On Wednesday, representatives of NATO met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office in an effort to bolster his reluctant commitment to the alliance. According to reporting by the iPaper, they brought “visual aids” that had less to do with pleading their case than with stoking “Trump’s ego.”
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As iPaper political editor James Ball writes, “Trump is not in a good mood with NATO right now. The US President has been repeatedly grousing that the Western alliance was not there for him during his recent conflict with Iran – he repeatedly demanded that they help him reopen the Strait of Hormuz, even though he also insisted he didn’t actually need their help. That has left Nato secretary general and former Prime Minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte in the unenviable position of trying to keep Trump onside, just to hold NATO together.” This comes at a precarious moment, in which the war between Russia and Ukraine has reached a critical juncture.
According to Ball, Rutte is an expert at handling Trump. “even if it comes at a heavy cost to his own personal dignity.” The former lavishes the latter with praise, concedes when Trump criticizes NATO, and rarely pushes back.
“His meeting with Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday, however, crossed a new threshold even by Rutte’s standards – because the secretary general had brought along visual aids to help make his case to the President,” writes Ball. “These were not complex diagrams explaining defence procurement, or even the current situation on the front lines in Ukraine – instead, they were ludicrously simple charts designed solely to inflate Trump’s ego.”
As Ball notes, it was obvious that the charts were “tailored precisely to Trump.” Each was enormous, mounted on its own easel, and had no more than 10 words, the lettering of which was gold and embossed in 1990s Word-Art style, “and the messaging was designed to tell Trump he was a massive success.”
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“THE TRUMP 47 EFFECT,” declared one, showing “NATO Europe and Canada” spending an extra $258 billion in two years. The other blasted “THE TRUMP TRILLION” while crediting the president with an expanded $1.2 trillion in defence spending since 2016.
“Rutte likely judged his target audience correctly,” writes Ball. “The US President gets a daily briefing by the intelligence agencies about the state of the world – unparalleled access to what’s going on, unimaginable to most of us. During Trump’s first term, the president himself admitted he found these repetitive, and didn’t like reading much. ‘I like bullets or I like as little as possible,’ he told Axios. ‘I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page.’”
Because of Trump’s disdain for reading and lack of focus, briefings became limited to just twice a week, and those briefing the president were advised “only to present one side of the argument, to cut their brief to a page, and to include diagrams wherever possible. Donald Trump’s attention span would not extend to nuance, details, or even to a second page of information.”
As Ball concludes, “Trump has not got more attentive in the years since. So, ridiculous as they might have made him look, Rutte’s giant, golden, flattering bar charts were probably a good tactic in trying to win the president over to his side. What a way to run the world.”
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