The World No Longer Takes Trump Seriously

23 comments

1. Tom Nichols: “Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing is the most recent evidence that the world’s authoritarians consider [Donald] Trump a lightweight. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s maximum nepo baby, Kim Jong Un, gathered to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. (Putin’s Belarusian satrap, Alexander Lukashenko, was also on hand.) The American president was not invited: After all, what role did the United States play in defeating Japan and liberating Eurasia? Instead, Trump, much like America itself, was left to watch from the sidelines.

   “But the parade was worse than a mere snub. Putin, Xi, and Kim stood in solidarity while reviewing China’s military might only weeks after Putin came to Alaska and refused Trump’s pleas to end Russia’s war against Ukraine. The White House tried to spin that ill-advised summit into at least a draw between Putin and Trump, but when the Kremlin’s dictator shows up with no interest in negotiation, speaks first at a press conference, and then caps the day by declining a carefully planned lunch and flying home, that’s a humiliation, not an exchange of views.

   “… The reality is that Russia, China, and North Korea are conspiring against America, but it is beneath both the dignity and the power of an American president to whine about it … A more self-assured commander in chief would have ignored the parade and, if asked about it, would have said something to the effect that the United States has always respected the sacrifices of our allies in World War II. But not Trump: He petulantly declared that he would not have attended even if the cool kids had invited him.

   “… America is adrift. It has no coherent foreign policy, no team of senior professionals managing its national defense and diplomacy, and a president who has little interest in the world beyond what it can offer him. Little wonder that the men who gathered in Beijing—three autocrats whose nations are collectively pointing many hundreds of nuclear weapons at the United States—feel free to act as if they don’t even think twice about Trump or the country he leads.”

   Read more: [https://theatln.tc/uYN6DlTX](https://theatln.tc/uYN6DlTX)

2. That implies there was a time world did take him seriously.

   Don’t confuse pandering to a fool with power for taking him seriously. Countries are obliging until they develop alternate options.

3. Of course no one takes him seriously. He’s a child playing in a game people train decades to take part in.

   Moreover, he is arbitrary, malicious and selfish. No one can expect to make any sort of arrangement with him and expect that the US will live up to its word.

   It takes generations of hard-work to build and maintain a national grand strategy. It only takes one fool (and his spineless enablers) to undo the work of millions over a century.

   One visionary can summon the future. One madman can also destroy an empire that took centuries to build and maintain: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phocas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phocas)

4. I can understand tariff’s as a means of getting more favourable trade deals, but when you start using them to try and get countries to submit or concede on non-economic demands, like getting India to stop buying Russian oil or getting Brazil not to prosecute Bolsonaro…countries will take this as an attack on their sovereignty.

   Not every country is like the europeans and completely dependent on American military protection. You’re just not gonna get guys like India or China or Brazil or even Iran to submit without a real fight – which America cant actually win without it being pyrrhic, if at all -and all of these countries will be willing to accept economic hardships to hold their pride. Pushing them together to organize a group response to what they (probably correctly) consider American tyranny is the only realistic outcome.

5. I can just hear them talking and Kim Jon saying “He’s such an idiot” and the other two in unison saying “Yes, but he’s our idiot”.

6. Uhhh…. Should we tell them?

   🤡

7. The stupidest article ever. The US has collected $142 billion in tariffs.

   You better believe that every country is taking these negotiations seriously, and every single one of them is desperate to reach Trump directly.

   I don’t agree with tariffs. But I am not silly enough to listen to someone who should and does know better.

8. The world does take Trump seriously.
   We understood that the Demented Evil Maniac Orange Nutbag is an untrustworthy mafioso.
   We are buying time to be able to eventually ignore or overpower this nasty economic and political vandal.

9. he did just break off a relationship that America was nurturing for the last 20 years for a Nobel peace prize and some crypto nonsense for his family, no one should take him seriously

10. He’s still a man in an extremely powerful position so we fail to take him seriously at our peril.

    However, I think at this point we have to recognise that as a man, he is a deeply unserious **person**.

    He is deeply ignorant, deceitful, lacking any kind of moral principles, mercurial to the extreme, and guided purely by his own selfish impulses and ego. Anything he promises could be forgotten forever by tomorrow, and he could tear up any agreement with zero notice.

    So yes, due to his position we do still have to take him seriously. But crucially he’s so unreliable – even to the extent that he can be trusted to act within his personal self interest – that engaging with him is arguably worthless.

11. I’ve never taken him seriously.

12. I mean, sure, that’s not an untrue take. One wouldn’t particularly take an eight-year-old ‘seriously’ if he were to somehow wander into a lecture on biomedical ethics and throw a tantrum, but if that petulant little tyke were somehow to have wandered in waving around a revolver, then the entire situation of trying to calm him down and somehow carry on the course becomes a bit of a different vibe.

13. From The Atlantic? Never-ending.

    Hey. How are democrats polling these days?

14. Hot take from The Atlantic, if theyre criticizing him you know its legit

15. The Atlantic is clickbait trash.

    We’re not even 1 year into his presidency and we’ve upended the global alliances in place since WWII. Shit is bad, and it’s getting worse. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.

16. In all honesty (I’m Canadian) I never took him seriously. I thought he was lower than whale shit years ago. I’m talking in the 80s I thought this. I’m a good judge of character. He has NONE.

17. America wants to be isolationist but wants to still tell the world what to do.

18. Trump’s super power is to drag others down to his level.

19. You shouldnt take him literally, but you should take him seriously

20. His has to be taken seriously, only because his actions can have dangerous consequences and there do not seem to be any checks and balances to restrain him.

21. The world is kind of slow. The only problem is he still has power.

22. The world never did.

23. The thesis is that because Trump wasn’t invited to a dictator party to which no serious Western leader was invited he isn’t being taken seriously? That’s pretty dubious.

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