Over the past decade, as I watched ambitious, embattled, fearful, or just plain weak interlocutors deal with Donald Trump, it became obvious that many of them have reached the same conclusion about how best to manage the capricious President: with suck-uppery—the more egregious, the better, and ideally combined with a few strategic rounds of golf that Trump is allowed to win. This has proved to be a much safer choice than actually standing up to him. Just ask Volodymyr Zelensky. Or Angela Merkel. Or Mike Pence. In Trump’s first term, Poland proposed to name a new permanent U.S. military installation Fort Trump in his honor. Israel thanked him for recognizing its occupation of the Golan Heights by unveiling a new settlement called Trump Heights. At this point in the Trump era, the path of over-the-top praise has been well-trodden by everyone from Lindsey Graham to the late Shinzo Abe, the former Prime Minister of Japan, who, in 2018, nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize for pursuing a nuclear-disarmament deal with North Korea that did not, in fact, happen. They know what we all know by now: Trump is a reverse-Machiavelli who prefers the praise of the flatterer, no matter how insincere, to the hard counsel of unpleasant truth.
But, even in the voluminous catalogue of world leaders who have engaged in ego-wilting acts of Trump sycophantism, this week’s performance by Mark Rutte stands out. Rutte, the secretary-general of NATO and former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, hosted the American President on Tuesday and Wednesday in The Hague for the alliance’s annual summit. To be fair, this was no easy assignment. Trump, a longtime NATO skeptic, threatened to pull out of the alliance altogether at its 2018 gathering; he began his second term demanding billions more in defense spending from NATO allies. Otherwise, he said at one of his 2024 campaign rallies, the alliance’s main adversary, Russia, ought to be free to “do whatever the hell they want” to any country that didn’t pay up. In response, Rutte and the allies designed the summit around avoiding a blowup with Trump—agreeing in advance to his demand for a new goal of five per cent of G.D.P. to be spent by members annually on their defense budgets, pre-negotiating the summit communiqué so that it could not be derailed by a last-minute Trump tantrum, and making the formal sessions as short as possible. “I would call this ‘the Trump Summit,’ ” Marco Rubio, Trump’s dual-hatted Secretary of State and national-security adviser, bragged before the official meeting had even begun.
Even after watching the months of anxious buildup that went into hosting Trump, however, I was not fully prepared for Rutte to launch NATO so robustly into what may become known as its MAGA era. The first sign of where Rutte was headed came from Trump himself, who, before leaving for The Hague, posted on his social-media account a text message from the secretary-general that was so florid in its praise that I might not have believed it was real had NATO officials not confirmed it. Rutte hailed the “truly extraordinary” and “decisive action” that Trump had taken against Iran over the weekend, launching air strikes aimed at destroying its nuclear program, “something no one else dared to do.” He promised “another big success” awaited Trump at the summit. On Wednesday morning, the secretary-general followed up with a photo op alongside Trump; his language during the press conference was, if anything, even more worshipful. “He is a man of strength, but also a man of peace,” Rutte enthused, as Trump sat practically beaming next to him. He then announced that Trump was personally responsible for a trillion dollars in “extra aggregate defense spending” in his first term, before crediting Trump with “the big splash” at this year’s summit, the new five-per-cent threshold for defense spending. “This would not have happened if you had not been elected,” Rutte said. “So I want to thank you.” Trump beamed some more.
After Rutte finished speaking, Rubio turned the discussion back to Iran and the controversy of the day—a leaked preliminary U.S. intelligence report that, to Trump’s fury, found that the air strikes might have only delayed Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon by a matter of months. Still, Rubio insisted, “This was a complete and total obliteration,” adopting Trump’s O-word as his own. To a veteran Trump-watcher, this was a sign that the press conference was about to take its inevitable partisan turn; rants about the evils of the “fake news” and the traitorous deep-state intelligence community were clearly soon to come. Rutte could have sat there and said nothing, the obvious course for a nonpartisan European security official, but instead he interrupted Rubio, just to make it clear how much Trump himself deserved credit. “Marco, can I just alert you to one other aspect?” Rutte said. “So, the great thing is you took out the nuclear capability of Iran. This was crucial. You did it in a way which is extremely impressive, but the signal sent to the rest of the world that this President, when it comes to it, yes, he’s a man of peace. But, if necessary, he is willing to use strength, the enormous strength of the American military.”
When the President started talking again, Rutte listened without interruption as Trump accused CNN, MSNBC, and the Times of being “scum” for daring to report about the intel assessment. He also sat quietly when Trump mentioned how he had talked on the phone with the “very nice” Vladimir Putin. I wondered what the NATO members thought of that, at a summit where they were pledging to spend trillions of dollars more on their own defenses over the next decade in the hopes of deterring the “very nice” man from invading them.
