Trump's global humiliation is nearly complete.

From cutting catastrophic "deals" with our enemies to snubbing our friends, Trump has fully made a fool of himself.

We’re only halfway through the week, and it’s already shaping up to be one of the most embarrassing stretches for Donald Trump (and for the United States of America) in a long time.

I’ll begin with Iran. In February, Trump launched a war against a regime he called a menace to the entire world. This week, he ended it by handing that same regime a $300 billion sweetheart deal — a truly astonishing sum spent to buy a promise we already had, namely that Tehran would not build a nuclear bomb. To put that number in perspective, it’s roughly five years of funding for the Department of Homeland Security that I used to help run. And it’s about three times the annual budget of the entire Iranian government.

So Trump is proposing the world “pay” our adversary several times what it costs to run their whole country, all in exchange for words on paper we’d already been given.

I worked on Iran issues in the first Trump administration, at various points. I’ll add to the chorus of criticism by noting that this “deal” may turn out to be one of the most humiliating compacts in U.S. diplomatic history. Even one of Trump’s single biggest boosters for the war, Fox News regular Marc Thiessen, couldn’t find a way to squirm himself into a position to defend it. Instead, he suggested it would be as if the Allies in World War II had decided to give the Nazis a massive fund “to rebuild Germany” while Hitler was still in power.

Ouch.

But the humiliation on the world stage doesn’t stop there. All of this began while Donald Trump was supposed to be in Europe huddling with our closest allies. Instead, he postponed the G7 meeting by a day so he could host a UFC cage match on the White House lawn for his 80th birthday. When he finally did arrive in France, the U.S. team was apparently unable to so much as agree on a communiqué with its fellow democracies, so they ditched the usual practices of releasing a joint statement at the summit. (If you can’t even write a press release with your friends, are they really your friends?)

I wrote about the deeper meaning of all this today in Britain’s i Paper:

“He arrived in France this week as the most diminished American president in the history of the transatlantic alliance. Diminished not only in tanks or dollars, but in the only currency that has ever made the West more than the sum of its parts, which is trust.”

Unfortunately, this is the direction we’ve been trending since Trump’s first term. He loathes spending time with his fellow democratic leaders because he feels judged by them. He is. They don’t believe anything he says, and why would they? They’ve been dealing with his petulance for a decade. In the first administration, I watched him torch a G7 meeting from inside the Situation Room by complaining about having to go meet with our allies and then upending the summit once he got there with embarrassing missives, before ditching the event altogether to fly to North Korea.

He’d rather deal with a despot than fellow democracies. Back then, I told colleagues the president had a “weakness for strongmen,” and that — until he was gone — it would put terrible strain on our alliances. If they didn’t trust us because of Trump’s behavior, America would suffer gravely. Now Trump’s tantrums have become national policy. As I put it in the i Paper:

“Trump’s fickle moods have, in their minds, morphed into something bigger than just a bad weather event. They’ve become the diplomatic equivalent of climate change. Massive. Long-term. System-changing.”

The damage is measurable. Last week in DEFIANCE News, we featured a survey that found that just 11 percent of Europeans now regard the United States as an ally. This is a record low. And the consequence is exactly what you would fear. Our enemies no longer respect us, and our friends are quietly making other plans. Humiliating, indeed.

Most of the component democracies in the G7 that Trump huddled with this week no longer believe in America and are preparing for a future without it, including building up their militaries independent of the United States. While Trump didn’t flick a Starburst at a fellow world leader at this week’s summit (as he did in 2018 in Canada) or snub handshake while wearing his signature pouty face, he didn’t need to. The damage was done before he got there. He’s used sweeping demonstrations of U.S. power against our friends since he came back to office, from slapping punishing tariffs on their goods to threatening to seize their territory.

Trump has debased himself and his country — thoroughly and completely — like no other American leader before him. The real question now is whether our friends will wait any longer for us to get our act together. If they do decide to “move on” from the United States, Trump’s global humiliation will be complete.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor
P.S. Help spread the defiance by sharing this post.

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THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST

We are tracking these stories today.

1. TRUMP IS DISMANTLING THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT, ONE PIECE AT A TIME. The administration announced this week it’s moving federal work related to “special education” from the Department of Education to the Departments of Health and Human Services and Justice — what? — peeling off two of the department’s core responsibilities without a single vote in Congress. Officials are calling the handoffs “partnerships.” Former employees are calling it decimation: “This isn’t a late-model Toyota that you can sell for parts,” one said. Here’s why it matters. Only Congress can abolish a department it created, so Trump is hollowing out the Department of Education, piece by piece, until there’s nothing left to formally close. The people who pay for it are disabled students whose protections have stood for 50 years.

2. THE PENTAGON IS RUNNING OUT OF WEAPONS. BUT DON’T WORRY, THEY SWEAR THEY’RE NOT. Trump quietly invoked the Defense Production Act last week to force defense companies to ramp up munitions production, after the war with Iran drained stockpiles faster than the country can rebuild them — a campaign that, by one outside estimate, burned through more than half of several critical missile systems. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent this week on Capitol Hill pitching senators on $350 billion to refill those same stockpiles, even though he told the country on national television days ago that “our stockpiles are great, and they’re only getting stronger.” Why it matters: you don’t invoke a Cold War emergency power and beg Congress for $350 billion to solve a problem you insist doesn’t exist, and Hegseth himself testified in April that some of these munitions could take months or years to replace. Either the stockpiles are fine or they’re not. We reckon someone’s not telling the truth, and we intend to keep asking until they do.

3. TRUMP’S DOJ IS NOW PERSONALLY SHIELDING ELON MUSK FROM THE LAW. The NAACP sued Musk’s xAI after it installed 59 unpermitted gas turbines (in Southaven, Mississippi, to power its Memphis supercomputer) in apparent violation of the Clean Air Act. Yet the DOJ’s response wasn’t to dispute the illegal pollution; it was to argue that it doesn’t matter whether xAI is breaking the law, so long as the Trump administration says it’s fine. The DOJ is claiming the power to cancel any “citizen suit” — the 50-year-old tool that lets ordinary communities haul polluters into court when regulators won’t — which would swing the door wide open to outright “pay-to-pollute” corruption. And the harm is real. Those turbines pump more than 5,300 tons of smog-forming pollutants into Memphis and North Mississippi every year, into communities already living with elevated rates of asthma and cancer. Expect this to escalate in the courts, as it should.

4. ACT OF DEFIANCE — NEWSOM TO THE DOJ: INVESTIGATE TRUMP, NOT ME. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s top lawyer sent a letter this week to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche telling him to redirect his attention to the “open-air corruption market that the White House has become.” The DOJ has reportedly been digging into Newsom and his wife, yet another indication the Justice Department is operating as a personal weapon for Trump. The president’s former defense lawyer is aiming federal investigators at the man most likely to challenge Trump’s MAGA coalition in 2028, while the corruption in plain sight at the White House goes untouched. But the Governor is fighting back — hard — and we’re here for it.

WHAT’S COMING UP

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ONE MORE THING

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