What did Donald Trump do today?

He decided that his "ceasefire" was over after two months of fire not being ceased.

The United States and Iran have been exchanging attacks for the past two days. Iran set at least two civilian oil and natural gas tankers on fire in the Persian Gulf, after which it and the United States traded attacks, with Iran claiming it had launched attacks against 85 different US targets in the region. 

Iran's government also once again closed the Strait of Hormuz, which had never reopened to more than 20% of its normal capacity, instantaneously spiking oil prices which had gradually been coming down.

In other words, it was a more or less typical weekday for the last three months of "ceasefire," which neither side has paid much attention to. But today, at the NATO summit, Trump admitted that the ceasefire he had unilaterally declared on April 7th was over.

It's not clear why these attacks, which were not appreciably worse than dozens of other tit-for-tat exchanges, was any different. Trump seemed dispirited and emotional, calling Iran's leaders "scum" and "vicious, violent people." 

It's not clear where this leaves the peace deal Trump had hoped to achieve in the 60-day period prescribed by the one-sided Memorandum of Understanding he signed last month. 

Trump spent today at the NATO summit in Turkey. He had been lashing out as usual at the United States' closest military allies, calling Spain a "wasted cause" and a "terrible partner" for not joining in on his war on Iran. He even "ordered" all trade with Spain stopped, which is not something he has any power to do.

But by the end of the day, after acknowledging the end of the "ceasefire," he seemed to try to mend fences with the United States' NATO allies—or, really, insist that they'd already been mended. 

He told reporters a "sir story" about how European heads of state told him behind closed doors how much they "love" him: "They said, ‘Sir, we love you.’ These are grown people saying that. Isn’t that nice?"

In reality, European leaders have spoken openly about a different strategy that was on display at the summit: ignoring and placating Trump as much as possible while quietly disengaging from the United States.

Why does this matter?

• This is the natural consequence of Trump's catastrophically inept attempt at a war. 

• Destroying our most important military and economic alliances for no reason makes the United States weaker and poorer. 

What Trump Did Today will resume publication on Monday, May 25.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He either got very confused, lied to cover up a mistake, or both.

Last Friday, as part of an ongoing tantrum against the United States' NATO allies in Europe, Trump canceled the deployment of 4,000 American troops to Poland.

Today, he announced in a social media post that he was surging 5,000 extra U.S. servicemembers to Poland.

Trump didn't acknowledge the discrepancy with the order he gave less than a week ago, but explained that the new order was "Based on the successful Election of the now President of Poland, Karol Nawrocki, who I was proud to Endorse."

Nawrocki was indeed elected to the presidency of Poland—in June of 2025.
 

Why does this matter?

• American forces should be deployed based on the best interests of the United States and its allies, not a president's whim. 

• It shouldn't be this easy to think that the President of the United States doesn't know what year it is.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He blustered about destabilizing NATO because Germany spoke honestly about his war in Iran.

Earlier this week, German chancellor Friedrich Merz said this about the current state of the Iran War, in which Iran enjoys a stronger position than it had before Trump launched attacks, while Trump is desperate for a face-saving way of backing down: 

The Iranians are obviously very skilled at negotiating, or rather, very skilful at not negotiating, letting the Americans travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result. An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by these so-called Revolutionary Guards. And so I hope that this ends as quickly as possible.

Merz saying that Trump was being humiliated by Iran was apparently a worse provocation than the actual humiliation, and in response, Trump vowed to start pulling American forces out of Germany.

Asked about it today at his vacation resort in Florida, Trump doubled down, saying that "We're going to cut way down, and we're cutting a lot further than 5,000."

American forces in Europe are there for the benefit of the United States, not just its European allies. The installations where American troops and aircraft are stationed allow the United States to project its military force much further than it otherwise could. Trump himself was outraged when, for example, Spain—which hosts only about 3,800 American troops—refused to allow him to use its airbases to conduct attacks on Iran. Trump fumed in the media about imposing an embargo on Spain before, apparently, forgetting about it.

Trump has made no secret of his contempt for NATO, the basis for those joint security arrangements, and—outside of demands that European countries join in wars he launched without consulting them, or help him escape from the consequences—has looked for excuses to degrade the United States' military alliances with its traditional allies wherever possible. 

The main benefactor of these efforts is the Putin regime in Russia. Trump is personally, financially, and politically beholden to Putin, who has interfered in American elections to help him.

Why does this matter?

• American national security is more important than Donald Trump's ego, or the favors he owes.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said the catastrophic mess he's made of his Iran war was for other countries to clean up.

