What Is Donald Trump Looking At?
Donald Trump is in Brussels this week for a two-day summit of NATO heads of state, before which, apparently, he decided to make it his personal mission to alienate as many of the United States' longtime allies as possible before the welcome breakfast had concluded. "Germany is a captive of Russia," he declared over still-empty plates, neatly illustrating in one sentence the concept that psychologists refer to as projection. "It's very inappropriate."
None of the afternoon's sound bites, however, captured the conference's prevailing sentiments quite as well as this candid shot of attendees, arranged on a set of stairs for an official portrait like an unruly third-grade class on picture day. For a moment, it seems, everyone's attention has been captured by something or someone off to their left—everyone, that is, except Donald Trump, who somehow keeps his squinting, baffled gaze fixed stubbornly to the right.
What stimulus could our nation's most powerful overripe toddler have found so compelling that, despite a thundering chorus of social cues and primitive human instincts urging him to do one thing, he nonetheless managed to do the exact opposite? The Goodyear Blimp? John Kelly jangling a set of keys? Another solar eclipse? A Space Force sighting? Someone carrying a Quarter Pounder? The skywriter he hired to spell out "OBAMA SUCKS"? The flaming wreckage of America's proud, hard-earned spot as the leader of the international community? The dot emanating from a laser pointer surreptitiously manipulated by Angela Merkel, as the others stifle their giggles and try mightily not to give up the joke? The already-unsettling Teletubbies sun, but with an even-more-unsettling Russophilic twist?
No eclipse glasses on earth can protect the fragile human eye from that.
