Rutte drew attention — and jokes from Trump — after he invoked the word “daddy” while describing the president’s response to Israel and Iran’s military conflict.
“Sometimes daddy needs to use strong language,” Rutte said with a laugh, referring to Trump using the f-word to rebuke the Middle Eastern countries on Tuesday.
So he's lying, because he's realised that his level of brown-nosing has disgusted many people.
‘Orchestrated grovel’: critics react to Europe’s attempts to tame Donald Trump
Diplomats may remember it as the week in which the art of obsequiousness reached new highs and the sycophants plunged new lows.
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The tone of Rutte’s public bootlicking had been muted compared with the text messages he had sent to “dear Donald” before the summit – “Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, it was truly extraordinary … you will achieve something NO president in decades could get done” – and which the president had immediately leaked. “I think he likes me,” smirked Trump later, while his cabinet giggled behind him.
Ass-kissing, arse-licking, brown-nosing, sucking up – there is a reason metaphors for obsequiousness so often involve body fluids and the backside, because the act of sycophancy demeans both the arselicker and the arselickee.
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That view is not universal, however. “Mr Rutte, he’s trying to embarrass you, sir,” Trump’s former director of communications Anthony Scaramucci said earlier this week. “He’s literally sitting on Air Force One laughing at you.”
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He thinks Rutte, too, has miscalculated. “There is a lot of evidence from the first term that Trump doesn’t necessarily respond to flattery,” Dunn says. “It sends a signal that this is not an alliance of equals. This is not the America of old, whereby there was a coming together of countries of shared values and shared interests. What it looks like is fealty to the king.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/27/critics-react-europe-donald-trump-nato-mark-rutteNato’s Hague summit was an orchestrated grovel at the feet of Donald Trump. The originally planned two-day meeting was truncated into a single morning’s official business to flatter the president’s ego and accommodate his short attention span. The agenda was cynically narrowed to focus on the defence spending hikes he demands from US allies. Issues that may provoke or embarrass Trump – the Ukraine conflict, or whether the Iranian nuclear threat has actually been eliminated by US bombing – were relegated to the sidelines.
Instead, the flattery throttle was opened up to maximum, with Nato’s secretary general Mark Rutte leading the assembled fawning. On Tuesday, Rutte hymned Trump’s brilliance over Iran; yesterday, he garlanded him as the vindicated visionary of Nato’s drive towards the 5% of GDP spending goal. No one spoiled the party. As the president’s own former adviser Fiona Hill put it yesterday, Nato seemed briefly to have turned into the North Atlantic Trump Organization.
For Rutte and most of the alliance leaders, however, this was 24 hours of self-abasement with a specific goal. The purpose of this first Nato summit of the second Trump presidency was to keep the US as fully on board as possible with the transatlantic alliance. Nothing else mattered. Any repetition of the shocks that JD Vance and Pete Hegseth delivered to Europe at the Munich security conference in February was to be avoided at all costs. In pursuit of that objective, no humiliation or hypocrisy was too gross.
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But in every longer term way, this appeasement of Trump solves nothing. In political terms the Hague summit does not mark the resumption of normal relationships, let alone the beginning of a new Nato golden age. Such things are not possible in the Trump era. Politically, the summit was a bunker buster dodged. True, things have not got worse, an outcome that many, including Rutte, will regard as a kind of achievement. However, none of Nato’s other preexisting difficulties has been solved. Most remain firmly in place.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/26/trump-the-hague-nato-europe-defence
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