From its beginning nearly a month ago, Trump has been unable to stick to a single story about his war on Iran for more than a few seconds. In consecutive sentences, he might switch from the war lasting months to being already over. He's said the war was fought to embolden the Iranian people to overthrow the ruling regime, then spoken warmly of that same regime's commitment to peace as he promises to launch attacks against electrical grids that will kill civilians. 

Incredibly, Trump hasn't even been able to commit to how he feels about Iran punching back: for the most part he seems completely incapable of understanding that it's even possible, but at times he's come right out and endorsed Iranian counterattacks against US allies.

But Trump spent most of today hammering what may be the first consistent talking point of the entire Iran war: the war he launched without consulting allies isn't his fault, and dealing with the consequences of his failure isn't his problem.

Speaking at a Saudi-sponsored conference in Miami, Trump tried once again to shift blame to NATO, the United States' most important military alliance, whose members he deliberately deceived about his attack plans:

NATO made a terrible mistake when they wouldn't send a small amount of military armament, when they wouldn't just even acknowledge what we were doing for the world and taking on Iran. They just weren't there. Why would we be there for them if they're not there for us? They weren't there for us. That sounds ‌like a breaking story? Yes, sir. Is that breaking news? I think we just have breaking news, but that's the fact. I've been saying that. Why would we be there for them if they're not there for us? They weren't there for us. …We would have always been there for them, but now, based on their actions, I guess we don't have to be, do we?

Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a separate statement, connected the dots. He conceded that Iran was likely to emerge strong enough from the war to do something it had never dared to do before, control the Strait of Hormuz and force other nations to pay multi-million dollar tributes to it. But Rubio insisted that it was "the world" that needed to "have a plan" for how to deal with that, and not Trump.

Blaming the rest of the world, and the United States' most essential military allies above all, is yet another turn in Trump's war that has worked to the advantage of the Putin regime in Russia. Giving Iran a stranglehold on oil markets drove up prices for Russian oil, and Trump's decision to cancel sanctions on Russia made it even easier to sell. The war has caused a sharp drawdown in critical military equipment like interceptors, making the United States less able to project force elsewhere. And Trump's attempts to destroy the United States' relationship with the rest of NATO is a success beyond all measure for Putin, the leader of the state it was created to contain. 

Why does this matter?

• The safety of Americans and the world at large is more important than Donald Trump's ego. 

• Being completely incapable of admitting mistakes is a serious mental disorder and a particularly terrible one to have in a president who is thinking about a ground invasion of a country six times bigger than Afghanistan. 

• Most Americans don't like to think of themselves or their nation as a spoiled child who won't clean up after itself.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He gave up trying to bully Spain and just lied about having bullied Spain.

On Monday, Spain denied the United States permission to use joint bases inside its territory as part of the attacks on Iran. In response, Trump blustered about cutting off all trade with Spain, saying "We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain." 

Trump also claimed that he would simply use Spanish bases without Spain's permission: "We could use their base if we want. We could just fly in and use it. Nobody’s going to tell us not to use it, but we don’t have to."

In reality, Spain did tell Trump no, and its president, Pedro Sanchéz, forcefully repeated his refusal in a speech today. In practical terms, forcing the issue would mean declaring war on Spain, something that might be even more unpopular with Americans than a war with Iran. 

The trade embargo threat is equally empty: Spain is part of the European Union, which immediately warned Trump that it would respond as though he'd embargoed the entire EU. (Spain is the United States' 22nd biggest trading partner, but the whole EU including Spain is by far the largest single trading bloc it does business with.) 

Today, as Spain's president Trump tried a new tactic: he stopped making empty threats and simply insisted that the threats had already worked. Trump's press secretary Karolina Leavitt announced today that Spain's government had changed its mind and had "agreed to cooperate with the U.S. military."  

Spain's foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, immediately denounced that as a lie. "The Spanish government’s position on the war in the Middle East, the bombings in Iran, and the use of our bases has not changed one iota. Our ‘no to war’ stance remains clear and unequivocal." He added, "She may be the White House press secretary, but I’m the foreign minister of Spain and I’m telling her that our position hasn’t changed at all." 

Why does this matter?

• Hoping people won't notice that your tough talk didn't work only makes you look even weaker. 

• The United States cannot afford a president this detached from reality in wartime or peacetime. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got called out on a lie or hallucination about Greenland in real time.

In an abrupt but not particularly surprising twist, Trump appeared to back down on his threats to invade NATO ally Greenland today. More accurately, he kept up his threat that Greenland would, necessarily, become part of the United States. But he ruled out using military force, the only means by which that could happen, since both Greenland and its parent country Denmark have flatly rejected Trump's "offers" with respect to the territory.

