EUobserver voice is a daily opinion piece by EUobserver staff writers, published every weekday morning
There was more “breaking news” in a Donald Trump speech last weekend, but it was hardly reported, while US diplomacy in France also lacked class.
The US president declared the end of Nato’s Article V, said he would rename the Strait of Hormuz the “Strait of Trump”, and invade Cuba “next”, while speaking at a Saudi business forum in Miami last Friday (28 March) evening.
“Nato just wasn’t there. They just weren’t there … now, based on their actions, I guess we don’t have to be [there for Nato], do we?,” he said, referring to allies’ refusal to join the Iran war.
“That sounds like a big story. Yes, sir? Is that breaking news? I think we just had breaking news,” said Trump.
He was quoted by newswires, but largely ignored by newspapers and TV, as it was nothing really new: Trump verbally rage-quits Nato every week, before later changing his mind, amid other U-turns.
There are Trump-parody accounts on X, but they posted genuine quotes from Friday’s speech, showing what a joke he has become.
Trump also did mock impressions of French president Emmanuel Macron, insulted Saudi Arabia, and hand-mimed US missile strikes on Tehran, in his 63-minute-long, often illiterate ramble.
“I said: ‘Emmanuel, would you like to help?’. [Macron said:] ‘Yes, yes, yes. Uh, as soon as the [Iran] war is over, we will send ships’,” Trump said, while adding that the Saudi king, who was in the front row in Miami, was “kissing my ass”.
And if you thought US secretary of state Marco Rubio was better — he isn’t.
His only “Scoop” from a G7 meeting in France on 27 March, as entitled by US website Axios, was that he had yelled at EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas about Russia.
“‘We are doing the best we can to end the [Ukraine] war. If you think you can do it better, go ahead. We will step aside,’ he fired back [at Kallas inside the meeting], raising his voice”, Axios said.
Speaking to EUobserver in 2020 at the end of Trump’s first term, US historian Anne Applebaum said: “The problem with him [Trump] isn’t that he’s stupid. [It’s that] he’s very uneducated. He knows very little about the world”.
His narcissism made him “confusing”, she said: “One of the reasons why he was always so hard for people to understand was that his only interest – I mean, his only interest – was himself”.
“We’re lucky we got that kind of autocrat, who didn’t know how government works. He could have done a lot more damage, if he understood what he was doing,” Applebaum added at the time.
Half-way through his second term, he has done a lot more harm to the US, Europe, and the Middle East, whether he knows or cares what he’s doing.
Europe is waiting for elections in Hungary on 12 April in the hope its illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orbán, loses and the EU Council can go back to normal without his pro-Russia vetoes.
More importantly, it is waiting for US mid-term elections in November and the presidential election in 2028 in the hope Trump is weakened, that the next US leader is normal, and Nato can be saved.
But if a week used to be a long time in politics, then events are moving so fast in 2026, that even though Trump’s weirdness has become boring, I wonder what there will be left to salvage in transatlantic relations two years from now.
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