Tight smiles, stiff handshakes and averted gazes ruled the day Thursday as Trump was shunned by world leaders at the NATO summit conclusion on Thursday.
Trump did his best to upend this week’s NATO summit through a series of lies and bullying tactics, but ultimately joined 28 other national leaders on Wednesday in signing a NATO declaration. However, the summit was anything but peaceful; and the meeting concluded with Trump being openly snubbed by other world leaders.
The Washington Post reported that Trump “began his trip {to the summit] by scolding allies over breakfast Wednesday with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.”
“Many countries are not paying what they should,” Trump said, seated across from a visibly rattled Stoltenberg. “And, frankly, many countries owe us a tremendous amount of money for many years back, where they’re delinquent, as far as I’m concerned, because the United States has had to pay for them.” [Factcheck.org, NPR, The New York Times and others have reported that Trump is distorting his claims about NATO financial obligations.]
The New York Times reported, “Trump threw the meeting into turmoil on Thursday by using a session on Ukraine and Georgia, countries partially occupied by Russia, as another chance to complain about NATO military spending. That prompted the leaders to convene an emergency budget session.”
The Washington Post elaborated, reporting that: “Trump’s ambush jolted the transatlantic alliance, and some diplomats perceived his comments as threatening a U.S. withdrawal from NATO.”
Continuing, The Washington Post reported that Trump reportedly had planned all along to upend the summit.
Trump last week told senior aides he was going to make threats about defense spending and that he was determined to flip the table over before he left, a senior administration official said ahead of Thursday’s drama, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive summit planning.
Ultimately, some sort of unspecified agreement was reached between Trump and other NATO leaders, prompting Trump to hold a press conference where The New York Times reports: “Trump once again hailed himself as a ‘very stable genius’ and took ‘total credit’ for persuading his allies to increase military spending.”
Continuing, The New York Times reported that, by the end of the Summit, other world leaders appeared to be snubbing Trump:
Other NATO leaders mostly refrained from responding to Mr. Trump’s disdain and criticism, but the body language at the summit meeting said plenty, and it was not a message of warmth and harmony.
As the leaders walked to the site of a group photo, many of them chatting easily with one another, Mr. Trump hung back, along with the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
When they took their assigned spots, Mr. Trump stood near the center but his counterparts mostly ignored him, giving him no more than sidelong glances, even as several of them continued conversing.
A number of news organizations noted the awkwardness, drawing rebukes from White House aides, who called it “fake news.”
Indeed, The New York Times published a separate article detailing the awkwardness of the summit meeting, writing in part:
As President Trump prepared to leave the NATO summit meeting in his disgruntled wake, the story of his visit could be told in the tight smiles, stiff handshakes and averted gazes he exchanged with the people who are supposed to be some of his closest European allies.
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