Finally, eighteen minutes into this remarkable display, Rutte offered what will no doubt become his most famous act of strategic self-emasculation. A day earlier, before leaving for the NATO summit, Trump had fumed to the cameras about Iran and Israel not sticking to a ceasefire deal that he announced they’d reached on Monday night. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” he said. During his photo op with Rutte in The Hague, Trump referenced his intervention in what he characterized as a “big fight like two kids in a schoolyard.” Trump did not repeat his expletive-laden criticism, but for some reason Rutte seized the chance to defend him for his F-bomb anyway. “Daddy has to sometimes use strong language,” he said, with no further elaboration. The moment was so painful it was almost a relief when Trump started talking again.
One can only imagine what they thought of Rutte’s line in the Kremlin. Trump, of course, loved it. After he returned to Washington on Wednesday evening, the White House put out a music video, with a highlight reel of his trip set to Usher’s 2009 track, “Hey Daddy (Daddy’s Home).” By Thursday morning, Trump was fund-raising off Rutte’s comment, selling red “DADDY” T-shirts for thirty-five dollars a piece. “When Biden was President we were LAUGHED at on the world stage. The whole world WALKED ALL OVER US!,” the e-mail read. “But thanks to your favorite President (ME!) we are respected once again. Moment ago, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte called me DADDY on the world stage. How nice!”
The backlash from many of the Europeans whose security interests Rutte was presumably trying to protect by bowing so low was, unsurprisingly, swift. The former foreign minister of Lithuania, Gabrielius Landsbergis, called Rutte’s “gushings of weakness and meekness” both “disgraceful” and “one of the most shameful episodes in modern history.” In a long rebuttal on X, he added, “I feel I might speak for a significant part of Europeans—it’s tasteless. The wording appears to have been stolen from the adult entertainment industry.” Nathalie Tocci, a foreign-policy specialist and former adviser to top European Union officials, said that Rutte’s “pathetic flattery and genuflection” had made her feel “profoundly embarrassed as a European.” Perhaps more importantly, she concluded, “it doesn’t even work.”
This, it strikes me, is an essential point often overlooked by the suck-uppers. Trump’s bottomless need for positive affirmation is such that no one can aspire to permanently satisfy it; he simply does not stay sucked-up-to. Ask Mike Pompeo, whose willingness to praise the boss was so extreme when he was Trump’s Secretary of State that one former Ambassador called him a “heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.” Nonetheless, Pompeo was frozen out of a job when Trump returned to office—a MAGA expulsion announced by Trump in a social media post.
Another problem with Rutte’s strategy is that there is little evidence that sycophancy, no matter how extreme, has produced significant long-term change in Trump’s views. European leaders, including Rutte’s predecessor, Jens Stoltenberg, have spent years trying oh-so-carefully to dissuade Trump from his positive views of Putin, his criticism of Ukraine, and his desire to impose punitive tariffs on the E.U.—with little success. If anything, their collective willingness to abase themselves before Trump has likely persuaded him that they are weak pushovers, the opposite of the strong leaders he so admires.
When Trump was reëlected last year, Malcolm Turnbull, a former Prime Minister of Australia, attempted to debunk the myth that flattery will get you e everywhere with Trump. “There were two misapprehensions about Trump,” he told the Times. “The first was he would be different in office than on the campaign trail. The second was the best way to deal with him was to suck up to him.”
So what, besides his own embarrassment, did Rutte actually achieve this week by sucking up to Trump? “Trump gets the win and goes home,” Ivo Daalder, the U.S. Ambassador to NATO during Barack Obama’s Presidency, told me, describing how officials had orchestrated the week’s events. “NATO lives for another day.” But, Daalder added, the “reality is different.” For starters, the five per cent spending target won’t actually kick in for a decade, and even then, it’s actually three and a half per cent of GDP to be spent on the military budget, a threshold that even the U.S. does not currently meet. (The other 1.5 per cent is supposed to go to non-military areas, such as roads, ports, and cyber capabilities, that are, in theory, helpful to defense.) Just as importantly, Daalder noted, the reason NATO members agreed to Trump’s demand “is not only the Russian military threat (which Trump denies exists) but the realization that they can no longer count on the United States.”
Daalder’s description of the state of affairs in Europe today rings much truer to me than Rutte’s: If Trump is really daddy, then what he’s actually doing is walking out on the family—and warning them that he’ll no longer pay their bills. I can understand why everyone is so relieved that he didn’t smash up everything at the annual family reunion. But is the divorce really off? As for the secretary-general, he ended the summit by trying to walk back the comment for which it will inevitably be remembered. “I didn’t call him ‘daddy,’” Rutte insisted to reporters. It was all just a metaphor. ♦
