Donald Trump is betraying our allies

May 3

Last night, while the President of the United States was away from the White House, spending yet another vacation weekend in Florida, he grew restless in the middle of the night. And at 11:03 p.m., he opened his Truth Social app and went on a late-night posting spree. Over the course of just 42 minutes, he rapidly posted 11 times in a row, including a custom portrait of his own face sketched in gold, and a photo of his face as an overlay at one end of Mount Rushmore, right next to Abraham Lincoln. He also shared a post attacking a sitting member of Congress, Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, calling him “low IQ” and a “thug,” his favorite insults for black people.

But the most bizarre was the fake image he shared of himself floating in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, lounging shirtless on a gold blow-up chair, giving a thumbs-up alongside Vice President J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Doug Burgum, and an unknown woman in a very small gingham bikini. That is what the President of the United States was doing in the middle of the night.

When the president spends his nights like that, not resting or preparing for the next day of executing what is arguably the most consequential job in the world, he isn’t just blowing off steam or sharing a harmless moment of eccentricity. He is revealing where his priorities actually are. Because this was the President of the United States, during an active war he started, choosing to spend 42 minutes in the middle of the night posting fake fantasy images of himself instead of upholding the dignity of the office.

And if we really think about what his favorite slogan, “America First,” actually looks like, it’s not this. Nobody would think it is if they were being honest with themselves. It’s not strategy or leadership. It’s spectacle. It’s crass and dangerous rhetoric coming from inside the Trump administration while the men and women of the United States military hold the line on the other side of the world.

And then this evening, before boarding Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport to fly to his own golf tournament in Miami, Trump stopped to talk to reporters on the tarmac. He was asked why the United States is withdrawing troops from Germany. The Pentagon announced just yesterday that it would pull 5,000 troops over the next six to twelve months. And when a reporter asked the President of the United States why, he stopped and made a large shrug motion before saying: “Uh, we’re going to cut way down and we’re cutting a lot further than 5,000.”

And to Trump, this may just be a retaliation method, or a deeper desire to create vulnerability and thus opportunity for wrongdoing. But regardless of the reasoning, those troops are there for a reason. And an important one at that.

Here is what those troops actually do, because it matters enormously, and because the framing that we’ve been sold for years, that this is somehow a favor we’re doing for Europe, is one of the most successful lies in modern American political life.

There are roughly 36,000 American military personnel permanently stationed in Germany. The centerpiece of that presence is Ramstein Air Base, which serves as the headquarters for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa and NATO Allied Air Command. Ramstein is not a symbolic outpost. It is the nerve center from which America projects military power across three continents: Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The satellite relays for American drone operations in the Middle East pass through Ramstein, because direct control from the United States would simply be too slow. Right now, today, during the Iran war Donald Trump started, Ramstein is actively running his own military operation. He is threatening to gut the very base that is executing his own war, because the German chancellor said something he didn’t like.

Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor, said this week that the United States was being “humiliated” by Iran and appeared to have no exit strategy. Trump’s response was to announce troop withdrawals. Not a diplomatic call or a frank exchange through proper channels. A punishment. And the people being punished are not Friedrich Merz like Trump thinks they are. They are us. They are the world.

Because here is the thing that “America First” has always gotten exactly backwards. Those troops are not in Germany for Germany. They are there because we learned, at a cost of approximately 405,000 American lives, what happens when the balance of power in Europe collapses. It happened in 1914, and it happened again in 1939. Twice in thirty years, the instability of that continent pulled the United States into a catastrophic world war. After the second time, the architects of the postwar order made a decision: never again. They built NATO. They stationed American forces in Germany. They created eighty years of imperfect but largely intact peace between the major powers of the world. Not as charity but as insurance. Paid for in American blood and maintained by American presence, because we understood that a stable world is a world where our children don’t have to go die in it.

Pulling those troops doesn’t just leave Europe exposed. It leaves us exposed. It shortens our reach into the Middle East and Africa. It signals to every adversary watching, and they are all watching, that American commitments are negotiable based on the president’s mood on any given day. Republican Senator Jack Reed said exactly that this week. The withdrawal, he said, “suggests American commitments to our allies are dependent on the president’s mood.” Multiple defense analysts said it plainly: this benefits Vladimir Putin. Directly, immediately, and without any strategic gain for the United States.

This is “America Last”, sold to us as “America First”. This is what happens when the people in charge can only see what is directly in front of them at this exact moment. There is no long game. There is no thinking about next year, or the next generation, or the world our children are going to inherit. There is only right now, and what can be extracted from it today. Budgets are being slashed not to strengthen America, but to concentrate wealth at the top, to create a larger pool of public money that can be redirected toward the people already in power. The president, his family, and enablers. Every cut, withdrawal, and dismantled alliance is another shovel of dirt moved from the public good into a private pile. And the people making these decisions will never feel the consequences. They never do.