In what may have been an attempt to square that circle, Trump posted to his private microblogging service that he'd agreed on a "framework of a future deal" with Mark Rutte, the Secretary-General of NATO. Immediately pressed for details, Trump evaded the question by saying "it's a little bit complex" but that he'd explain at some unspecified point in the future.

There are two problems with Trump's story. First, NATO has no authority to make deals on behalf of one of its member states. Rutte could no more agree to give Greenland to the United States than he could give Florida to Denmark.

That leads to the second problem: Rutte denies that any such discussion about Greenland ever took place. 

Being caught in an easily disproved lie is nothing new for Trump, but it raises the question of why Trump has finally backed down, at least momentarily, from the absurd prospect of boosting the United States' "national security" by starting a war with the rest of NATO. One possibility is that he began to fear—probably correctly—that the U.S. military would simply refuse to follow any such order. While the subordination of American military forces to the President is normally absolute, there's precedent: during the lame duck period of Trump's first term, Congressional leaders sought and received assurances from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the military would not assist him in a coup attempt or suicidal nuclear attack.

Alternatively, in the face of virtually unanimous public opinion against any such invasion and a united European front, Trump may have been trying to save face by claiming a "deal" that will never exist. If so, it doesn't seem to be working.

Finally, Trump may have said that he had a nonexistent conversation with a Dutch military bureaucrat about ceding an independent Danish territory because he genuinely believed he had. It wasn't the only time Trump got confused about which country was which: during his shambling address to the World Economic Forum today at Davos, he repeatedly confused Greenland with Iceland.

Why does this matter?

• There's no practical difference between a president who won't tell the truth and who doesn't have any idea what the truth is. 

• Just because someone can be distracted, scared or shamed off of an incredibly stupid course of action doesn't mean it wasn't an incredibly stupid course of action to pursue in the first place.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He wrote a note whining about Denmark to the wrong person in the wrong country.

Trump repeated a few of the same lies about Denmark and Greenland on social media today that he has been telling for years. Specifically, he suggested that NATO (an organization he loathes and frequently becomes emotional about) had been "telling Denmark for 20 years" about the looming Russian threat.

In reality, NATO members—most especially the United States—have been closing military installations on the island precisely because they weren't needed. (The United States has a treaty right to build them back up again, but Trump doesn't seem interested in doing this, for reasons he hasn't explained.)

But today also saw reporting that Trump is mixing up his Greenland obsession with his Nobel Peace Prize obsession, in the form of a letter to Jonas Gahr Støre, the Prime Minister of Norway. Nick Schifrin, a reporter with PBS, posted the text he'd confirmed with multiple government sources today:

 

There's no neutral way to put this: either Trump is suffering from an acute mental health episode, or a chronic cognitive one. Norway and Denmark are two different countries. The Norwegian government does not award the Nobel Peace Prize. And even if it did, threatening to wage war specifically out of spite for not getting a peace prize is absurd.

And most importantly, even if Trump believed Russia had designs on Greenland—and even if Trump thought that the Putin regime having its way was a bad thing—Denmark already has a robust system of defense. It is a member of NATO, whose members, including the United States, would be obliged to come to its aid if it were attacked.

Incidentally, in the 77-year history of NATO, only one country has ever invoked the portion of the charter that requires allies to come to its aid: the United States, after the September 11th attacks. As a deterrent to Soviet and later Russian aggression, it has never failed—which makes Trump attacking it from within worth far more to hostile countries like Russia than Greenland ever could be.

Why does this matter?

• It doesn't really matter whether a president is doing the bidding of hostile foreign nations out of incompetence, corruption, or any other reason.  

• This is not how someone who is mentally stable and alert enough to be president behaves.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He forced NATO to take up defensive positions against an American invasion of Greenland.

In response to Trump's bizarre and increasingly serious threats to invade Greenland, European countries that are officially allies of the United States have been sending military and diplomatic delegations to the island. France recently announced it was opening a consulate in Greenland's capital city of Nuuk, and today it confirmed it would be sending military forces to participate in joint force exercises with Denmark. The UK is also sending a single officer, and Germany, Norway, and Sweden are also taking part.For their part, Denmark's armed forces have been given strict orders to actively repel any attack on Greenland. 

In military theory, token detachments like this in the path of a potential invasion are called "tripwire forces." They're intended to deter aggression (because of the promise of a full-scale counterattack) without provoking unstable regimes with an escalating force. For example, the United States military presence in South Korea is not large enough to repel an invasion from North Korea, but even the notoriously chaotic North Korean government is unwilling to risk harming American troops for fear of retaliation.

