A
Week for the Ages in the Annals of Trump Suck-Uppery
The NATO secretary-general goes all in
on strategic self-abasement while meeting with his American “Daddy.”
June 26,
2025
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!,” an 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 important, 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 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 G.D.P. 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 nonmilitary 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.