And then there are our allies. The people who have stood with us when it counted. They are being collectively punished right now. Germany said something honest about the war Trump started, and now 5,000 troops are being pulled. And he told us Saturday morning, almost cheerfully, that 5,000 is just the beginning. The allies who opened their bases to us, who shared their intelligence, who sent their own sons and daughters to stand beside ours, are now being left more vulnerable to the very threat that NATO was built to contain. The line we drew together is breaking apart. And every inch it breaks, Russia moves closer to everything it has wanted for three-quarters of a century.

NATO’s first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, summed up the alliance’s founding logic in a single sentence: keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. That was 76 years ago. And in the decades since, through the Cold War, through the fall of the Berlin Wall, through Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its full invasion of Ukraine, that alliance has been the single most effective check on Russian expansionism the world has ever produced. Every country that broke free from Soviet control and ran toward NATO did so because they knew exactly what waited for them if they didn’t. They had lived it and remembered it. They joined because NATO was the only guarantee that Russia could not simply take them back.

Putin has wanted NATO weakened since before he had the power to do anything about it. In 2005, he called the breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He has spent the years since trying to reverse it, piece by piece and border by border. And the one thing standing between his ambitions and the map he wants is a unified Western alliance with the United States at its center. Remove the United States from that center, and the entire architecture shifts. The deterrence collapses, and the calculation changes for every country on Russia’s border.

What Trump is doing has Putin written all over it. And if he had nothing to do with it directly, he is still going to be thrilled. He has dreamed of this for decades. A weakened Europe and a retreating America. An alliance fracturing from the inside, not from Russian military pressure, but from an American president doing the work for him, for free, out of spite and ignorance.

Donald Trump is either in on it, and benefiting from it in ways we may not yet fully understand, or he is too captured by his own ego and the flattery of the men around him to see what is happening and why. Neither option is acceptable. Both are dangerous. And the people paying the price are not the ones posting AI images of themselves on gold chairs at 11 o’clock at night. They are the countries on the eastern edge of Europe who are watching the American commitment evaporate, and left to wonder how bad this is going to get.

And this is exactly why the world is pulling away from us. They know this is just the beginning. What Trump is doing in Germany is another test balloon, another push to see how far he can go before someone stops him. Will our allies hold together without us? Will Congress finally draw a line? Will our military leaders speak? The questions are piling up. And the silence where answers should be is its own answer. Because here is the hard truth: you can send troops back to Germany. You can sign new agreements. You can make new promises. But you cannot easily rebuild what trust requires, which is time, consistency, and the belief that the word of the United States actually means something. That is what is being destroyed. And that damage does not come with an undo button.

There is a kind of American exceptionalism buried in the assumption that we can do whatever we want, and the world will wait for us to come back to our senses. It won’t. Not forever. For over a century, people have repeated a saying, often credited to Churchill, though historians can never quite pin it down, that Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, after they’ve exhausted every other possibility. It was meant as a backhanded compliment. A wry observation from the outside that we get there eventually, even if we make everyone wait. But that saying assumed there was a “there” to get to. It assumed that the right thing was still the destination, just delayed. What we are watching now is something different. This isn’t delay. This isn’t America taking the long way around. This is the voice of America, a man who has no intention of arriving at the right thing at all. And the world, watching him dismantle alliance after alliance from a vacation in Florida, is starting to wonder if they can afford to keep waiting and if he even knows or cares what is right.

And as bleak as this all is, there is always light in the darkness. Always something to hold onto to keep us going. Because it’s not just us seeing this for what it actually is. More Americans by the day are voicing their disapproval of Trump, even within his own party. A Pew Research poll released this week shows Trump’s approval among Republicans has dropped from 73% in January to 68% today. The share of Republicans who say he keeps his promises is down 14 points since November.

And upon hearing the news, two Republicans in Congress broke from the White House on the Germany troop cuts. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker of Mississippi and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers of Alabama issued a joint statement saying that they are “very concerned” by the decision. They said Germany has stepped up, increased its defense spending, and provided support for Operation Epic Fury. And then they said this: pulling troops from Germany prematurely “risks undermining deterrence and sending the wrong signal to Vladimir Putin.”

That is two Republicans, the chairmen of both Armed Services Committees, saying that the president is sending the wrong signal to Putin. They also said that any significant change to U.S. force posture in Europe must be reviewed and coordinated with Congress, and that they expect the Pentagon to engage with its oversight committees in the days and weeks ahead. That is friction. That is the machinery resisting, even from the inside. It is not nearly enough. But it is real, and it counts. And friction is how we slow this down while we work toward November.

[Salon] Donald Trump is betraying our allies

Donald Trump is betraying our allies