Donald Trump's Trips To Europe, Ranked By Offensiveness
You'll be surprised to learn that Donald Trump's big Armistice Day weekender in France went down like a lead observation balloon, with the President swerving a ceremony attended by Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, insulting the French president over a news story which misquoted him and confusing two European regions about 800 miles from each other.
Trump started by tweeting about a slightly mangled Emmanuel Macron quote which the American press said included a call for a European army to protect Europe from China, Russia and the United States. Macron actually said that he wanted to make sure Europe could defend itself more confidently without America, which is roughly what Trump's been saying about his country's NATO contributions for ages.
President Macron of France has just suggested that Europe build its own military in order to protect itself from the U.S., China and Russia. Very insulting, but perhaps Europe should first pay its fair share of NATO, which the U.S. subsidizes greatly!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 9, 2018
Then there was the Le Monde story about Trump apparently getting the Balkans and the Baltic mixed up, and blaming the assembled leaders of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia for the war in Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s. Worst of all, though, was Trump skipping an Armistice commemoration at the Aisne-Marne cemetery and memorial in Belleau, about 60 miles from Paris, because it was raining. The White House said the presidential helicopter couldn't fly in such conditions, and that taking a car would snarl up the Paris traffic.
In all, it's been a rancorous trip. But where does it rank among Trump's other rancorous trips to Europe? Here they all are, in order of offensiveness.
13-14 July 2017: Paris
Mostly remembered for an absolutely banging Daft Punk tribute by the French military band on Bastille Day, as well as being the inspiration for Trump's now-abandoned military parade through Washington. Otherwise, though, not too crass.
25-26 January 2018: Davos
Trump was booed after attacking the "nasty, mean, vicious, fake" press in his address to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, and had to give a tentative apology for retweeting Islamophobic videos the previous November, but generally managed to keep himself to himself.
23-27 May 2017: Rome, Vatican City, Brussels and the G7 summit
This one produced the enduring images of Trump as an international statesman. Exhibit A:
You tiny, tiny, tiny little man.
pic.twitter.com/mP3mad6cMt- J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 25, 2017
Exhibit B:
Exhibit C:
President Trump and newly-elected French President Emmanuel Macron exchanged a white-knuckled handshake https://t.co/gqppj3UeyA pic.twitter.com/fSZGMJCAX2
- CNN (@CNN) May 25, 2017
The handshake-off between Trump and Macron was exactly the testosterone-reeking bloke-off it looked like at the time. "My handshake with him - it wasn’t innocent," Macron later said to the Journal du Dimanche. "It was a moment of truth."
5-8 July 2017: Warsaw and Hamburg
Trump's paranoid speech in Poland was very, very Steve Bannon - it really wallowed in the horrors of Nazi invasion, the Holocaust, the Katyn Massacre and the privations of communism before turning to more cheery subjects like cyberwarfare and terrorism - but dusted with a sprinkle of that ol' Trump magic. "In 1939, you were invaded yet again, this time by Nazi Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east." Trump paused. "That's trouble," he noted, sagely. "That's tough." The G20 meeting in Hamburg went pretty much without incident aside from being frozen out over his Paris climate accord withdrawal, though Trump did have his first proper chats with Putin and allegedly human rights-abusing Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan.
9-11 November 2018: Paris
Not great, as we've covered. Giving Vladimir Putin a thumbs-up and having to have his and Putin's places swapped minutes before a working lunch at the Élysée Palace was the shitty icing on the rotten cake.
10-16 July 2018: Brussels, London, Turnberry and Helsinki
This was an absolute whopper. The backdrop wasn't great to begin with: the UK leg was a severely downgraded from the state visit Theresa May bunged in the post almost before the balloon drop had hit the floor at Trump's victory party, and planned protests helped force Trump away from public appearances. Then Trump told The Sun he thought Boris Johnson would be a great Prime Minister, that he himself was more popular than Abraham Lincoln and lamenting that "you don't hear the name England as often as you should". Then, at a Chequers press conference with May, he called the quotes published the previous day "fake news". Up at his golf course in Scotland, Trump was picketed by protestors, including a paraglider, and then hung out with Putin in Helsinki. Finally, a chance to sort out the whole election meddling thing. "President Putin says it's not Russia," Trump said at the summit, channelling every useless cop in Scooby-Doo who can't see that the ghost pirate is very obviously the janitor. "I don't see any reason why it would be."
('You Might Also Like',)
