Donald Trump showed up to the NATO summit, told allied leaders he was "very disappointed" in them, demanded Greenland, insulted Spain, and declared that the war in Ukraine basically isn't America's problem. Then he walked out saying there was "a lot of love in that room." And the terrifying part is, he wasn't entirely wrong.
What Actually Happened in That Room
According to The Guardian's Robert Reich, the heads of state sitting across from Trump at the NATO summit did not push back. They did not walk out. They treated him, Reich writes, with "as much courtesy and respect as any US president has ever received from NATO — perhaps more."
This is the same man who, in the same meeting, reiterated his desire to annex Greenland and said the Russia-Ukraine war "doesn't affect us." NATO's founding purpose is collective defense. The whole point of the alliance is that an attack on one is an attack on all. Trump looked at that principle and said, essentially, not my problem. The room applauded anyway.
If you're trying to understand how that is possible, Reich has an answer. And it's one of the more clarifying things you'll read about the past decade of American politics.
The Actual Source of His Power (It's Not What You Think)
Reich is explicit: Trump's power does not come from America being the world's strongest military. His arbitrary tariffs, the Iran war, and what Reich describes as the "outright abduction" of Nicolás Maduro have already damaged American credibility in significant chunks of the world. The muscle is still there, but the moral authority that made other countries want to work with the US has taken serious hits.
It doesn't come from the MAGA base, either. Reich points out that even that base is getting restless. Getting dragged into another Middle Eastern war, watching prices climb, and still waiting on the full Epstein files will do that to a coalition.
What it actually comes from, Reich argues in The Guardian, is Trump's total willingness to do things that no one in his position was ever supposed to do. No norms. No rules. No treaties that feel binding. No laws that slow him down. Other world leaders sit across from him knowing, at a bone-deep level, that he will just do something completely unhinged if he doesn't get what he wants. So they smile. They clap. They call it a great meeting.
The Small-Town Thief Who Never Has to Buy a Lock
Reich uses an analogy that's simple enough to explain to your uncle and sharp enough to actually sting. Imagine a small town where nobody locks their doors because nobody steals. The social trust is the security system. Now imagine the first person who decides to just start robbing houses. That person has an enormous advantage, because every door is wide open.
Eventually, people buy locks. But here's the asymmetry Reich is pointing to: the thief doesn't pay for those locks. The thief doesn't spend the time installing them, checking them, maintaining them. The community bears that entire cost. The thief extracted the benefit of broken trust and left everyone else to clean it up.
That, Reich says in The Guardian, is Trump's entire operating model, just scaled up from a small town to the entire international order. He shatters the norm. He walks away richer, more powerful, more dominant. NATO buys the locks. The DOJ buys the locks. FIFA buys the locks. The American public is still out here buying locks.
He's Not Unethical. He's Non-Ethical. There's a Difference.
This is where Reich's piece gets genuinely useful as a thinking tool, not just a venting exercise. He argues that calling Trump "unethical" is actually a category error. Ethics, Reich points out, assumes there are shared standards against which a violation can be measured. Trump doesn't have any standards. There's nothing to violate.
He's not breaking rules he secretly knows he should follow. He operates in a world where rules, as concepts that apply to him, simply don't exist. It's all transactions. What do I get? What does it cost me? That's it. Reich's framing: not immoral, amoral. Not unethical, non-ethical.
The World Cup moment Reich cites is instructive. When fans objected to Trump's interference on behalf of the US team, he responded by saying that if Belgium beat the US, he'd say it was rigged, just like the 2020 election was rigged. Then he caught himself mid-sentence, correcting "we'll say" to "I'd say." As Reich notes, ethics is a "we" concept. Trump doesn't think in "we." He corrected himself to the accurate pronoun without even noticing what he was revealing.
What Comes After He's Gone
Reich is not optimistic about the aftermath, and he earns that pessimism. The institutions Trump has damaged, from NATO to the Justice Department to whatever credibility the US had in international sports governance, were built on a foundational assumption: that no American president would ever do what he's done. That assumption is gone. It cannot be restored by simply electing someone else.
The damage is structural. It's not a stain you wipe off. It's a broken lock that you now have to replace, on every door, permanently. The community has to keep paying that cost long after the thief has moved on.
Reich writes in The Guardian that Trump will likely be remembered as both the most powerful president in American history and the worst. That combination, he argues, is not a contradiction. Power and destruction have always been compatible. Ask anyone who's watched a wrecking ball work.
The Dingo Take
Here is what makes the NATO summit story so specifically maddening: Trump did not pretend to be polite. He insulted the allies to their faces. He floated annexing a sovereign territory that belongs to a NATO member. He said the war in Ukraine isn't really America's concern, at a meeting whose entire purpose is the principle that threats to allies are threats to America. And the assembled leaders of the free world responded by giving him a warm sendoff and letting him declare victory on the way out the door. That's not diplomacy. That's a hostage situation with better catering.
Reich's analysis cuts through the usual cable news framing about whether Trump is "norm-breaking" or whether critics are being too dramatic. The answer, laid out clearly in The Guardian, is that "norm-breaking" isn't even the right concept anymore. Norms are for people who at least acknowledge that norms exist. What Trump has demonstrated, across two terms and every institution he's touched, is that if you're willing to do things other people aren't willing to do, and if you never internalize the social cost of doing those things, you can extract enormous personal benefit while the people around you scramble to repair the damage. He got rich doing it in business. He got more powerful doing it in politics. NATO gave him a standing ovation for doing it on the international stage.
The small comfort, if there is one, is that Reich is naming the mechanism clearly. You cannot fight something you can't name. The thing people keep calling a political strategy or a communication style is actually something simpler and uglier: a man who decided the rules didn't apply to him, found out he was right, and has been running the same play ever since. The question that nobody in that NATO room was willing to ask is when exactly someone stops smiling and starts buying different locks.
