Annual gatherings of the great democracies in the age of Donald Trump have acquired a certain … rhythm. There is the meeting that takes place before the President arrives, when all is as it usually is between world leaders of the same broad ideological hue: convivial open sessions, chummy photo-ops, urgent side-conferences.
Then there is what happens after he gets there, and the desperate scramble to reconcile the chaos that ensues with the serene normalcy that went before: to insist that the torrent of lunacies foaming out of the President’s mouth from the moment of his arrival, making hash of everything the other conferees had agreed upon – not to mention decades of settled international law – were in fact in perfect harmony with the rest.
