Critics say 'pathetic' Trump’s summit behavior humiliates America

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US President Donald J. Trump makes an announcement on healthcare in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., US, September 18, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci

President Donald Trump's conduct when engaging in summits, such as his ongoing one with Chinese President Xi Jinping, is "pathetic," at least according to one conservative commentator and retired professor from the US Naval War College.

"Once at the White House, Trump took Xi for a quick tour," wrote The Atlantic's Tom Nichols on Thursday. "Trump had long ago replaced Joe Biden’s portrait in the hall of presidents with a picture of an autopen, a petty jab from a small and petty man, and on their walk, he made sure that Xi saw it. He even gave the Chinese leader a bit of a pat on the arm while yukking it up."

Nichols continued, "This was too much even for the conservative writer Charles Cooke of National Review, who posted on X about Trump’s 'grotesque behavior.' Xi, Cooke said, 'is a communist dictator, and the head of a foreign state. Our internal divisions are not fair game in this context.'"

Nichols then summed up the problem with the president's approach to foreign policymaking, at least when it comes to key summits such as those with Xi and North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong-un.

"But Trump does not think in these terms," Nichols wrote. "His summits are a national hazard precisely because Trump apparently does not understand that he is representing the United States; instead, he seems to think he’s just having a visit with some of the guys in a very cool club of which he’d very much like to be a member. His attempts to ingratiate himself are obvious and pathetic, and they function as a giant tell to America’s opponents: This president likes you, fears you, and wants your approval."

Earlier in the same article, Nichols pointed out that "in the Donald Trump White House, summits are hazardous excursions during which the interests of the United States are shoved aside by a president whose cringe-inducing admiration of dictators makes these meetings into rituals of American humiliation. The country would be better off if Trump just stopped hosting or attending them."

He singled out Trump's obsequious behavior toward Russia's dictator, Vladimir Putin.

"No one, however, has taken Trump to the cleaners more times than Putin," Nichols explained. "Trump seems to both venerate and fear the Kremlin leader, and when they are left in a room together, things do not go well for the United States. After their 2018 meeting in Helsinki, Trump stood next to Putin and told the world that he accepted the word of a former KGB spy over reports from the U.S. intelligence community. And this was at a time when the president had a Cabinet and staff far more willing to tell him hard truths than his current circle of sycophants."

When this journalist wrote for Salon, he interviewed the two people that Trump offered to hand over to Putin during that summit, billionaire and whistleblower Bill Browder and former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. Both foreshadowed Nichols' subsequent criticism.

“I was deeply disappointed,” McFaul explained to Salon. “The generous interpretation,” he continued, is that Trump “didn’t understand what he was talking about. But let’s be clear: What Trump was doing was assigning moral equivalency to a legitimate indictment with lots of evidence against several Russian military intelligence officers for violating American sovereignty in 2016 during the presidential elections, with a completely fabricated, cockamamie story invented by Putin. To even, for a moment, give any kind of dignity to what President Putin proposed was not in America’s national interest, from my point of view.”

Browder, similarly, told Salon at the time that "I have no idea what motivates his behavior. All I can say is that the idea that he seemed to entertain for a few days of handing me and 11 Americans over to Vladimir Putin for our work on the Magnitsky Act seemed pretty horrifying.”

Nichols himself has previously singled out Trump's behavior as endangering American national security, such as during an MS NOW appearance in August.

“He now has become completely wrapped up in his own power and surrounded by people that are just footmen rather than advisors. That is incredibly dangerous,” Nichols told anchor Nicolle Wallace. “It's bad when it's the, the head of a corporation or the captain of a sports team, but when you're the president of the United States and you lose touch with reality because you're simply cut off from anybody and anything that can contradict the reality of that movie inside your own head rather than what you see around you, that's just astonishingly dangerous.”

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