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Trump Can't Get No Respect [1]
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Date: 2025-09-05
Last week I wrote a diary about how European Leaders are Mocking Trump. I argued that when the various heads of European governments escorted Zelenskyy to the White House, Trump thought they were paying him homage (and they did slather him with flattery). In reality, they were there to stage an intervention, the sort where a social worker sits down with a child bully and tries to get him to behave, at least for the day. Now Tom Nichols of The Atlantic is making a similar point about the world’s autocrats: they don’t respect Trump either. The World No Longer Takes Trump Seriously:
The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea are not good men. They preside over brutal autocracies replete with secret police and prison camps. But they are, nevertheless, serious men, and they know an unserious man when they see one. For nearly a decade, they have taken Donald Trump’s measure, and they have clearly reached a conclusion: The president of the United States is not worthy of their respect.
Putin’s contempt for Trump and his repeated “two weeks!” warnings has been obvious all along. But the Chinese are more subtle (they have a couple of thousand years more practice), so when Xi held a parade the other day to celebrate the WWII victory over Japan, he pointed left out Trump, even though the US was the the major player in the Pacific from Pearl Harbor on. Russia — then the Soviet Union — only joined the war against Japan on August 8, 1945 (two days after we bombed Hiroshima, though the Russians claim even to this day that “[t]heir declaration and attack hastened the end of the war”).
Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing is the most recent evidence that the world’s authoritarians consider Trump a lightweight. . . . After all, what role did the United States play in defeating Japan and liberating Eurasia? Instead, Trump, much like America itself, was left to watch from the sidelines.
Trump, needless to say, was not amused at, once again, being locked out of a club he wants to join. He petulantly posted on his social media platform (copied from Newsweek so I don’t have to link to it):
"May President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of celebration. Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America."
Nichols describes Trump as “acting exactly like the third-tier leader that Xi, Putin, and Kim seem to think he is” with this post. He then makes the same observation I did in my earlier diary:
Authoritarians are unfortunately in good company in treating Trump as an incompetent leader. Even America’s allies have recognized that Trump may be their formal partner, but that they mostly get things done with the American president by soothing his ego and working around him.
I do have an objection though, to the title of Nichols’s article (with the caveat that editors often dictate titles, even against the writer’s wishes, sometimes to play with words, as may be the case here). I think world leaders do indeed take Trump very very seriously — just not in a good way.
This is, after all, the man who just blew up a “dinky speedboat” (h/t to strawbale) off Venezuelan waters because he claimed, without evidence and indeed in contradiction to the known facts, not to mention international law and common sense, that it was smuggling illegal drugs to the United States. And his Secretary of State is promising that Trump will do it again whenever it pleases him to do so.
According to Nichols, Rubio was supposed to be the “adult in the room” but instead became an enabler for Trump’s worst ideas. However, in this case it looks like Rubio wasn’t just speaking for Trump; he was also speaking for himself. A deadly strike marks a moment in Rubio’s long desire to confront Venezuela:
President Donald Trump’s top diplomat, a former Florida senator, has depicted Venezuela as a vestige of the communist ideology in the Western Hemisphere. Rubio has consistently pushed for the ouster of its leader, Nicolás Maduro, advocated for economic sanctions and even argued for American military intervention.
Either way, consider it from the viewpoint of the rest of the world. Trump is off his rocker (I am convinced that our allies and our enemies are getting more accurate intelligence about Trump’s physical and mental states than we the US public are being told), and unlike in his first term when there really were “adults in the room,” this time Trump has made sure that the only people allowed to be around him are ones who will urge him on to greater acts of incompetence and insanity. Plus, he still wants Greenland — and Denmark is taking him seriously. And while he hasn’t mentioned taking over Canada lately, Canada is still wary of his intentions. A few weeks ago, Rolling Stone revealed that Team Trump Is Actually Drawing Up Attack Plans for Mexico. And now his top diplomat, the one who is supposed to be restraining Trump’s worst impulses on the world stage, is suggesting that Trump should invade Venezuela.
Trump caught on to the way China, Russia, North Korea, all disrespected him at Xi’s parade. He may not actually do anything to them (after all, every two weeks he gives Putin another two weeks), but countries like Mexico, Venezuela, Denmark, almost anywhere in the world, must be starting to worry that he could lash out at them in his otherwise impotent rage. The world may not respect Trump, but they take him seriously.
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