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Whenever I need to leave a boring party, I always get my press secretary to tweet the apologies, and so it was that White House spokesmonster Karoline Leavitt informed X users in the dead of night that Donald Trump had ditched the G7 after barely 24 hours of mid-price hotel drabness, thus avoiding the possibility of getting cornered by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the kitchen. Trump later said he had to leave the summit “for obvious reasons”, though failed to elaborate whether he meant he’d been expected to talk with leaders, not at them, or simply that the trouser press in his room was broken.
You probably can’t call it a French exit if the French president then claims you left early to work on a ceasefire. But you can definitely up the stakes on Le Bumptious by calling him “publicity-seeking”, someone who “always gets it wrong”, and adding – almost by way of an afterthought – that all Iranians should “immediately evacuate” Tehran. (Population: 9.8 million.)
Incidentally, how are your tension headaches these days? I woke up at 2am with a blinder and nothing to do in the small hours but diagnostic detective work. Had I slept in a draught? Ground my teeth? Was I dehydrated? No, no and no. Once you have eliminated the impossible, I suppose you just have to face it: the less-improbable-by-the-day threat of total conflagration might just be the explanation.
But look, hopefully this is all just the relaxing buildup to Iran signing a nuclear deal? If so, someone should tell Trump’s beloved stock market, which doesn’t love the increased tensions in the Middle East since Israel began striking nuclear and military targets in Iran on Friday. Furthermore, it has yet to alight on either a fight or flight reflex following Trump’s delphic pronouncement – probably posted in the middle of the night while on the Air Force One toilet – that something “much bigger” is coming. Nor can it ignore the fact that Trump’s wasn’t even the first evacuation order for Tehran in the past day, with Israel having already issued one on Monday afternoon.
The US president has made clear his impatient incredulity that Iran did not sign a deal to largely dismantle its nuclear programme in the various forms it has been on the table. Then again, it was only five incredibly long years ago that Trump thought Israel and Palestine should sign his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “deal of the century”, which the two sides somehow resisted, no doubt leaving present-day Kushner staring into one of his many infinity pools and sighing: “I could have made it SO easy for them.”
As for who could next give statecraft a whirl, anyone underwhelmed by the thought of Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff meeting Iranian leaders should prepare for an even bigger tension headache at the prospect of Trump’s other floated idea – that he might send vice-president JD Vance to meet them. That would certainly be a face-off for the age, given how well all of Vance’s other forays into the art of international diplomacy have gone. Nato, Ukraine, Greenland – he’ll have enough for a greatest shits album soon.
But back to the G7, which today is somehow trying to carry on without its central character – a bit like The Office did after Steve Carell left. It’s hard when you’ve spent days of buildup reading that a G7 in the age of second-term Trump is effectively The Donald Show. He is the centre of gravity, everything revolves around him – pick your physics metaphor, basically, then try to imagine a post-physics G7/G6/G-also-rans/Gee why don’t we just sack the whole thing off and go hiking in the Rockies.
You just know that all the other leaders are relieved that it’s Emmanuel Macron, and not them, getting it right in the truth-socials. It was barely two weeks ago that Macron was the beneficiary of one of Trump’s lethal expressions of support, with the president breaking off from his farewell-to-Elon-Musk press conference to reassure reporters that despite poor old Macron appearing to have been shoved by his wife on his presidential plane, “he’s fine”.
The one thing Trump did have time for was signing the much-vaunted US-UK trade deal, which he unveiled to the media at a photocall with grateful supplicant Keir Starmer, before dropping the papers all over the floor. The UK prime minister promptly scrabbled around to pick up what he could, which should in no way be regarded as a metaphor for the fact he is celebrating having a 10% tariff on car exports that didn’t exist a few months ago, on the basis that it is no longer 27.5%. Trump made zero attempt to help pick up the mess he’d made, which apparently should also not be regarded as a metaphor. And there was precisely nothing on lifting the 25% steel tariff, much less that the next stage of the deal will include Tata Steel. Forget metaphors here – that would be simply and literally bad.
As for the rather bigger story of the day, we’re probably at the stage of wondering which lucky journalist will be accidentally added to the group chat ahead of any US military strike in Iran, and get all the juicy operational details and high-end bitching in real time. Would you like that ringside seat? Or do you think it’s the one thing guaranteed to give even your headache a headache?
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
