Donald Trump apparently left his phone under the cushions of the Blue Room couch. Now that he’s back from “home running” around the world, he’s located his precious, and has begun what’s sure to be a long session of Twitter-based catharsis.
Why single out Germany for his first homecoming Tweet? Well, there’s the way that everyone and their cousin immediately recognized that Angela Merkel was now the de facto leader of western democracy while Trump follows sadly behind—in his pokey golf cart. There’s also the speech that Merkel delivered as a verdict on the United States under Trump following his visit.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Europe’s most influential leader, has concluded, after three days of trans-Atlantic meetings, that the United States of President Trump is not the reliable partner her country and the Continent have automatically depended on in the past.
Mene mene tekel upharsin, Mr. Trump. And no, that’s not German. But flailing out at Merkel wasn’t Trump’s only tweet of the morning. He also found time to complain about the media and coverage of, what else, his connections to Russia.
As it turns out, sovereign states are so … sovereign. There are few who appreciate being hectored for money they don’t know, while at a ceremony supposedly in memorial of the blood they spilled helping the nation handing out bills.
“This seems to be the end of an era, one in which the United States led and Europe followed,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a former United States envoy to NATO who is now the director of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “Today, the United States is heading into a direction on key issues that seems diametrically opposite of where Europe is heading. Merkel’s comments are an acknowledgment of that new reality.”
Donald Trump isn’t delivering leadership. He’s not even delivering good “follow-ship.” He’s showing the same kind of blustering bully act that impressed his followers with his “toughness,” but that act is singularly ineffective in real life. It turns out that the State Department uses diplomats for a reason. Though don’t either Trump or Rex Tillerson to draw that conclusion.
Trump is showing that his “America First” campaign motto was amazingly accurate, because he’s driving the country into the arms of an isolationism last glimpsed by those who argued against the nation’s entry into World War II. Only this time it’s not even by our own volition—the world is pushing us away.
Meanwhile, Trump’s other morning tweet …
Continues his quest to create a false dichotomy between his popular-vote losing squeaker of an electoral victory, and malfeasance in colluding with Russia.
Here’s a small clue, Donald: Richard Nixon carried 49 states in 1972, racking up a whopping 520 electoral votes. But that didn’t mean Watergate was suddenly legal.
Did Russian interference throw the vote to Trump? Probably, yes. Considering that Trump won through the swinging of a small number of votes in a handful of rust belt states, it’s likely that without the handy supply of hacked emails and the torrent of genuinely fake-news articles spread through social media, Trump would have lost. That’s doubly true now that we know that Russia was also at the back of what inspired James Comey to go public with the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email.
But it’s beside the point.
There is, sadly enough, no mechanism to call for a do-over or—did Melania get a chance to bat this term around with the Pope?—an annulment. The election is done. What gets decided now is whether there was any malfeasance before, during, or after the campaign.
And the very real news on that front just kept compounding while Trump—and Jared Kushner—were away.