It's a Lovely Life by Heather Delaney Reese
Today, at 6:00 p.m. local time in Évian-les-Bains, France, Donald Trump stepped behind the podium and quickly looked into the audience with a lost look in his very swollen eyes. And before he could get more than a few words out, he was already struggling to catch his breath. For the next hour and eight minutes, his voice faltered as he delivered the most concerning press conference of his presidency. Not just because of the large patches of flesh-colored makeup covering bruises, scratches, and gashes on the backs of his hands. But because he struggled at times to pronounce words, complete thoughts, and understand questions that had been asked only moments earlier.
But one of the most troubling moments came when he stopped talking about the question he had been asked about Iran and started sending out thanks to world leaders. But instead of thanking any of our allies, still standing with us, he thanked two of the most dangerous men in the world.
“I want to thank China, President Xi. I was with him and he stayed neutral, totally neutral. And I appreciate it. And I want to thank Vladimir Putin. He was very neutral. They could have made it much more difficult for us. And I want to say it.”
Then, almost as if he knew exactly how bizarre and inappropriate it sounded, he stopped to acknowledge what everyone listening was already thinking. “You know, somebody would say, oh, that’s terrible. He’s thanking President Xi of China.” And then he did it anyway, finishing by saying, “So I just want to thank them because they made it a lot better.”
The leaders of the world’s most powerful democracies had gathered to discuss war, global security, and growing instability in the Middle East. And the President of the United States chose this moment to thank the very men helping create many of the crises being discussed in the room. That was only the beginning of the most alarming moments of Donald Trump’s night, and another reminder of how far America has fallen under his leadership.
What unfolded over the past few days only made things stranger. At one point, Trump turned to praise Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and offered a description no world leader has likely ever received at a gathering like this. He called him “the most beautiful-looking man,” then said “he’s like an angel,” before adding, without missing a beat, that “he’s as tough as he’s a killer.” This is what one world leader said about another while standing at a G7 summit. This is what Donald Trump has reduced American leadership to. The leaders gathered there were supposed to be discussing war, economic instability, and growing tensions around the world. Instead, the President of the United States was standing at a podium describing a foreign leader as both an angel and a killer.
This wasn’t the first time Trump wandered into the same disturbing pattern, because Trump had been doing the same thing throughout his time in France. Earlier on Wednesday, when asked a serious question involving Egypt and border security, he abandoned the topic entirely and launched into a story about Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Trump recalled their first meeting during the 2016 campaign and told reporters that the two men met in a hotel and “fell in love, deeply in love.” He went on to claim that el-Sisi told him he was going to win the election and didn’t even want to meet with Hillary Clinton. So a serious question about border security turned into a love story about a strongman. And Trump wasn’t lying. He loves strongmen, especially ones like El-Sisi, a former general who seized power in a military coup in 2013 and has ruled Egypt with a heavy hand ever since, jailing critics and crushing dissent. Exactly the kind of leader who never has to worry about being told no. Which is exactly what Trump aspires to become here.
And this pattern is impossible to miss. Xi. Putin. Modi. El-Sisi. Again and again, Trump seemed drawn to the same type of leader. Men with enormous power and few limits on it. Meanwhile, his anger is almost always directed somewhere else: the press, the courts, prosecutors, democratic institutions, and anyone whose job is to provide oversight or accountability. It is one of the clearest patterns of his political life.
And then, in the middle of selling what he kept calling historic peace, he threatened to restart the war with Iran. Asked whether the agreement was even final, he admitted it was not, and warned that if he did not like the terms, “we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their head,” adding that if Iran stepped out of line, the United States would go “right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head, because they’ve misbehaved for 47 years.”
What we did not fully understand at the time was that Emmanuel Macron may have already had a plan. By the end of the summit, it became clear that Macron’s goal was not just to get the agreement signed, to prevent or at least mitigate some of the impulsiveness and violent ideology Trump kept displaying throughout the summit. But to also keep him there for the entire summit.
And for his part, Macron managed to play Trump like a fiddle to get both done. Especially to keep him there, which is no small feat. Last year in Canada, Trump grew bored and left early. This year, Macron found the lever, and the lever was a private tour and lavish dinner at the Palace of Versailles. Trump, by every account, was thrilled to be surrounded by all that gilt and grandeur. In explaining why he decided to stay, he reportedly marveled that “Versailles is not gold leaf. Versailles is the real deal.” And went on to say, “I’m a fan of beautiful places.” and explained that he had been planning to leave earlier, but stayed after Macron invited him to Versailles.
And that location matters. Versailles is where the world has gone for centuries to end its wars, and the most consequential of those endings was the treaty signed in its halls in 1919 that closed the First World War, a treaty whose punishing terms toward Germany many historians believe helped till the soil in which fascism and the next war would grow. How this location will serve the world in this moment is yet to be seen.
Trump did end up signing the memorandum of understanding on Iran. But that piece of paper has a lot less power than Trump is willing to admit out loud, or perhaps less than he understands himself. Because an MOU is not a treaty. It is not binding. It is not enforceable. It is simply a statement of intent, a piece of paper that says here is what we hope to do. Almost everything that actually matters has been pushed into a second round of negotiations that may never happen.