In other words, the rest of NATO is beginning to treat Donald Trump the same way they do Kim Jong-un, and for the same reasons. Support for a military invasion of Greenland is nonexistent among Americans, with a recent poll showing only 4% of Americans in favor. 

The foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland were in Washington today, meeting with JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Predictably, nothing was accomplished, if only because Trump preemptively declared today that "anything less than" surrender of Greenland was "unacceptable." He also flatly refused to rule out a direct military invasion of a founding member of NATO.

Trump himself did not attend the meeting. Instead, he held a signing ceremony for a bill promoting 2% milk, during which he nodded off. 

Why does this matter?

• Even by Trump standards, this is delusional and dishonorable. 

• Destroying NATO like this would be a godsend to nations hostile to the United States

What did Donald Trump do today?

He appointed an "envoy" to Greenland, which still doesn't want anything to do with him.

With news stories still landing about his DOJ's carefully (and illegally) groomed Epstein document release—and its botched attempt at a coverup of damning materials that got released anyway—Trump once again stayed safely hidden away from the press and the public. His only public "appearance" was a call-in lasting about a minute to a conservative political event.

He did take one official action: he appointed the current governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, to be his "envoy" to Greenland.

Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark, and one of Trump's more bizarre fixations. He appears to believe that making it a territory of the United States—and not of a different NATO ally—is somehow essential for American national security. (The United States already operates a military base in Greenland.) In a few manic appearances early in his second term he went so far as to threaten to invade it and take it by force, before apparently mostly forgetting about it.

Then in August, the Trump administration was caught in what appears to have been a clumsy attempt at a covert influence operation, trying to drive a wedge between the tiny Greenlandic population and Denmark. 

It's not clear why Trump appointed Landry, the governor of a place about as unlike Greenland as it's possible to be. But then it's not clear why Trump needs an "envoy" at all. He sent his son, Donald Trump Jr., for a brief tourist appearance earlier this year, and Vice-President JD Vance visited the US military base. But those visits were poorly received: a planned meet-and-greet between locals and second lady Usha Vance had to be scrapped when literally nobody could be found who wanted to meet with her.

Why does this matter?

• This is placating the mad king's nonsense from top to bottom.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He agreed to another summit with Vladimir Putin, possibly because of a hallucination.

Two months ago, Trump hosted Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin at a summit meeting in Alaska. That meeting that was widely regarded as an embarrassment at the time, and it only got worse in the ensuing months as Putin continued to stonewall Trump's pleas for a politically useful ceasefire in Ukraine, while escalating his aggression against NATO members. 

Trump has never shown any real ability to stand up to Putin, who actively interfered in American elections on Trump's behalf, and who exercises power in Russia in a way that Trump has at times been openly envious of. But he has been attempting to cajole other nations to stand up to Putin on his behalf, by threatening them with trade sanctions if they continue to buy Russian oil and natural gas.

Today, Trump announced that he had agreed to meet Putin again, this time in Hungary. The reason he gave was that he believed he'd made "great progress" in a phone call with Putin today.

The problem with Trump's optimism is that he also apparently believes that he had a good phone call with Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modi yesterday, one in which Modi promised to stop buying Russian oil. But the Indian government has confirmed that no such phone call took place, and that there was no such agreement in place.

The silver lining is that all indications are that Trump really did talk to Putin today, and that he is not imagining it. But Trump is famously secretive about his communications with Putin: he once sought to have a special private communications channel put in place that his own government couldn't monitor, and he's been paranoid about U.S. government translators knowing what he's saying to Putin, so much so that he's confiscated their notes or done without them entirely. As such there's no way of knowing what was actually said or why Trump suddenly feels so optimistic.

That is, unless Russia once again decides to embarrass Trump by sharing with the American public details of Trump-Putin diplomacy that Trump was trying to hide from them.

Why does this matter?

• A president who is having hallucinations or is otherwise profoundly confused about what is happening around him is not fit for office. 

• Trump is hopelessly compromised by the Putin regime even if he's fully coherent and alert.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to give himself an excuse for not punishing the Putin regime for its encroachment over NATO territory.

Where Russia is concerned, most of Trump's second term has been an extension of the first. Trump, who is personally and politically indebted to the Putin regime in ways previously unthinkable for an American president, has occasionally made feints at independence, only to retreat before actually doing anything. 

That pattern repeated itself today. Earlier this week, Russian drones violated the airspace of Poland, a NATO ally—the first time in the 76 years of the alliance's existence that a hostile nation has done so. Trump waited 14 hours before responding, and then only in the form of a social media post—and not even with a threat of consequences, but a question: "What's with Russia violating Poland's airspace with drones?"

