What sort of fireworks might erupt when the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, meets Donald Trump for the first time at the White House on Friday?

If visits by foreign leaders to the White House so far are any guide, it will be … awkward, and perhaps embarrassing.

The British prime minister, Theresa May, has the distinction of being the first foreign leader to have visited Trump, with Shinzō Abe of Japan, Justin Trudeau of Canada, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Enda Kenny of Ireland following closely at her heels. Each of those trips was uncomfortable in its own unique way, but the visits did share a basic format.

Merkel can expect to undergo a meet-and-greet with Trump in the Oval Office, with a photo opportunity; a private bilateral meeting with Trump; and, finally, a joint news conference. (Abe, like Trump an avid golfer, went in for the premium package, spending the whole weekend with the first family at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private Florida resort. Kenny, by contrast, got the basic package, which included a luncheon but not a news conference.)

For a closer look at what Merkel might be in for, we’ve broken down the previous trips by foreign leaders to the White House round by round. And we’ve declared a winner for each round, based on who handled Trump best.

Round 1: Pleased to meet you

To greet a peer, the custom in much of the world is to shake hands. Unfortunately, Trump has a highly idiosyncratic handshake that is often visibly uncomfortable for the other person. And it’s not just his handshake. But let’s go to the tapes.

May

What happened: They held hands.

Tell me more: Walking in the West Wing colonnade alongside May, Trump grabbed her hand and held it for awhile before patting it twice and letting it go. She kept a poker face. An anonymous White House source spread the word afterward that Trump, 70, is afraid of slopes and stairs and that the pair had to walk down a slope, so he reached out for her. But others suggested it just looked like he grabbed her because he could.

Abe

What happened: They shook hands for 19 seconds.

Tell me more: Posing for photographers in the Oval Office, Trump and Abe locked hands and then seemed incapable of unlocking. The awkwardness escalated when Trump asked Abe what the Japanese photographers were saying. “Look at me,” Abe replied. So then Trump gazed at Abe. When it ended, Abe turned away with a traumatized grimace, gripping his chair and bobbing his hips. Then Trump told Abe he had “strong hands” and pretended to grip a golf club.

Trudeau

What happened: Trudeau beat Trump at his own game.

Tell me more: Like some kind of Canadian Superman, Trudeau proved impervious to the handshaking tricks – yanking the arm, patting the hand – that Trump uses to subdue mere mortals. Further asserting his self-possession, Trudeau allowed himself a disdainful glance at Trump’s outstretched hand in the Oval Office before he accepted it. (You don’t leave your largest trading partner wholly hanging.)

Netanyahu

What happened: The awkwardest reception.

Tell me more: When Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu emerged from their limo at the White House, Donald and Melania Trump greeted them with a friendly chat … that seemed like it would never end. There was a lot of fumbling with arms and hands and elbows and shoulders, as if none of the group had ever attempted conversation with more than one other person before. Then they stood for a picture – with the Trumps in the middle, as if they were the guests. Then, after more fumbling, Trump randomly returned a guard’s frozen salute and the foursome disappeared inside.

Kenny

What happened: Trump was seemingly the only man in the room not wearing a bright green tie and a shrubbery pocket square in honor of St Patrick’s day. Then it got meta.

Tell me more: Somebody didn’t get the memo about the shrubbery thing, apparently. In Trump’s defense, Kenny’s visit fell a day before the actual holiday. In the Oval Office, Kenny actually cracked a joke about Trump’s handshaking style. “You can see nobody pulled anybody else,” Kenny said. “Yeah, I’ve been getting a little heat for that,” Trump replied, incredulously. Not from us, Mr President. Then Trump said: “I love Ireland. I love it. I really love Ireland.”

Winner

And the award for best handling of Trump goes to … Trudeau. Especially if Ivanka Trump were one of the judges.



Round 2: The press conference

The joint news conference can be a delicate pas de deux, in which world leaders standing side by side strive to show mutual deference while speaking to their distinct national audiences. It must be said for Trump that, so far, he is better at these than he is at anything that involves touching.

May

What happened: Trump patronized May a bit, telling her that Brexit “was going to be a wonderful thing for your country”. May smiled and prayed silently for a trade deal.

Tell me more: There was some built-in suspense for this one, for the American audience, because it was Trump’s first official appearance on the global stage as president. Would he observe basic protocol? Would he allow May to speak? Would he mock her British accent? Would he make a dumb 1776 joke?

In the end, it went OK. Trump said: “A free and independent Britain is a blessing to the world, and our relationship has never been stronger.” May said Trump had vowed 100% support for Nato, which for Trump counted as news.

But at times, Trump seemed to be talking down to May. “I think the prime minister, first of all, has other things that she’s much more worried about than Mexico and the United States relationship,” Trump said when May was asked about that issue.

Abe

What happened: Trump was not equipped with a translation earpiece but seemed to pretend to understand Abe speaking Japanese.

Tell me more: Trump spoke first. Then Abe smiled, took out his translation earpiece and began speaking in his native language. Trump, without inserting his own earpiece, nodded along and appeared to listen intently to Abe’s remarks. A White House spokeswoman later explained that Trump “did see the text and they spoke quite extensively before the remarks”.

Did it constitute an international incident? No. Did it reinforce the idea that Trump is in way over his head and desperately bluffing at every turn? That’s not for us to say. Trump did put a small speaker to his right ear during the subsequent question-and-answer session with journalists, some of whom were from Japan.

Trudeau

What happened: The Canadian prime minister barely suppressed a smile in the process of extruding diplomatic language on the subject of his counterpart’s wild talk on refugees and immigration.