So why did Macron want Trump’s name on something with so little legal weight? Because Macron is not naive. He wants the bombing to stop. He wants stability in a region that has been on fire for more than a hundred days. He wants oil flowing through global markets again. And he has watched the same maddening pattern the rest of us have, where Trump agrees to something and then days later cannot remember what he agreed to, refuses to admit it, or publicly contradicts his own administration. Getting the signature was the only way to pin him down. Now, at least, when Trump inevitably tries to wriggle out of it, they can hold up the page and say: this is yours. That is your name. You signed this.
And what did that signature actually buy us. According to the 14-point text that outlets including CBS, ABC, Newsweek, and The Hill have now published, the United States agrees to lift its naval blockade, to begin waiving sanctions so Iran can immediately resume exporting crude oil, to make as much as roughly a hundred billion dollars in frozen Iranian assets available again, and to work with regional partners on a reconstruction fund for Iran of at least three hundred billion dollars, the very figure Trump stood at the podium and called false. Because asked about the reported reconstruction fund of at least $300 billion tied to this deal, he snapped “False!” and insisted the United States was “not putting up 10 cents,” only to explain a few sentences later that “you can invest if you want.”
In exchange for the favorable terms and money, Iran agrees to allow ships through the Strait of Hormuz with no toll for 60 days only, after which, by Iran’s own foreign minister’s account, Tehran fully intends to start charging the world to use a waterway that was free before Trump’s war, and Iran offers nothing more than a restated promise that it will not build a nuclear weapon, with the entire question of its enriched stockpile shoved into that same 60 day window that may simply lapse. One senior American official, quoted by ABC, described the whole thing as a gentleman’s agreement, then asked aloud what a gentleman’s agreement is even worth with the Iranians.
That is why so many people who study this for a living are not calling it a victory. The Atlantic Council’s experts noted plainly that the deal does not resolve any of the core issues, the mechanics of the strait, the nuclear concessions, the sanctions, and warned that an MOU with no follow-on deal will be volatile and impossible to sustain, the kind of arrangement that could slide the country right back into war. Read honestly, the picture is not a triumphant president ending a war on American terms. It is a country that bombed Iran for a hundred days, killed children in the process, rattled the global economy, and emerged with a non-binding promise, a reopened strait Iran plans to tax, billions flowing back toward Tehran, and a strongman who gave up almost nothing, all of it signed by a president who looked weak, vulnerable, and the loser in a war he started.
Throughout the press conference, there were long stretches where he could not hold a single thought to its end. Trying to explain where Iran’s nuclear material was being kept, he wandered into a comparison of granite and marble and began boasting that the black granite he had installed on the White House stairs is “rated one million years-plus,” before claiming that Space Force has cameras trained on “every single door” in Iran, close enough to read a worker’s identification badge, even underground, and that the name on it would be “Mohammed something, which is about a 50-50 guess.”
When he finally explained why he had agreed to end the war at all, the reason was not the nuclear weapons he claimed were the reason he started the war, and it wasn’t the soldiers, or the families on either side who had buried their dead. The reason was the market. “Every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship,” he said, and then, as if it were wisdom rather than confession, “the stock market is more brilliant than anybody there is.” He went on to say that the one president he refused to become was “the late, great Herbert Hoover,” the man whose name is shorthand for economic collapse. Very little of what he said today made any sense outside of the thoughts of an impaired man like Trump.
And whatever was happening with Trump’s health had been increasingly visible throughout the summit. Across his time in France, there were repeated moments where others appeared to be guiding him from one event to the next. At one point, he walked hand in hand with France’s First Lady, Brigitte Macron. There were moments when he appeared distracted or uncertain about where he was supposed to go. He arrived late to the opening session this morning, the final day, and, finding it already underway, walked into the room and announced, “I’m the boss.” It was met by pandering laughter because the other leaders in that room knew their only goal was to manage Trump.
This is who is representing the world’s oldest constitutional democracy on its largest stage. Trump is visibly unwell, easily played, and is lavishing his admiration on the most dangerous men alive while reserving contempt for his own people and our allies. It is embarrassing, but the embarrassment is only the surface of it. The danger underneath is that the people sitting across the table from him can see it too.
And still, even here, there is something worth holding. We are still being invited. The other democracies have not written off the United States, even with this as our representative, and that matters far more than it might first appear. Macron did not give up on us; he worked the problem, because keeping America inside the alliance, the room, and the conversation is worth the trouble of managing the man we sent. Our allies are still trying, still steering us toward the right outcomes even when our own president cannot find them on his own, still treating this country as one worth saving from the worst instincts of its leadership. The institutions are holding, and so are the alliances, and the careful, unglamorous work of diplomacy is being carried out by people who refuse to let one man’s vanity unravel eighty years of painstaking construction. That refusal is its own form of resistance, and it buys us time, time that runs toward the midterms. The world has not closed the door on us. It is holding it open, watching to see whether we will walk back through it as the nation we are still capable of being, and the work between now and then is to make sure that we do. That is why I still have hope for America, and you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
