President Trump passes French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on his way to a photo shoot during the NATO summit May 25. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

President Trump woke up incensed Tuesday morning, apparently because after he finally got through lecturing European leaders about how they had to take more responsibility for themselves, Germany’s chancellor had the audacity to suggest that European countries should take more responsibility for themselves.

“The times when we could rely on others have passed us by a little bit,” was Angela Merkel’s takeaway from her most recent meeting with Trump. She said European powers “needed to take our fate into our own hands,” which prompted Trump to fire off an angry tweet assailing the trade gap with Germany and vowing to make the country spend more on defense.

Because what we really need are fewer BMWs manufactured in South Carolina and more of a German military presence in Europe. That’s always worked out great before.

But really, all this focus on Trump’s tweets and the stories about his boorishness abroad should please the White House no end. The more the narrative focuses on Trump’s toughness and bluster with our allies, the less anyone focuses on what’s really been exposed in these opening months of his presidency.

Trump is weak, and our rivals have figured it out. They’re walking all over the American president in a way we haven’t seen since at least the days of disco and Space Invaders.

None of this seems to permeate the family circle of Trump’s White House, where, as ever, mythology crowds out any notion of policy or reality.

As Hope Hicks, Trump’s onetime corporate flack, put it in a breathtaking statement this week that Trump himself might well have authored, the president “has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy,” has “an unparalleled ability to communicate with people,” “treats everyone with respect” and is of course “brilliant with a great sense of humor.”

Out here in the world that isn’t Narnia, though, we’ve all got enough of a sample size now to know what kind of leader Trump is.

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Trump punches down. Like all bullies, he prefers to flex his muscle with those who are inherently smaller, or where the stakes are impossibly trivial.

He’ll hurl his cutting asides at an aide, or berate some poor guy at the National Park Service who refuses to lie about the size of a crowd. He’ll mock Arnold Schwarzenegger for low ratings. He’ll bravely shove aside the president of Montenegro, which no one could circle on a map.

Like all Twitter trolls, he’s got an endless supply of insults to be dished out in 140 characters or less, using all caps and exclamation points, as long as he doesn’t have to stand in front of you and look at you level.

Just how tough is Trump when the adversary isn’t someone who works for him or serves as a prop in some way? Ask the Turkish despot, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

A few weeks ago, just after Erdogan visited the White House, a bunch of Turkish goons kicked in the heads of protesters outside the country’s embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Thanks to this excellent video analysis from the New York Times, we know that several of these thugs had ties to Turkey’s security service, and they could be seen conferring with the Turkish president himself before deciding to plunge into the crowd.

Erdogan watched the bloody crackdown from behind the armored window of his car, two miles from the White House.

America does business with all kinds of characters, of course, and what you do at home is your problem. But here we have certain laws and convictions, and when you come to our country, people get to tell you what they think without being bludgeoned.

What did Trump, who talks so tough with other NATO allies, have to say about any of this? Where was the outraged tweet blasting back at a foreign incursion in the American capital? How many Turkish diplomats were expelled?

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