Tell me more: Trump thinks Syrian refugees are secret terrorists, while Trudeau literally hugs them, a Toronto Star journalist pointed out. Would they care to comment?

“There have been times when we have differed in our approaches, and that’s always done firmly and respectfully,” Trudeau replied, when suddenly the right side of his face tried to break into a smile of sympathy, discomfort or perhaps disbelief. “The last thing Canadians expect is for me to come down and lecture another country on how they choose to govern themselves,” he finished, somberly.

Trump did not smile. While the US’s trade relationship with Canada was generally good, he said, “we’ll be tweakin’ it”.



Netanyahu

What happened: Trump jettisoned longstanding US support for a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Tell me more: Netanyahu in general ran circles around Trump, at one point turning Trump’s request for Israel to stop settlement construction into a joke. “He’s a good negotiator,” Trump said, as the crowd laughed. “That’s the art of the deal!” Netanyahu quipped. Good times.

Asked about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Trump gave a vacuous and poorly improvised reply. “I’m looking at two-state, and one-state,” he said. “And I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I could live with either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two, but honestly, if Bibi and the Palestinians, if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best.”

Then Trump said of a US embassy in Jerusalem: “I’d love to see that happen.”

Kenny

What happened: There wasn’t a news conference, but there was a luncheon.

Tell me more: Trump bravely pronounced “taoiseach” and called Kenny “my new friend”. Then he praised the contributions of Irish immigrants to the United States. He mentioned that John F Kennedy had once been US president. And he said: “I’ve spent a lot of time at St Patrick’s Day parades over the years, I will tell you that.”

Winner

And the award for best handling of Trump goes to … Netanyahu. In his first visit, he seemingly had the new American president dropping a two-decade-old commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Round 3: The art of the deal

This is the round that happens behind closed doors, in private meetings between the parties. There are no transcripts and, from the US side at least, scant official description of what was discussed.

One way to gauge how it went is from the coverage of the leaders’ trips in the media back home. Here’s how some of that coverage looked.

May

What happened: May was criticized for not confronting Trump over refugees and over his travel ban.

Tell me more: After meeting Trump, May claimed to have laid “the foundations of a trade deal”. But the opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, accused her of failing to defend British citizens affected by the travel ban and failing to stand up for refugees, women and other groups Trump has attacked.

May said she “made very clear” that Trump’s travel ban on was “divisive and wrong”.

Abe

What happened: Trump gave Abe the deluxe dignitary treatment, golfing with him, sending Melania Trump out into the public eye with Akie Abe, and even troubleshooting an international incident with the Japanese prime minister on the terrace at Mar-a-Lago.

Tell me more: During his campaign, Trump accused Japan of dumping goods on the United States, of manipulating its currency and of not paying a fair share for its defense. But face-to-face with Abe, those criticisms disappeared, to be replaced by praise from Trump for Japan’s “heavy” investment in mutual defense and a commitment to “bringing those ties even closer”, as well as personal compliments from Trump to Abe and his wife – “a wonderful couple!”

To cap the trip, the two leaders spent a cozy weekend together at Mar-a-Lago, where a provocative North Korean missile launch “was played out by candlelight against a backdrop of hotel muzak, high-paying guests and low-paid waiters”, the Guardian’s Julian Borger wrote.

Abe appears to have harvested a popularity bump from the trip, with a Kyodo News poll finding that 70.2% were satisfied with the Abe-Trump talks, while only 19.5% were dissatisfied.

Trudeau

What happened: Trudeau was praised for his restraint.

Tell me more: “According to a senior government source, there was some acknowledgment in private of the two leaders’ differing perspectives on immigration,” a CBC columnist wrote afterwards. “But the president is said to think highly of Canada’s points-based system for selecting immigrants.”

The Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Cohen called it a “good, successful first date” and praised Trudeau’s “bravura performance”:

However tempted, you say nothing about global warming … At the same time, you do not lecture your host on Muslim refugees, Mexican immigrants, the value of the UN – or, frankly, any of your values. Canada, which can be smug, has done that sort of thing before. It never works well. At the end of the day, you do what you have to do to keep our biggest customer happy. Mr. Trudeau did. It was a bravura performance.

Netanyahu

What happened: Netanyahu’s rapport with Trump was contrasted favorably with the prime minister’s lack of rapport with Obama.

Tell me more: While Haaretz noted that the Trump-Netanyahu meeting was loaded with “ignorance, internal contradictions, political sloganeering and more than a few disagreements”, most coverage back home of the prime minister’s trip noted the palpable warmth between Netanyahu and Trump, who have known each other since the 1980s.

“Trump greeted Netanyahu as an old and dear friend, hosting him in Blair House, and lauding him as a smart and good leader,” the Jerusalem Post effused. “The tone was markedly different from the acrimony that always seemed to follow Netanyahu’s meetings with former US president Barack Obama.”



Kenny

What happened: Kenny won positive coverage back home for asking Trump to pay special consideration to Irish immigrants.

Tell me more: The Irish Times reported that Kenny “said he had raised both the issue of legal immigration paths for Irish people, including the revival of a stalled proposal of a new E3 visa scheme, as well as the situation of undocumented Irish citizens living in the United States”:

He said the president had been surprised at the number of undocumented Irish living in the country - said to be 50,000 - and had expected it to be much higher.

The Guardian quoted Kenny as telling Trump that undocumented Irish immigrants just want to “make America great”, adding:

We would like this to be sorted. It would remove a burden of so many people that they can stand out in the light and say, now I am free to contribute to America as I know I can. And that’s what people want.

Winner

And the award for best handling of Trump goes to … Abe. On his watch, Trump was transformed from hostile critic to praiseful host. Then they went golfing.

Next up: Merkel