Almost immediately afterwards, Trump walked back even that mildly critical tweet, saying without any evidence that Russia's incursion (which shut down all Polish air traffic for most of a day) "could have been a mistake." (It was not.)

But even then, Trump administration officials were willing to rattle the saber a little with talk of increasing sanctions against Russian officials, which hurt the financial bottom line of the oligarchs that Putin has doled out control of state industries to. This is something that Trump has also occasionally hinted at, though never acted on.

Today, though, Trump slammed the door on even that possibility. He claimed that he wanted to punish the Putin regime, but for some unstated reason could only do so if all NATO members agreed to stop buying all Russian oil immediately. This is all but impossible for two reasons. First, it would hurt European allies more than it would hurt Russia, particularly going into the winter. And second, at least two NATO countries, Hungary and Turkey, are themselves run by autocrats who have used Trump to strengthen their own grip on power, and are effectively neutral where the Putin regime is concerned.

In other words, Trump is using the fact that 31 other allied countries won't instantaneously agree to do something against their own interests to escape having to do something—stand up to Vladimir Putin—that he is famously unwilling or unable to do in any event.

Trump, who has spent essentially all of his second term on the opposite side of a major war from his own government and public, once again today blamed Ukraine and the United States for somehow causing Russia's unprovoked surprise attack in 2022 that set off the current conflict.

Why does this matter?

• Past a certain point, it doesn't matter if a president's refusal to act in defense of the United States is because he's corrupt, scared, or just impotent.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He "got played" by Vladimir Putin, according to his own party.

At least 19 Russian drones violated Polish airspace last night, as part of the Putin regime's continued attack on Ukraine. Commercial aviation was abruptly shut down throughout Poland as its F-16s, aided by Dutch F-35s, destroyed some of the drones. No casualties were reported, but at least one house was destroyed.

Trump's response, more than 12 hours later, was to post to his private microblogging website: "What's with Russia violating Poland's airspace with drones? Here we go!"

Poland is a NATO member. This is the first time since NATO was founded that hostile aircraft were engaged inside a member nation's airspace. But it's not the first time that Russia's attacks on Ukraine have affected Poland, which has repeatedly had to scramble its fighter jets to defend its airspace. 

Trump, whose political and personal debt to Vladimir Putin has defined both terms of his presidency, has been openly anti-NATO. He falsely speaks of it as an American-owned protection racket, something that the United States pays for in order to defend other member nations, and has threatened to unilaterally shut it down. He's also repeated a Putin talking point: that Russia's unprovoked attack on Ukraine was justified because Ukraine might have joined NATO at some point in the future.

But in reality, all NATO member nations maintain their own military forces for the mutual defense of one another. Only the United States has ever formally requested other NATO members to come to its aid (after the September 11th attacks).

Trump has been desperately courting Putin in the hopes of winning a cease-fire in its war against Ukraine, something he promised he could accomplish on "day one" of his second term. But his mild tweet-only response was so alarming that even members of Trump's own party spoke out openly against him, calling it "pathetic" and demanding much harsher responses in terms of sanctions and commitments to honoring obligations to NATO than he has been willing to give.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA): "President Trump wants to make sure that he is giving every opportunity for peace to get this war resolved. But Putin is playing him right now."

Former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton: "Putin has acted like he has a free hand since the Alaska summit. He's ignored any further conversation on a ceasefire, the Russian military is expanding its operations, and he's received the political support of his friends Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, and Kim Jong Un." 

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC): "I think Russia is playing – they’re really playing us like a piano right now."

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS): "Amid the brutality, Putin has played games with peace talks. We’ve all seen it.  With one hand, he signaled interest in negotiations.  With the other, he lobbed bombs and kills civilians. …Putin clearly has no intention to stop." 

Why does this matter?

• There's no practical difference between a president who won't take necessary action in defense of the United States and its allies, and a president who (for whatever reason) can't take action.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said a central campaign promise was a joke.

Trump seemed to have regained some of his emotional equilibrium today at a NATO summit in the Netherlands. Part of the reason may have been some gentle manipulation by the former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who is currently serving as NATO's Secretary General. Rutte wrote Trump a fawning letter in advance of the meeting—which Trump promptly posted to his microblogging site—which is generally being interpreted as strategic flattery of the sort Trump is known to be susceptible to.

If so, Rutte's letter did the trick, with Trump sounding much more upbeat about NATO than he has in previous years when he treated it as a protection racket with the United States in the role of the mob boss. But his good mood evaporated when he was asked about the Russia-Ukraine war:

REPORTER: You once said that you would end the Ukraine war in twenty-four hours. You later said that you said that sarcastically—

TRUMP [angrily] Of course it was sarcastic.

