Anne Applebaum: “Remember the time, during the election campaign, when Donald Trump got bored of his rally, turned on his playlist and started dancing? Or when, more recently, he got up in the middle of a meeting with oil executives, looked out the window and started talking about the White House ballroom?”

“There have been so many bizarre moments in the past two years that it can be hard to recall them all. But the word ‘bizarre’ isn’t really sufficient to describe the strange things happening right now in Washington…”

“Nobody around him wants to stop him. They are too craven, or too cowardly, or too greedy. Only Congress can call a halt to this charade. But in order for that to happen, a handful of Republicans have to find the guts to say that 2+2 = 4. Years of careful diplomacy, billions of dollars in trade, are now at risk because senators and representatives who know better have refused to use the powers they have to block him. Now is the time.”

“If the Supreme Court strikes down President Trump’s tariffs, the Trump administration plans to begin replacing them almost immediately with other levies, Jamieson Greer, the United States Trade Representative, said in an interview,” the New York Times reports.

Said Greer: “The reality is the president is going to have tariffs as part of his trade policy going forward.”

French President Emmanuel Macron does not plan to accept President Donald Trump’s invitation to join a proposed Board of Peace, Bloomberg reports.

Charlie Sykes: “Yes, it’s real. He really did write that letter to the Norwegian PM, whining (once again) about not getting the Nobel Prize and declaring that since he didn’t get the Prize, ‘I no longer feel any obligation to think purely of Peace.’ And no, you are not the crazy ones if you think we have fallen down a black hole of mad king dementia.”

“‘Unhinged’ doesn’t really capture this moment, where we find ourselves in a full-blown crisis because our president is butt-hurt about losing an award no one was ever going to give him. And now we are left actually wondering if our military commanders would obey an order to fire upon our closest allies.”

Anne Applebaum: “One could observe many things about this document. One is the childish grammar, including the strange capitalizations… Another is the loose grasp of history…”

“Yet what matters isn’t the specific phrases, but the overall message: Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.”

“Think about where this is leading.”

Katie Martin: “We should be in no doubt now that Donald Trump is ripping up global markets. The only question is how far the rest of the world goes in using it against him.”

“We really should have seen it coming. Before Trump retook the White House a year ago, one of his key financial lieutenants, Stephen Miran, wrote a detailed if baffling paper about a so-called Mar-a-Lago Accord — a recognition that for the US, the global hegemon, everything is ‘intertwined.’ Trade, finance and defense are three legs of the same stool, and each can be used to reinforce the other in the interests of America First.”

President Trump was back on Truth Social criticizing Denmark for supposedly failing to “get the Russian threat out of Greenland” and warning its leaders: “Now it is time, and it will be done!!!”

Playbook: “The irony, of course, is that Russian strategists are gleeful at this schism opening up in the Western alliance. Driving a wedge between the U.S. and western Europe has been a Moscow pipedream for the past 80 years, but it never looked remotely likely until now.”