Donald Trump's G7 Speech: A Baffling and Breathless Performance

If you’d like to know how Donald Trump’s closing speech at the G7 went, it’s probably best to start at the part where he asked Scott Bessent whether the stock market was smarter than his Treasury secretary.

“No, sir,” Bessent dutifully replied. He was disagreeing with a notion Trump had just posited, but it was clear from his tone of voice that he didn’t mean to disagree. He was simply trying to make real-time sense of what his boss had just said, which happened to be the semi-coherent and utterly baffling: “The stock market is more brilliant than anybody there is, including people on this stage, apart from me. What do you think, Scott, is the stock market more brilliant than you?”

Yes, sir? No, sir? What, sir? It was clear at that point, just a couple of minutes in, that nobody — including his own team, or perhaps especially his own team — had any idea what Trump was talking about.

This was probably the most alarming Trump appearance to date. He was breathless and incoherent, ill-seeming and off-piste. He spent 32 minutes justifying his deal with Iran to the world before mentioning a single discussion that had taken place among the G7 countries at the summit, and the justifications spoke for themselves.

"This wasn't a three-month deal," he declared. "This was years in the making. You know why? Because I was the one who killed General Soleimani."

Soleimani, who has been dead since 2020, enjoyed repeated cameos throughout the proceedings. Trump called him "a mad genius" and "the boss of Iran," returning to him again and again like an aging musician who keeps bringing audiences back to his biggest hit because the new material isn't getting much applause. The implication, of course, was that Soleimani represented a job well done to Trump himself. This deal? Not so much.

Iran's leadership, Trump explained, had suffered because "their first set of leaders is all gone. Their second set of leaders, all gone. Their third set of leaders is a little bit gone." That’s not technically “regime change” but it sort of is, he added, if you think about it.

The asides got more and more bizarre.

“Bibi Netanyahu is a good man, by the way — he gets a little excited,” gave way to, “Afghanistan is kissing our ass.”

He thanked Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin for “being very neutral” during the Iran war, then immediately added that people probably wouldn’t like seeing him thank them.

He interrupted himself to swat a fly.

On lifting tariffs on Iran and investment in the region, he was defensive and juvenile: “Like, what are you gonna do, say you can never invest in a country?... We did $2 trillion of damage. Somebody’s gonna have to help them out.”

On whether it was true that the deal with Iran includes money for the country to rebuild, he started with, “We don’t give them money… What happens is with time, if they behave–” and then seemed to lose his trail of thought and went back to, “Regime change? The first group is dead. One morning they were having breakfast… They thought we’d never bomb during breakfast.”

In the middle of his speech, he took 10 minutes to mention the war in Ukraine, Ebola, the global economy, and his favorite piece of recurring fan fiction: that world leaders repeatedly tell him behind closed doors that they used to laugh at the US, but now it’s “the most respected country in the world.” Then he pivoted swiftly back to Iran, musing, “If they don’t behave, they’ll get hit again.”

It was hardly Churchill at Yalta.

The recurring villain of his piece was the media, who supposedly are all in a grand conspiracy to ignore or devalue his personal victories. “If they said ‘Praise be to Allah, Donald Trump is the greatest president ever’... then the New York Times would say ‘Iran had a great victory’,” he said, during a long segment about fake news.

When it came to questions, one reporter mentioned that the wording of the deal doesn’t actually seem to say much about not developing a nuclear weapon, despite Trump’s claims that it will ensure the country never has one, “permanently”. Trump responded that so long as America doesn’t have a “weak, pathetic president,” then Iran definitely won’t have nuclear bombs, because when they start developing them, he’ll just flatten their cities again.

“So you’ll bomb if they don’t comply, but there’s nothing specific in the deal, is that correct?” the reporter followed up.

“Doesn’t have to be,” Trump responded. Because why would a deal that stops Iran from developing a nuclear weapon in terms much more stringent and powerful than “Barack Hussein Obama” ever allowed make explicit mention of nuclear weapons? Below the bombast and the egotism, the impression that the president seemed to give was: I don’t know and I’m tired. Words don’t have to mean things, because bombs exist. Anyway, it all leads back to me, and once I’m out of picture, do you really think I give a crap?

Besides the other, worrying things this might imply about the 80-year-old’s ailing health, this speech also made extremely clear that Donald Trump himself doesn’t think he actually got a good deal.

But hey, remember General Soleimani?!