REPORTER: But you've now been in office for five months and five days. Why have you not been able to end the Ukraine war?

TRUMP: Because it's more difficult than— people would have any idea.

There are two lies here. First, Trump appears to be the only person who thought it wouldn't be difficult to end that war, which he has tried to do by switching the United States' side in the middle of the conflict to align with the Putin regime.

The second lie is about Trump's campaign promises about ending the war "within 24 hours" or "on Day One" or even "before I even arrive at the Oval Office" being sarcastic. They were delivered over and over again in all apparent seriousness. CNN's Daniel Dale catalogued at least 53 separate examples taken from a partial database of Trump's public remarks. As Dale put it:

It’s sometimes hard to determine the intent of a politician’s one-time ad-libs, but this was no jovial ad-lib. Rather, the promise of a rapid end to the war was a sober staple of Trump’s pre-written rally remarks. He framed the promise as a key component of his second-term agenda, and he justified it with claims about his “credibility” as a leader, his history as a “peacemaker,” and his knowledge of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  

Other times that Trump has claimed he was "joking" after saying things in all seriousness include:

• when he said he'd give pardons to people who broke the law for him (in this case, related to the border fence he'd promised to build) 
• when he compared himself to Jesus not once but twice in one week 
• when he said that President Obama, whom he'd falsely said was a foreign-born Muslim, was the founder of ISIL 
• when he accused Democrats of treason for not clapping for him at a speech
• when he publicly begged the Putin regime to conduct cyberattacks to help him in the 2016 election (a "joke" Russia acted on the very same day, and which he didn't reveal as a "joke" until 2019) 
• when he did the same thing except in regards to the 2020 election, this time with Putin in the room 
• when he thanked Putin for expelling American diplomats because it reduced the number of State Department employees he had to pay 
• when he said it was okay for police to deliberately beat people they'd already arrested
• when he challenged Rex Tillerson, his own former Secretary of State, to an IQ test challenge because he was angry that a Tillerson quote calling him "a fucking moron" had leaked
• when he said he wanted fewer COVID tests to be done at the outbreak of the pandemic, because more people testing positive made it harder to lift restrictions that were hurting him politically
• when he lied about having been surveilled by the Obama administration, and then tried to cover for it by saying to German Chancellor Angela Merkel that Obama had spied on her too
• the many, many, many, many, many times he said he would ignore the results of any election he lost, or that people should commit crimes to keep him in office if he did
   

Why does this matter?

• You can't turn a lie into a joke just because you got caught. 

• It's bad if the President of the United States is so easily and transparently manipulated, even if the people doing it have good reasons.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He pissed off just about everyone without even leaving his weekend resort.

Trump is once again spending the weekend resting at his Florida result, with no events on his schedule. It's a light day even by Trump's famously casual schedule: the 78-year-old is not golfing, or—remarkably, for him—even posting to his private microblogging site.

That said, he did manage to make sure people were talking about him. Among the ways Trump found himself in the news today:

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum called him out for his "offer" to use American troops on Mexican territory. Trump had been trying to portray himself as taking a tough line with Mexico, accusing Sheinbaum of being "very, very afraid" of Mexican drug cartels. But in a speech today, Sheinbaum flatly and without diplomatic nicety rejected any possibility of allowing an American military incursion, calling it a violation of Mexican sovereignty: "We will never accept the presence of the United States Army in our territory. I told him, ‘No, President Trump, our territory is inviolable, our sovereignty is inviolable, our sovereignty is not for sale.'"

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also scored domestic political points at Trump's expense, winning re-election for his center-left Labor Party after campaigning directly against Trump. In his victory speech, Albanese said, "Our government will choose the Australian way because we are proud of who we are. We do not seek our inspiration from overseas. We find it right here in our values and our people."

This was a direct dig at both Trump and the conservative opposition leader Peter Dutton, who modeled himself and his party after the MAGA movement, only to watch a substantial poll lead evaporate after Trump returned to office and alienated Australian voters. This is the second foreign election Trump has lost single-handedly for the party associated with him, and much like in the Canadian elections on Monday, the leader of the pro-Trump party failed to even keep his own seat.

European leaders marking V-E Day used the occasion to lament the United States' decline on the world stage, and Trump's apparent abandonment of American allies in favor of personal enrichment and fealty to the Putin regime in Russia.

Trump recently "hereby declared" that he was renaming V-E Day as "Victory Day for World War II," in a post that seemed to forget some basic facts about the war—for example, that it didn't end with surrender of Germany. As with his attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico, Trump doesn't have any real authority to do this, except that people may want to humor him by playing along.

