Donald Trump arrived at NATO's summit carrying his familiar catalogue of complaints, then left it praising the alliance as a triumph of unity. The whiplash was vintage Trump: one moment lavishing praise on an institution he had just spent hours criticizing, the next moment threatening military strikes on Iran with an ominous flourish.
Standing beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, Trump declared the NATO gathering a resounding success. "There was a lot of love in that room today, a lot of unity," he said. "It couldn't have gone much better." The comment marked a sharp reversal from earlier sessions, when he had sat with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and rehashed grievances over Greenland, European defense spending, and what he characterized as insufficient backing on Iran.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared to explain the sudden warmth, crediting Trump with salvaging the alliance and noting that European leaders wanted to meet their spending obligations. Trump even upgraded his assessment of Zelenskyy, a man he had publicly berated in the Oval Office years earlier. The Ukrainian president, Trump suggested, had "done an amazing job" and could broker a deal to end Russia's war in his country within months.
The atmosphere darkened considerably once Iran entered the conversation. Trump declared a 60-day ceasefire he had brokered just two weeks earlier effectively finished. U.S. forces had struck Iranian targets after, he claimed, Iran attacked three vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, violating the terms of their recent agreement. "We have a score to settle," Trump said, launching into a catalogue of Iranian actions stretching back decades: roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, the USS Cole attack in 2000, and the 1979 embassy siege that held 52 Americans hostage.
The pivot was jarring. Trump had recently hailed the same ceasefire as economically vital, warning that closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of global fuel passes, could trigger a depression-level economic collapse. Now he dismissed the possibility of reaching any lasting agreement with Iran's leadership, even as he acknowledged having previously praised them as more reasonable.
"They violate the agreement every day. They lie, they cheat, they kill people," Trump said. His administration would pursue "denuclearization," he announced, a far broader objective than the strait's reopening that formed the ceasefire's core. When asked whether negotiations stood a chance, Trump hinted at military action instead: "We're going to have a deal. We may just do it without a deal, because you know what, it's easier." U.S. forces would "probably" carry out major strikes that evening, he added, possibly targeting power stations and desalination plants.
Amid the tirade, Trump stumbled into a series of verbal miscues that veered toward the absurd. He referred to missiles allegedly aimed at the USS Abraham Lincoln as having been fired by "the Islamic Republic of Japan." While discussing Iran's military capabilities, he abruptly shifted to offer Ukraine the right to manufacture "patriot" missiles, though his reference remained murky. Most strikingly, after fielding questions about the Russia-Ukraine conflict, he asked journalists if they had a question for "President Putin" while Zelenskyy sat feet away.
Attempting damage control, Trump doubled down on the slip, insisting he meant to reference Putin because he had a scheduled call with the Russian leader later. The maneuver echoed a similar gaffe by Joe Biden at NATO's 2024 summit in Washington, an incident that helped trigger the events leading to Biden's withdrawal from the presidential race.
Trump's most telling error came when he referenced Iran's late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, buried this week after being killed in an Israeli strike. "They wanted to go to the funeral of Khomeini," Trump said, substituting the name of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Khomeini died in 1989. The slip may have been innocent, but it conjured the historical grievance that has defined U.S.-Iran relations for nearly five decades: the embassy hostage crisis, the revolutionary overthrow of an American-backed shah, and the long shadow of payback that Trump's language suggested still loomed in his mind.
Author James Rodriguez: "Trump's erratic performance at NATO paints a portrait of a president wrestling with contradictions on the fly: demanding NATO unity while hurling threats, praising deals while spelling their death. The namedrops and missteps were comedy gold until you remembered the stakes."
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