Lurking Deplorables- This is what the world thinks of your messiah. [View all]

[DemocratSinceBirth]

‘People Here Think Trump Is a Laughingstock’

Chaos.”
“Circus.”
“Laughingstock.

Those were just a few of the comments I heard in Berlin this week from senior European officials trying to make sense of the meltdown in Washington at just the moment when a politically imploding President Trump embarks on what he called “my big foreign trip” in this morning’s kickoff tweet.


For months, the American president has raised unprecedented questions about the future of the American-led alliance that has persisted since the end of World War II. He has slagged off NATO, evinced skepticism about the European Union, cheered for like-minded right-wing populists, boosted antidemocratic strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and vowed to rip up free trade deals—and Europe’s political class has been outraged, confused and even terrified.

Trump’s tumultuous last two weeks—from firing his FBI director to allegedly sharing highly classified information with Russian officials even as a formidable special counsel was being named to investigate his campaign team’s possible collusion with the Kremlin—has them still confused about his foreign policy. But now they are more appalled than afraid of the man with whom they have no choice but to partner.

Many I spoke with said they had made a fundamental mistake of viewing Trump primarily as an ideologue with whom they disagreed rather than what he increasingly appears to be: an ill-prepared newcomer to the world stage, with uninformed views and a largely untested team that will now be sorely tried by a 9-day, 5-stop world tour that would be wildly ambitious even for a seasoned global leader.

“People are less worried than they were six weeks ago, less afraid,” a senior German government official with extensive experience in the United States told me. “Now they see the clownish nature.” Or, as another German said on the sidelines of a meeting here devoted to taking stock of 70 years of U.S.-German relations, “People here think Trump is a laughingstock.”

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/19/trump-middle-east-trip-saudi-arabia-215163