American Catholics, including arch-conservative church leaders who normally offer Trump their political support, were infuriated by a Trump posting a picture of himself as the pope to White House social media accounts. In perhaps the most direct rebuke to a sitting president American Catholic leadership has ever made, the archdiocese of New York bluntly told Trump, "Do not mock us."

Trump made no secret of his dislike for the late Pope Francis and trolled him in life as well as in death, at one point fantasizing about Francis's death at the hands of the Islamic State and suggesting that Francis would be sorry he didn't have Trump's protection then.

Why does this matter?

• Presidents who needlessly piss off strategic partners, military allies, and major world religions hurt the United States.

What did Donald Trump do today? 

He tapped a patent grifter to be the U.S. Ambassador to NATO.

Today, Trump announced that he would nominate Matthew Whitaker as the U.S. Ambassador to NATO. Whitaker served briefly as Acting Attorney General in Trump's first term, after Trump fired Jeff Sessions for refusing to kill an investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election on Trump's behalf.

But Whitaker is better known as a board member of World Patent Marketing, a firm that the Federal Trade Commission called an "invention promotion scam." In 2017, the FTC found that WPM had falsely promised to promote clients' inventions, then threatened them with costly legal actions if they complained.

The company, which at one point tried to get clients to invest in a cryptocurrency it described as "a theoretical time travel commodity," is now defunct. The FTC wrote that its victims had paid

World Patent Marketing Inc. thousands of dollars to patent and market their inventions based on bogus 'success stories' and testimonials promoted by the defendants. But after they strung consumers along for months or even years, the defendants did not deliver what they promised. Instead, many customers ended up in debt or lost their life savings with nothing to show for it.

Whitaker has no military or diplomatic experience.

As NATO Ambassador, Whitaker would be the representative of a president who has repeatedly threatened to withdraw the United States from NATO, which would effectively destroy it. Curtailing NATO's influence has been the primary military goal of the Putin regime in Russia.

Why does this matter?

• Jobs relating to the military defense of the United States and its allies are too important to give out to political cronies.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He lied about American troops in Germany.

In trying to explain his decision to redeploy American troops currently stationed in Germany, almost universally seen as a gift to the Putin regime, Trump tweeted this today:

It's not clear whether Trump is still genuinely confused about what NATO is "all about," or simply hoping his Twitter audience is. American troops are stationed in Germany to advance American interests, which include a stable and democratic Europe.

There is no "2% fee to NATO." (NATO's administrative budget is tiny, and Germany is paid up on its obligations.) But it will cost the United States billions of dollars to redeploy its forces.

Germany trades with Russia for the same reasons that the United States does with every country—like China, for example—with which it is not actively at war. Not only does Germany need some amount of natural gas, Russia's desperately fragile economy cannot survive without selling it. This economic reality has helped keep the peace even as Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed part of its territory—something Trump would like to forgive.

Of course, Trump is personally beholden to Russia in both political and financial ways. It's impossible to ignore the possibility that he is doing this simply because Putin wants him to. Trump has spoken with Putin eight times since Trump was warned that Russia was paying the Taliban bounties to kill American troops and destabilize the peace process, but Trump insists the subject has never come up. He defended Putin again today, calling his own government's intelligence reports "fake news."

Why should I care about this?

• There should never be any doubt about what country a president's loyalties lie with, much less this much doubt.

• A president who can't remember basic facts about our most important military alliances is unfit to be commander-in-chief.

• Germany is a military ally of the United States and Russia is not.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He threw a tantrum and rage-quit the NATO summit in London.

Last night, a video clip of the leaders of Canada, France and the UK talking about Trump went viral. In it, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau is commenting on Trump's erratic behavior from the day before as the British prime minister Boris Johnson and French president Emmanuel Macron nod along. Trudeau mentioned that something Trump said—possibly his sudden disavowal of pro-democracy protestors in Iran—made Trump's staff's "jaws drop to the floor."

As mockery goes, it was pretty gentle—but Trump is easily enraged by anything even remotely like criticism. The attention the clip got was enough to provoke Trump to quit the summit early, though not before he gave himself a chance to call Trudeau "two-faced."

It's not news to anyone else that world leaders think Trump is dangerous, mentally ill, ridiculous, or easily manipulated—because they've said so. But Trump himself, whose staff works very hard to keep him from seeing news that will upset him, may actually have been caught by surprise.

It's not the first time Trump has stormed out of a conference of America's closest allies. The last time he did so was at the June 2018 G7 summit in Montreal, rage-tweeting insults from Air Force One at Justin Trudeau on his way out.

How is this a bad thing?

• This would be a disturbing lack of emotional control even in a small child.

