The Snowflake That Is trump

Didn't know about it until earlier this week that trump was going over to Europe to hang out with our nation's NATO allies, and I also didn't realize how bad a trip it was turning out to be until THIS little tidbit got out there for public consumption. Just consider the headline to Anne Laurie's article at Balloon-Juice:

Late Night NATO Open Thread: They’re Not Laughing *With* Him,
They’re Laughing *At* Him

With links to various Twitter threads like this one:

When even Boris Johnson is getting in his kicks at you, you're clearly not the cool kid at this school.

Via Martin Longman at Washington Monthly:

I’ve been watching Trump since I was teenager growing up in the New York media market. It has been obvious to me that he’s driven by insecurities and resentment toward the Manhattan financial elite who have always viewed him as a mannerless fraud from the outer boroughs. He really wants their acceptance and I think he thought he’d finally get it when he won the presidency. It hasn’t worked out that way, and the only thing that has changed is that people see him now as a threat.

It’s hard to imagine anything that would strike Trump to his core more than being ridiculed by his would-be peers, and that’s why it was predictable as the rain that he’d throw a fit when he realized that he was the butt of jokes at the Queen Elizabeth’s Buckingham Palace reception on Tuesday night...

Trump was particularly angry with Justin Trudeau who was captured on an audio feed sympathizing with Macron for being unexpectedly roped into a tense 40 minute press conference that was supposed to be a brief photo opportunity. Doing his best “Mean Girls” impression, Trump called Trudeau “two-faced” and suggested he was just angry about criticism that Canada doesn’t contribute enough money to NATO.

Then he did this:

President Donald Trump on Wednesday abruptly canceled a press conference that was scheduled to cap a contentious trip to London for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 70th anniversary meeting.
The presser was scheduled to come after a series of bilateral meetings with NATO members, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.
“When today’s meetings are over, I will be heading back to Washington,” Trump said in a series of tweets.
“We won’t be doing a press conference at the close of NATO because we did so many over the past two days. Safe travels to all!” Trump said.

The president is obviously wounded. His feelings are hurt. And now he will seek ways to exact revenge. This is such a well established pattern with him by now that I have no trouble predicting that he will repeat it.

This behavior has never won him respect in the past and it will not work in the future.  At this point, I’m surprised that he continues to make foreign trips to Europe since they always end in humiliation...

trump's vanity has always been a sore spot: HE has to be the biggest brightest star in the sky even when he's clearly not. he'd been obsessed with his claims of wealth and power and dealing prowess, even as the business deals collapsed into bankruptcy courts and even as the real rich kids banned him from such cool things as major team sports ownerships.

What will actually happen next isn't entirely predictable. trump can express his impotent rage towards Europe in various ways. Forcing the United States to quit out of NATO altogether is still out there as an option. he's still of a mind that tariff wars are easy to win (he just started them up again versus Brazil and Argentina).

The thing is, when trump does his damage to his perceived enemies, he's not going to do it in the best interests of the United States.

he'll be causing damage to satisfy his own rage.

And that's not how a President should act. Ever.

That's what 62 million of you Americans voted for.

Gods help us.