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History may record this week as the one in which Donald Trump came to Europe to discuss defence spending.
Diplomats may remember it as the week in which the art of obsequiousness reached new highs and the sycophants plunged new lows.
All in the name of taming the president. It seems to have worked.
After Trump landed to Washington from this week’s Nato summit in The Hague, the White House posted a video that made clear how his team felt the trip had gone.
The summit had concluded on Wednesday with a joint press conference in which Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, after showering the US president with compliments over his actions on Iran, bizarrely referred to him as “daddy”.
Rutte was now being widely derided for the summit’s “orchestrated grovel” and attempting to row back on his choice of language. In Washington, however, Team Trump were enjoying themselves.
“Daddy’s home!” trilled the video, which mixed clips of Trump’s handshakes with world leaders with footage of crowds awaiting his motorcade, soundtracked by a 2010 song by Usher: “And I know you’ve been waiting for this loving all day …”
The tone of Rutte’s public bootlicking had been muted compared with the text messages he had sent to “dear Donald” before the summit – “Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, it was truly extraordinary … you will achieve something NO president in decades could get done” – and which the president had immediately leaked. “I think he likes me,” smirked Trump later, while his cabinet giggled behind him.
Ass-kissing, arse-licking, brown-nosing, sucking up – there is a reason metaphors for obsequiousness so often involve body fluids and the backside, because the act of sycophancy demeans both the arselicker and the arselickee.
What is more cringeworthy, after all – the clips of Trump’s cabinet members taking turns to parrot praise of his leadership and vision, or the fact that his fragile ego demands lavish compliments before he can get down to work?
No doubt all the president’s yes-men believe that lavishing him with praise can lead to lavish rewards.
Take the former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, who in 2020 presented him with a “bookshelf-sized” bronze model of Mount Rushmore, portraying Trump’s face next to those of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt. Noem is now the secretary of homeland security. Stephen Miller, who called Trump “the most stylish president in our lifetime”, is the White House deputy chief of staff for policy.
To some observers, this is just how Trump works, at home and abroad, and world leaders like Rutte who engage in flattery and “strategic self-emasculation” are just being smart. “A useful way to think about President Trump and his team is not in terms of a conventional American administration, but rather as a court,” says Sam Edwards, a reader in modern political history at Loughborough University. Understood in those terms, he argues, performative upsucking is all.
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He points to Keir Starmer’s first visit to Trump’s Oval Office, when the UK prime minister theatrically brandished a letter from King Charles inviting Trump to a second state visit, saying, “This is really special, this is unprecedented.”
In this sense, Edwards argues, Rutte’s conduct “looks like debasement, like he’s conducted himself with weakness,” says Edwards. “But in the longer term, he gets the Nato partners to sign up to 5% expenditure on defence, which is something he wants as much as Trump wants. I guess that’s the strategic calculation that Rutte has made. I might come in for criticism, but further down the line, do I get what I want? Yes.”
That view is not universal, however. “Mr Rutte, he’s trying to embarrass you, sir,” Trump’s former director of communications Anthony Scaramucci said earlier this week. “He’s literally sitting on Air Force One laughing at you.”
David H Dunn, a professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham, agrees that licking Trump’s boots doesn’t earn his favour but his disdain. His flattering cabinet were selected not because the president admires them, says Dunn, but because their obsequiousness shows their weakness.
He thinks Rutte, too, has miscalculated. “There is a lot of evidence from the first term that Trump doesn’t necessarily respond to flattery,” Dunn says. “It sends a signal that this is not an alliance of equals. This is not the America of old, whereby there was a coming together of countries of shared values and shared interests. What it looks like is fealty to the king.”