• A president who lets a temper tantrum get in the way of maintaining America's military alliances is unfit for the job.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He told a Norwegian official about what he apparently thinks is the quaint American custom of asylum laws.

During a press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Trump was asked a question about his empty threats to close the US-Mexico border. (Trump began by walking back his bluff, claiming that Mexico had suddenly managed to halt all traffic across its southern border.)

Eventually, his response came around to the fact that many of the people crossing the US border are not seeking to work illegally, as was more common in the past, but are openly seeking asylum. Turning to Stoltenberg, Trump said:

Every time — and you won’t even believe this, Mr. Secretary General — you catch somebody that’s coming illegally into your country, and they bring them to a court. But we can’t bring them to a court because you could never have that many judges. So they take their name, they take their information, and they release them. Now, we don’t release too many. We keep them. It’s called “catch and keep.” But you don’t have facilities for that. But you have to bring them through a court system. If they touch your land — one foot on your land: “Welcome to being Perry Mason. You now have a big trial.”

Stoltenberg, the former Prime Minister of Norway, probably could "even believe" Trump's description of the "worst, dumbest immigration system in the world," since Norway has the same system. Like virtually every other democracy including the United States, Norway has a robust process in place for applying for asylum. But under the law (of both countries), asylum seekers crossing the border and presenting themselves to law enforcement are not entering the country illegally.

Trump then turned to a favorite lie of his, saying that of asylum applicants given a hearing in court, "nobody comes back. I guess 1 percent — 1 to 2 percent, on average, come back. And nobody can understand why they come back."

In reality, about 90% of asylum seekers are present for their court date. The remainder includes applicants who have died or left the country voluntarily in the meantime.

Why should anyone care about this?

• Presidents should know something about the laws it's their job to enforce.

• It's wrong to lie for political purposes, especially about people who can't fight back.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He lied about whether America's military allies supported his move to blow up a major nuclear arms treaty.

Trump announced today that the United States would begin the legal process of withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed by President Reagan in 1987. Ostensibly a warning shot at Russia, which the United States has long suspected of violating the treaty, Trump's withdrawal is likely to give the Putin regime a much freer hand in a less stable European theater. 

The territory of the United States is not threatened by the land-based, medium-range missiles prohibited by the treaty. Rather, it is the United States' European allies in NATO that will be directly impacted. For that reason, Trump, or whoever drafted the statement he released explaining the move, repeatedly insisted that those allies supported the move. "Allies have supported the United States at every step, because they understand the threat posed by Russia’s violating missile system," he wrote.

This is a lie. Military and political leaders from NATO members Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, as well as non-NATO allies Finland and Japan, and representatives of the European Union, all spoke out against the move. Only Poland openly supported it.

Trump, who appears to genuinely believe that NATO and other military alliances are a sort of for-profit protection racket, has repeatedly pitched the idea of pulling the United States out of NATO, which would effectively destroy it. 

Why does this matter?

• Lying about the United States' military allies weakens the United States' national security.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to take revenge on Nancy Pelosi.

Minutes before members of Congress departed on a planned trip to NATO headquarters in Belgium and then Afghanistan, Trump canceled their military transport. In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Trump said the "excursion" was inappropriate during a government shutdown.

The tone of the letter made it clear that Trump was trying to retaliate against Pelosi for her suggestion that because of the security logistics involved, the televised State of the Union address should not happen in the House chamber during the shutdown. 

But regardless of its intent, the letter is revealing about what Trump does or doesn't know.

Trump sneeringly suggested that Pelosi could take a commercial flight instead. In fact, as Speaker and second in the line of succession to the presidency, she cannot, because of security rules put in place after the September 11th attacks. By revealing the secret details of the trip before it was underway, Trump essentially made it impossible for any member of Congress to go.

Trump also scoffed at the very idea of visiting troops and military commanders in a war zone, during a shutdown, calling it a "public relations event." Trump visited troops and military commanders in Iraq during this same shutdown. 

Trump has been furious over the political beating he is taking during the shutdown, which is beginning to erode his support among the "base" voters he is trying to rally in the first place. But his anger, and his sabotage of Congress's travel, may also be due to his own inability to leave the White House because of the political optics. Trump has been forced to spend almost every night since late November away from his winter resort home at Mar-a-Lago, where he normally spends two or three nights a week.

Trump's wife Melania took a military transport to Mar-a-Lago today.

So what?

• The president isn't supposed to actively prevent other branches of government from doing their jobs.

• A president who was reportedly too afraid to travel to a war zone for the first two years of his term should probably have a better understanding of the security implications.

• Even by Trump's standards, this is petty.