'Big cringe moment':  How Trump's meetings with world leaders are a 'queasy experience'

During his second term, President Donald Trump has frequently made headlines for his showy Oval Office meetings with world leaders. One veteran entertainment journalist is now pointing out something they all have in common.

In a Sunday essay for the New York Times, Lisa Schwarzbaum — who was a longtime film critic for Entertainment Weekly — observed that many Americans have likened Trump's meetings with foreign heads of state to reality TV. But she cautioned that world leaders may end up avoiding the White House altogether to avoid being caught up in the media spectacle that typically ensues after each meeting.

"For many of us, watching these affairs offers the same queasy experience as the most car-crash-reminiscent reality shows, but with geopolitical consequences," Schwarzbaum wrote. "We brace ourselves for the inevitable moments of skirmish and bluster, of braying rudeness and the possible surprise reveal straight out of 'Punk’d' or 'Jerry Springer.' We grimace in preparation for the next big cringe moment before the show goes to commercial."

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But the entertainment writer posited that rather than reality TV, Trump's Oval Office summits with various heads of state may be better characterized as nature documentaries narrated by Sir David Attenborough. She pointed to Trump's most recent meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz as one example.

"The Trump-Merz meeting was certainly no reality TV show brouhaha — Mr. Merz was too artful for that," she wrote. "Instead, it played out like an encounter between a cool, intelligent outsider, sizing up the powers and weaknesses of a formidable fellow mammal who must see himself as an apex predator."

"Merz seemed to heed well the famous words of his predecessor, Angela Merkel, who said of meeting with Mr. Trump during his first term, 'Every meeting is a competition.' Mr. Merz handled it well," Schwarzbaum continued. "In Sir David’s imagined words: Observe that Mr. Merz’s color palette is muted, unthreatening. Observe that he lets his host talk and talk and talk and talk — talk himself into a feces-flinging contest with Mr. Musk, in fact — while Mr. Merz saves his words for things that matter."

According to Schwarzbaum, what separated the Merz meeting from more contentious Oval Office visits by other leaders — like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa — was that he simply refused to engage in "furious, bruising bouts of warfare" with Trump and handled the encounter with "cool cunning." And she noted that other world leaders could follow Merz's example as he "outflank[ed] the presumptive alpha mammal."

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Read Schwarzbaum's full op-ed in the Timesby clicking here (subscription required).