Trump seems to believe the presidency comes with C-Suite access for the planet as a whole: he can interview foreign leaders for job openings, dissolve international peacekeeping entities, fudge the expense reports, and dispatch his wife to “do” diplomacy like she’s running the annual company charity auction. (All the items for sale are signed copies of her autobiography, of course.) And that’s before the environmental rollbacks and the renaming sprees like the planet is a failing franchise he’s trying to rebrand. In Trump’s head, the U.S. is corporate HQ and the rest of the world is a network of regional branch offices.
Most leaders wrestle with governing. Trump skips the match and just announces he won. Everything is going the way he says it’s going—better than ever! He has decided he’s going to redecorate not just the White House ballroom but the entire globe, starting with hostile takeovers of Venezuela and Iran; maybe Cuba and Greenland penciled in for next quarter?
Let’s start with Trump’s latest foray into international headhunting: his announcement that he must be personally involved in selecting Iran’s next Supreme Leader. He’s also suggested that the regime’s handpicked successor to the Ayatollah killed in the recent U.S. strike should, wait for it, be killed too. This would be worth of an HR investigation if Trump believed in HR; the man who free-associates through war briefings now wants to run the hiring committee. You can imagine the interview now: ‘Tell me about a time you showed leadership under pressure. Are you willing to relocate? Also, would you describe your hatred of America as a strength or an opportunity?”
Foreign policy turns into reality TV the second he touches it. He can’t help it. It’s The Apprentice: Tehran, complete with Trump as the executive producer, the star, and the guy who keeps pausing the meeting to ask how his hair is coming across on camera.
Plenty of presidents meddle abroad. Trump does it with the confidence of a man who thinks theology is a management style, not a worldview. He genuinely can’t grasp why a theocratic state might not want career coaching from a twice-divorced casino owner who treats spiritual authority like a PR problem and keeps trying to workshop the Pope. Also, he just bombed them.
But why stop at hiring foreign dictators when you can also restructure the entire international order? Trump has announced his intention to create a body, which he hints could supplant the United Nations, called the “Board of Peace,” all the while handing out comic-book job titles and re-orgs like “Shield of the Americas.” Because apparently the problem with global diplomacy isn’t the complexity of international relations. It’s that the name doesn’t sound tough enough.
This is peak Trump business thinking: take an 81-year-old institution that has, at minimum, kept the biggest powers in meetings, not on battlefields, for decades, and treat it like a failing restaurant chain that just needs better signage. That’s the same genius who brought us Trump University (shut down for fraud), Trump Steaks (discontinued, the only product that tastes like a press conference), and Trump Airlines (grounded faster than you can say “Chapter 11.”)
The “Board of Peace” sounds like something a kindergarten teacher would call the corner where children go to resolve their playground disputes, which, come to think of it, might actually be an improvement over the current UN Security Council. But there’s something genuinely unhinged about a man who thinks you can solve centuries of geopolitical complexity by changing the letterhead. It’s like announcing you’re going to cure cancer by renaming it “Happy Cells Syndrome.” Paging RFK, Jr.
Here’s what connects Trump’s Supreme Leader auditions, his UN makeover plans, and his wife’s new diplomatic career: a breathtaking inability to grasp that other countries aren’t subsidiaries of Trump International. In his mind, sovereign nations are property acquisitions. He’s writing performance reviews for countries he’s never met. And for at least one country, he’s going to misspell in all caps. By that I mean “Spain,” not “Tajikistan.” The Performance Improvement Plan for Iran probably has bullet points like ‘smile more’ and ‘stop making me look bad.’
This leaves the rest of the world doing international diplomacy with America on a kiddie leash. While Trump obsesses over ballroom drapes during war briefings, European leaders are probably in some back room drawing straws to see who has to be the designated adult when he starts threatening to dissolve NATO.
At this point, the world’s strategy is the same one you use with a loud toddler in a nice restaurant: give him a menu, tell him he’s in charge, and quietly move the knives while he doodles on the placemat. Then praise his “Board of Peace,” throw a shiny participation trophy his way and do the actual diplomacy after he’s tucked into bed.
