Illustration by João Fazenda

One of the harder points to sort out, when President Donald Trump launches into a tirade, is whom his angry words are actually targeting, and why. The exact proportions of demagoguery, diversion, and personal pique are rarely clear, as was the case last week, when Trump lashed out at immigration judges, the “F.B.I. lovers,” and his own Attorney General, in addition to causing an uproar at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit, in Brussels. The trouble there started on Wednesday, with a breakfast at which Trump announced that Germany is now “totally controlled by Russia”—that it is a “captive” state.

This in itself was a wild claim, given that Trump’s only evidence of Germany’s subjugation was that Chancellor Angela Merkel was allowing Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, to construct a natural-gas pipeline to her nation. But it was an especially odd outburst in view of the context and the timing. Trump, after a stop in the United Kingdom, was headed to Helsinki for a summit with Vladimir Putin that will begin with a one-on-one meeting in which Trump will be unconstrained even by his own team. Last week, he described the agenda for that meeting, alarmingly, as “loose.”

Even more than with most subjects, when Trump brings up Russia he seems to be speaking of something that is defined less by reality than by what he needs or wants it to be at the moment. Indeed, almost every mention of Putin in the course of Trump’s trip was disorienting, as he skittered from saying that the Russian President was “nice to me” to warning that NATO was selling itself into Russian slavery. So what was Trump really worked up about last week, when he spoke about enemies, allies, and Russia?

One possibility, as always with this President, is money. “They pay billions of dollars to Russia, and now we have to defend them against Russia?” he asked, referring to NATO’s European member states. It wasn’t fair, he said. The members—a bunch of “delinquents”—were supposed to spend at least two per cent of their G.D.P. on the military, but most did not, while America was spending more than four per cent. (Actually, three and a half; almost every figure Trump cited in the talks either fluctuated or was wrong.)

Trump is not the first President to express concern about this disparity—Barack Obama did, too—and the right balance, and the total amount, are worth debating. Trump, however, seems to reject the entire premise of a mutual defense, viewing NATO as a kind of bizarro protection racket, in which the Mob boss hands out envelopes of cash to the shopkeepers. (Or, as he recently told a crowd in Montana, “We’re the schmucks paying for the whole thing.”) On Thursday, Trump proclaimed, “I believe in NATO,” then immediately undermined the sentiment by complaining that Europe was unfair to American farmers.

Another likely explanation for this performance is that the NATO members were simply being subjected to the phenomenon of one bully showing off to another. “He’s a competitor,” Trump said of Putin. “Somebody was saying, Is he an enemy? Mmm, no, he’s not my enemy. Is he a friend? No, I don’t know him well enough.” Trump, by that measure, isn’t interested in anyone’s relationship with Putin except his—not Europe’s, not America’s. The policy contents of his demands were hardly relevant; his message to Putin was that he had yelled at NATO. Putin, though, will likely have a cannier take on how to exploit the ill will that Trump has created, to potentially hazardous effect in such places as Crimea and Syria.

Trump’s European tantrum was also, no doubt, intended for the home audience. On Thursday, the same day that one of the “F.B.I. lovers”—that is, the veteran F.B.I. agent Peter Strzok—testified forcefully before two House Committees about the integrity of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Trump hardly saw the point of asking Putin about it. “What am I going to do?” he said. “He may deny it. It’s one of those things. All I can do is say, ‘Did you?’ and ‘Don’t do it again.’ ” Russia, in this sense, becomes shorthand for all “those things”—the fakery and dodgy promises and money—that are just a part of the daily life of an American political candidate. (As it happened, the next day Robert Mueller, the special counsel, obtained a dozen indictments against Russian officials, who are accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee.)

Trump also showed scant concern for his next host, the British Prime Minister, Theresa May. In an interview in the Sun, published on Thursday evening, as she welcomed him to a dinner at Blenheim Palace, he said that May had “wrecked” Brexit, because “she didn’t listen to me.” He then proceeded to endorse, as a future Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, May’s freshly departed, self-indulgently destructive Foreign Secretary, largely on the ground that “he obviously likes me.” With that, and a swipe at immigration in Europe (“You are losing your culture”), Trump prepared for tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle, dodging the mass protests being staged against him in London.

Merkel, meanwhile, has been embroiled in a battle over immigration within her own coalition, which earlier this month led to her agreeing, perhaps tragically, to stricter controls at Germany’s border. Still, she remains the closest leader Europe has to an anti-Trump; that alone may explain his need to portray her as a captive, along with whatever it is about a woman in a position of power that he seems to find so jarring. At the G-7 summit in June, he reportedly ended a meeting by taking a couple of Starburst candies out of his pocket, throwing them on the table, and saying, “Here, Angela, don’t say I never give you anything.”

Crucially, when it comes to Trump, Merkel has an unmatched knack for exposing the true meaning of his words. “I have experienced, in my own life, a part of Germany that was controlled by the Soviet Union,” she said in Brussels. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, when she was thirty-five, Merkel was a quantum chemist in East Germany. The contrast is not only between her life experience and Trump’s—or, to put it another way, between her toughness and his bluster—but between her awareness of the shadows of the past and his dangerous ahistoricism. She added, “I am very happy that today we, the Federal Republic of Germany, are united in freedom. Because of that, we can say that we can form our policies independently and make decisions independently.” This time, it was Merkel who, in invoking Russia, seemed to be really talking about something else: about America, a country now captive to Donald Trump. And the truth, in the end, is Trump’s real target. ♦