International columnists Lydia Polgreen and Nick Kristof discussed with the New York Times how the world is coming to terms with an international superpower run by what they perceive to be a "toddler."
“It may be risky, but it’s also pretty pathetic that we essentially have world leaders treating the president of the United States like a toddler who needs to be placated with a shiny toy,” said Polgreen. “The latest shiny toy, of course, being a $400 million plane that the government of Qatar is apparently donating — whatever that means — to the United States.”
“There’s something really sinister and frankly pathetic about this way of operating in the world,” she added, which ultimately means the U.S. government, is “catering to the venal and … childish desires of one very immature man.”
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Kristoff acknowledged seeing similar examples of childish appeasement in North Korea.
“I once visited a museum in North Korea that was filled with gifts to the Kim dictators, and it was this incredible monument to the idea of a personality cult. I spent much of my career … mocking personality cults; they were funny. And then all of a sudden you see cabinet meetings in the U.S. that sound, frankly, a lot like North Korean cabinet meetings.”
Consider audio clips of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth telling President Donald Trump “we’re making the military great again”… “because of your leadership, sir.”
In that same April cabinet meeting Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler told Trump, “I want to thank you for standing up to the Chinese Communist Party and fighting for our Main Streets, for our workers and for those that make things in America.” Attorney General Pam Bondi spent the meeting stroking Trump’s ego with statements like: “Your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country. Ever,” and “You were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority,” in contradiction to the facts.
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After additional heaping adulation from U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and U.S. Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum, Trump turned expectantly to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“Very good. Thank you. Marco?” he prodded.
Both columnists believed it would take years for the U.S. to recover its image with international allies who had once respected it.
Kristof said the essence of NATO “is realistically dead.”
“If Russia invaded Estonia tomorrow, the U.S. would not join other countries in intervening to protect Estonia. That kind of collective security, which has been the foundation of the international system since 1949, is, in practice, gone.
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“Can we recover what we had before? Can we rebuild this? And I think the consensus is that we’re never going to be able to fully get back what we had, that it’s going to be decades before Canada trusts us again the way it once did. NATO will be hard to recover,” Kristof said.
Polgreen said the international community was surely making note of Trump’s blatant surrender on international conflicts while declaring victory. The Houthis assault, she said, ended “essentially … because they couldn’t achieve anything very quickly, and because it was costing about a billion dollars a month.”
“Trump essentially decided to pull up stakes and say, “You know what, we’re just going to declare victory. … [T]he message that you’re sending to the world is, ‘We’re going to bully. But if we can’t get what we want really quickly, then we’re actually just going to try and package whatever we can and salvage it as a ‘win,’ and then move on.’”
Read the full New York Times report here.