social media outbursts, we are watching in real time as a reality TV presidency collapses into pure farce. And through it all, the Trump regime has developed a remarkably consistent diplomatic language: if you can’t explain it, scream it; if you can’t spin it, swear at it. Court orders? “Go f*** off.” Foreign leaders? “They don’t know what the f*** they’re doing.” Reporters? “Gutless losers.” Allies? “You better f***ing pay up.” For an administration obsessed with projecting strength, they sure sound like a pack of flailing, red-faced tourists trapped in an airport meltdown. The tragedy, of course, is that the stakes aren’t fictional, even if the dialogue increasingly feels like bad improv.
