"It was a scene that could make even the furniture in the East Room cringe: Donald Trump basking in the glow of Mark Rutte’s compliments, nodding like a Roman emperor being told the crops were bountiful. The newly minted NATO Secretary-General, once Europe’s pragmatic Dutch prime minister, now recast as the alliance’s designated Trump whisperer, sounded like a man mistaking survival strategy for sincerity. “Your leadership,” he cooed. “Your vision of peace.” The adjectives came thick as syrup; the self-delusion, thicker still.
In truth, Rutte wasn’t there to flatter Trump’s ego; he was there to keep him from detonating the world order by accident. Europe, desperate for a ceasefire in Ukraine and a stable Washington, had quietly deputized Rutte as the one man who might soothe the beast. His task wasn’t diplomacy in any classical sense, it was damage control, disguised as deference. The goal was simple: convince Trump that ending the war would make him look brilliant before he decided to prove it by doing something catastrophic.
And so the press conference became a kind of theater of survival. Rutte played the loyal chorus, feeding lines to a man who thinks he solved the Middle East with “peace plus seven,” and Trump, ever the unreliable narrator, performed his delusional soliloquy about ending “nine wars,” cutting gas to $2, and personally saving Los Angeles from combustion. Every absurdity went unchallenged, every fantasy transcribed as fact. It was hostage negotiation conducted in daylight.
Trump, naturally, lapped it up. “We solved the Middle East,” he declared, just casually, like you might say you finally found your keys. He called the region’s endless tragedies “a puzzle,” now conveniently “solved” under his “tremendous leadership.” And Ukraine? A bit tougher than expected, sure, but nothing a fresh batch of tariffs and Tomahawk tutorials couldn’t fix.
There was a time when reporters would have stopped a president mid-sentence for falsely claiming to have ended nine wars, built a ballroom with “friends and patriots,” or single-handedly solved the Middle East. But the bar is so low now it’s practically a tripwire buried in the sand. Trump declares that South Korea paid him $350 billion cash up front, and the press corps dutifully transcribes it, as if he were describing a budget line instead of an extortion fantasy.
Bloomberg’s Korean-language bureau had to do the heavy lifting the White House press pool wouldn’t. Seoul’s finance minister, visibly mortified, explained that the maximum South Korea could raise “without market disruption” was $20 billion, less than a tenth of Trump’s hallucinated windfall. But in Washington, the briefing room nods and moves on to the next question about the East Wing ballroom. No follow-up. No on-camera fact check. Just the quiet acceptance that the President lives in a different reality, and everyone’s supposed to pretend it’s fine.
The danger isn’t only that Trump lies, it’s that he believes the lies. He speaks as if the United States is running a global subscription service, with allies wiring billions to his personal PayPal. “Japan 550 billion, EU 650 billion, South Korea 350 billion,” he rattles off, like a street-corner scammer counting invisible stacks of cash. The networks air it, analysts stroke their chins, and by nightfall the lie has entered the bloodstream of reality.
Trump’s imagination doesn’t stop at trade or tariffs, it extends to physics and hydrology. During his press conference with Mark Rutte, between claiming to have “solved the Middle East” and insisting “we have the greatest weapons in the world,” he veered into climate denial cosplay. “They had the fires, which shouldn’t have happened,” he said, reprising one of his oldest lies. “They didn’t have the water for the fires. They should have had the water coming in from the Pacific Northwest. They didn’t have water in the hydrants or the sprinklers.” In Trump’s mind, California’s firefighters weren’t battling drought, wind, and climate chaos, they were just too stingy with the hoses. It’s a lie he’s repeated for months, and every expert from Cal Fire to the U.S. Forest Service has debunked it. There was no withheld water, no valve waiting for a presidential turn. The fires raged because of record heat, desiccated vegetation, and a climate crisis he pretends doesn’t exist. But in Trump’s world, and too often in the press coverage that treats this performance as just another “colorful aside”, complex systems collapse neatly into cartoon villains and miracle fixes.
No reporter dares interrupt with, “Sir, that didn’t happen.”No outlet risks losing access by calling the madness what it is.And so the fiction metastasizes.
Even Mark Rutte, now NATO’s Secretary-General, plays along, praising Trump’s “brilliance” and “vision for peace” like a man soothing an unstable patient until the nurse arrives with the syringe. The press, meanwhile, hides behind false balance: some say he’s delusional, others call it negotiation. In that vacuum, unreality becomes policy. Tariffs morph into tribute; coercion becomes diplomacy; the commander-in-chief mistakes his own campaign talking points for international law.
Mark Rutte may have walked into the White House trying to save Ukraine, but he left looking like a man who’d spent ninety minutes reasoning with a monarch who’d misplaced his crown and his medication. To his credit, the visit did pry loose something tangible: Trump, after months of fawning ambiguity, finally announced sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies. “These are tremendous sanctions,” he bragged. “Very big.” He quickly added, “We hope they won’t be on for long.”
That last sentence told the real story. The sanctions were a reluctant concession, a gesture to keep Europe from bolting. Rutte had coaxed a performance of statesmanship, not a conversion. Within minutes, Trump was hedging, reminding everyone that he’d just spoken to “Vladimir,” whom he described as “a very strong leader of a very big country.” Translation: don’t expect anything permanent.
When asked why the U.S. still refused to send Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, Trump produced a new entry in his encyclopedia of excuses. “It’ll take a minimum of six months, usually a year, to learn how to use them,” he said. “They’re highly complex. So the only way a Tomahawk is going to be shot is if we shoot it.” It was the kind of nonsense that sounded technical enough to go unchallenged by a weary press corps, but it collapses under a minute of scrutiny. Britain, Japan, and soon Poland and Australia already use Tomahawks under standard NATO training programs, no yearlong Jedi initiation required. The “too complex” line was cover, not caution.
The timing made the lie even uglier. Only days before, Trump had spoken by phone with Vladimir Putin, a call he canceled “because it didn’t feel right,” but later admitted was “very good.” And just like that, the missile excuse appeared.
The result is a world led by a man who can’t distinguish his imagination from the Treasury ledger, and a press corps too numbed or career-minded to pull him back to Earth. The cognitive decline, the narcissism, the financial grift: all of it merges into one sustained act of national gaslighting. And the longer journalists treat it as normal, the more that alternate universe consumes the real one.
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