If You See The Word "Laughingstock" In A Headline, Do You Immediately Know Who The Story Is About?

Four months into his term and just 34% of Americans say Señor Trumpanzee has the judgement to be president. Before taking him on his trip abroad, his aides staged an intervention in the hope of getting him to behave well-- at least on twitter. They told El Señor he's painting himself into a corner legally and politically with his psychotic stream of consciousness tweet storms. He's supposedly promising to restrain himself and act like an adult. Meanwhile, for his meeting with NATO officials next Thursday it has been decided to keep all presentations very simple and short with plenty of pictures. Trump is widely thought to have a 4 minute attention span.

NATO is scrambling to tailor its upcoming meeting to avoid taxing President Donald Trump’s notoriously short attention span. The alliance is telling heads of state to limit talks to two to four minutes at a time during the discussion, several sources inside NATO and former senior U.S. officials tell Foreign Policy. And the alliance scrapped plans to publish the traditional full post-meeting statement meant to crystallize NATO’s latest strategic stance.

...“It’s kind of ridiculous how they are preparing to deal with Trump,” said one source briefed extensively on the meeting’s preparations. “It’s like they’re preparing to deal with a child-- someone with a short attention span and mood who has no knowledge of NATO, no interest in in-depth policy issues, nothing,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re freaking out.”

Friday, the DailyBeast reported that Regime officials who didn't go with the Trumpanzee Circus to Saudi Arabia, were growing increasingly frustrated as Putin-Gate and corruption scandals keep breaking while Trump was flying over the Atlantic and that they "couldn’t do much more than dodge questions and vent inflamed frustrations at their boss... 'I’m glad I’m not on the plane so I could be here to answer your Russia questions,' a senior Trump administration official said, sarcastically, before abruptly hanging up... 'If Donald Trump gets impeached, he will have one person to blame: Donald Trump,' one of those administration officials said."

“Trump himself hasn’t been implicated in any of these leaks except where he’s implicated himself, where he says something that makes his perhaps less-than-sterling intentions clear,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the controversy candidly. “He keeps saying there’s no collusion, and I think he’s right. So if he would just shut his trap, what would Dems have?

“Okay, he fired Comey,” the official conceded. “With a semi-competent comms operation, that would blow over in 24 hours. And that’s the worst part: he has a competent comms staff. But they can’t do their jobs because he keeps running his mouth.”

Those complaints echo weeks of griping from administration and White House officials who say that Trump, through unscripted tweets and statements to the press, has undermined a White House communications operation that is trying to dig him out of a very deep public relations hole-- not to mention the legal bind the president may find himself in.

Trump’s repeated media missteps have frustrated even longtime supporters. “Every day he looks more and more like a complete moron,” said one senior administration official who also worked on Trump’s campaign. “I can’t see Trump resigning or even being impeached, but at this point I wish he’d grow a brain and be the man that he sold himself as on the campaign.”

This morning Politico, reporting from Germany, was very blunt, using words like "laughingstock," "chaos" and "circus" to describe how senior European officials viewed Trump. "When European diplomats meet these days, they often swap stories about Trump-- and how to manage their volatile new ally. 'The president of the United States has a 12-second attention span,' NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told a former senior official in April after meeting Trump in the Oval Office. Not only that, this person told me, the president seemed unprepared and ill-informed, turning the conversation to North Korea and apparently unaware that NATO is not a part of the ongoing North Korea saga."

“People are less worried than they were six weeks ago, less afraid,” a senior German government official with extensive experience in the United States told me. “Now they see the clownish nature.” Or, as another German said on the sidelines of a meeting here devoted to taking stock of 70 years of U.S.-German relations, “People here think Trump is a laughingstock.”

“The dominant reaction to Trump right now is mockery,” Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the conservative journal the National Interest, told the meeting at the German Foreign Office here while moderating a panel on Trump’s foreign policy that dealt heavily on the difficulty of divining an actual policy amid the spectacle. Heilbrunn, whose publication hosted Trump’s inaugural foreign policy speech in Washington during last year’s campaign, used the ‘L’ word too. “The Trump administration is becoming an international laughingstock.” Michael Werz, a German expert from the liberal U.S. think tank Center for American Progress, agreed, adding he was struck by “how rapidly the American brand is depreciating over the last 20 weeks.”

...NATO has downgraded the May 25 session to a meeting from a summit and will hold only a dinner to minimize the chances of a Trump eruption. Leaders have been told to hold normally windy remarks to just two to four minutes to keep Trump’s attention. They are even preparing to consider a “deliverable” to Trump of having NATO officially join the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Syria, as Trump has said his priority is getting NATO to do more in combating terrorism. “It’s a phony deliverable to give to Trump, a Twitter deliverable,” said a former senior U.S. official, pointing out that the individual NATO member states are already members of that coalition.

Fox is working with the White House to push a theme that there is a coup in progress in the U.S. in which the Deep State, the Clintons and other Democrats and the media are attempting to remove the (arguably) legitimate president. Fox was eager to get out a Harvard study today that shows that 80% of the media coverage of Señor Trumpanzee's first 100 days was negative. The findings of the study show a somewhat different conclusion than the one Fox is pushing.

• President Trump dominated media coverage in the outlets and programs analyzed, with Trump being the topic of 41 percent of all news stories-- three times the amount of coverage received by previous presidents. He was also the featured speaker in nearly two-thirds of his coverage.
• Republican voices accounted for 80 percent of what newsmakers said about the Trump presidency, compared to only 6 percent for Democrats and 3 percent for those involved in anti-Trump protests.
• European reporters were more likely than American journalists to directly question Trump’s fitness for office.
• Trump has received unsparing coverage for most weeks of his presidency, without a single major topic where Trump’s coverage, on balance, was more positive than negative, setting a new standard for unfavorable press coverage of a president.
• Fox was the only news outlet in the study that came close to giving Trump positive coverage overall, however, there was variation in the tone of Fox’s coverage depending on the topic.