The next day, July 12, the situation went from uncomfortable to dangerous. The NATO summit was concluding as planned. European leaders were pleased that Trump had been reasonably well behaved, despite the visceral disdain he had long harbored for them because he believed they looked down on him. But late in the morning Trump arrived at NATO headquarters and was visibly fuming. He was frustrated that news reports of his first day in Brussels did not describe him as angry enough. In Trump’s mind, the stories failed to convey to people back home the depth of his agitation with allies for failing to up the ante on defense spending.
Several U.S. officials could tell the president was in a foul mood, just by watching him enter the main atrium of the NATO headquarters from the windowed offices on a balcony above. He was about forty-five minutes late. Though his Secret Service detail entered the building with him, Trump looked very much like a man alone. The president was frowning, his head was down, and he made no effort to look up to greet anyone or say hello. He was walking toward the main NATO meeting hall with purpose.
Trump arrived at the meeting of the North Atlantic Council, where members were already deep into a conference with the presidents of Ukraine and Georgia, and took it over without so much as a courtesy greeting. Holding the meeting hostage, Trump scolded and shamed countries one by one for their defense spending totals. He was on a tear. He harassed individual leaders. He had statistics at the ready, indicating his assault was preplanned. He warned that if NATO member nations did not meet their defense spending targets of 2 percent of their gross domestic product by January, the United States might leave the alliance. Trump had trouble putting his precise threat into words. First he warned there would be “grave consequences” if the allies didn’t draw up formal commitments to increase their defense spending amounts. Then he said the United States would “go our own way.”
Stunned by Trump’s tirade, Stoltenberg tried to calm the room, but the president snapped. “No, we are not playing this game,” Trump said. “Other presidents have done this, but I’m not going to.” The entire Western alliance scrambled for an hour to keep itself together in the face of the possibility that the United States could withdraw from NATO, which it helped found in 1949 to counter the Soviet Union.
Just ten minutes later, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s aides began getting urgent texts on their phones. They were desperately needed in the U.S. holding room. As Dana White, Mattis’s press secretary, rushed downstairs, she saw Hogan Gidley, a deputy White House press secretary, and shared what she considered a terrifying development. “I’m getting messages that we’re pulling out of NATO,” she said. Gidley, who had a self-effacing, aw-shucks manner, counseled in his southern drawl that nobody rush to judgment. He’d been here before. Some of Trump’s ideas sound ominous, he explained, but may not end the world. “Eh, you know the president likes to float things,” Gidley said. “But it’s just a floater.”
Katie Wheelbarger, a former aide to Vice President Cheney who was acting assistant secretary of defense for international affairs and who didn’t rattle easily, had a panicky look on her face after witnessing the president harangue his fellow NATO partners. “It feels like we just pulled out of NATO,” Wheelbarger said. Stoltenberg himself called an emergency session for allies only so they could discuss Trump’s demands on expenditures and construct a response on their burden-sharing agreements.
Mattis, a steadfast NATO supporter, had had to miss the emergency session to attend a prearranged meeting with a battlefield commander who had flown from the Middle East to Brussels strictly to brief him. The fact that the defense secretary wasn’t attached to Trump’s shoulder at this particular moment made Pentagon officials nervous. Who then could prevent Trump from doing something catastrophic?
Kelly soon located and retrieved Mattis for a huddle about what they should do. The defense secretary suggested he, Kelly, Bolton, and Pompeo meet privately with Trump in a secure holding room. Aides said they heard Trump wanted to hold an immediate press conference, but Mattis wanted to talk to the boss first. After Mattis and the others spoke with Trump, the president emerged first from their private conference. Miller, a fellow NATO skeptic, was busy drafting some talking points for the impromptu news conference. Mattis and Kelly hung back, continuing their private discussion. The Pentagon reporters who traveled with Mattis, and had already been screened by security officials, were waiting on the secretary’s plane to depart Brussels with him; now they were furious upon finding out they would be missing a major Trump news conference that Mattis was attending.
Before heading to the airport to depart Brussels, Trump addressed throngs of journalists from around the world at a lectern at NATO headquarters. The American president made claims that some of his international counterparts contested. For instance, Macron and other foreign leaders disputed Trump’s announcement that countries had agreed to eventually increase their spending “quite a bit higher” than 2 percent of their gross domestic product. However, the U.S. officials traveling with Trump breathed a major sigh of relief when Trump stated, “I believe in NATO.” He called the alliance “a fine-tuned machine” and praised its “great unity, great spirit, great esprit de corps.”
At his news conference, Trump revealed he had been disappointed with the media’s lack of coverage of him scolding the Europeans to pay more. “I was surprised that you didn’t pick it up; it took until today,” he said, as if his morning threat were a stunt orchestrated to generate headlines. Xavier Bettel, the prime minister of Luxembourg, had reminded reporters that Trump had wireless internet on Air Force One and could reverse his support for NATO in a single tweet once he left Brussels. When a reporter asked Trump if he might attack NATO on Twitter after departing, just as he had maligned Trudeau following the G7 in Quebec, the president replied, “No, that’s other people that do that. I don’t. I’m very consistent. I’m a very stable genius.”
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Four days later, Trump warmly embraced Russia, NATO’s greatest direct threat. The Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki was long in the making. Trump was under intense pressure to confront Putin over his broad subterfuge operation in the 2016 election, as well as to counter Russia’s intervention in Syria and Ukraine.
Trump knew before he clasped Putin’s hand that U.S. investigators had built an airtight case proving the Russian government had interfered in the election. When Trump had announced at the end of June his scheduled Helsinki summit for mid-July, Mueller’s prosecutors had been getting their ducks in a row to indict a dozen GRU military officers for the email hacks. They faced a diplomatic quandary. They had to give Trump a heads-up and offer to let him decide whether he wanted the indictment to occur before or after he met with Putin. Trump’s choice surprised the prosecutors. He wanted the announcement of the indictment to take place prior to the Helsinki summit.
Before leaving Washington, Trump sat down with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to preview the Justice Department’s charges against twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking Democratic emails. The indictment, which Rosenstein publicly announced on July 13, was a major development in Robert Mueller’s investigation. “When we confront foreign interference in American elections, it is important for us to avoid thinking politically as Republicans or Democrats and instead to think patriotically as Americans,” Rosenstein said, announcing the indictment. “The blame for election interference belongs to the criminals who committed election interference. We need to work together to hold the perpetrators accountable.”