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Just when you think youve seen it all, out comes another Donald Trump tweet, or tweetstorm, to prove you wrong. On Sunday morning, Americas forty-fifth President, having just returned to Washington from the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, pronounced his trip a great success for the United States.

It says something about Trumps grip on reality that he could reach such a conclusion after a summit in which he and the rest of the U.S. delegation were utterly isolated on major issues such as climate change and international trade. In fact, the only way that German Chancellor Angela Merkels diplomatic sherpas were able to cobble together a communiqu that everyone could sign onto was to include a section that noted Americas decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, but which added, Leaders of the other G20 members state that the Paris Agreement is irreversible. The symbolism here was powerful: in a global forum that the U.S. government, especially the Treasury Department, helped to create during the late nineteen-nineties, Trumps America stood alone.

Of course, the G-20 is far from perfect: the protesters assembled outside the Messehallen Convention Center, most of whom were peaceful, were right about that. The organizations membership is arbitraryItaly is a member, Spain isnt; South Africa is in, Nigeria is outand its pronouncements can reflect the sometimes hidebound thinking of finance ministers and central bankers. But the G-20 is also one of the few political forums for tackling global economic problems, such as financial contagion, tax evasion, and climate change (which is ultimately a market failure). And, until Trumps election, U.S. leadership was widely recognized as an integral part of any G-20 get-together.

The message of Hamburg was that Trumps America First rhetoricand his inability to see international agreements as anything other than zero-sum dealshave changed that situation, at least temporarily. The rest of the world hasnt turned its back on the U.S.; the country is still far too big and powerful for that to happen. And, in any case, many foreign leaders harbor respect for the values that the U.S. espouses and the global order that it has helped maintain for seven decades. At the moment, however, they are looking for ways to work around Washington and its rogue President.

Judging by his Twitter comments on Sunday, Trump is proud of having turned the U.S. into a G-20 pariah. But even more revealing, and disturbing, was the readout he delivered on his meeting last Friday with Russias Vladimir Putin. Here it is, not quite in its entirety (as, since weve heard Trump criticize Barack Obama and the fake news media many times before, Ive left out those bits):

I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election, He vehemently denied it. I've already given my opinion. . . . We negotiated a ceasefire in parts of Syria which will save lives. Now it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia! Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded . . . and safe. Questions were asked about why the CIA & FBI had to ask the DNC 13 times for their SERVER, and were rejected, still dont . . . have it. . . . Sanctions were not discussed at my meeting with President Putin. Nothing will be done until the Ukrainian & Syrian problems are solved!

In the spirit of generosity, it should be acknowledged that the final sentence here was a welcome one. And Moscows many critics in Congress will surely remind Trump of it if he decides, during the coming months, to relax the restrictions that the Obama Administration imposed on Russia following its annexation of Crimea.

But the rest of what the President wrote on Sunday was a mess of confusions and contradictions. Trump didnt out-and-out confirm the claim made by Sergey Lavrov, Russias foreign minister, that he had accepted Putins denials of any Russian involvement in hacking during the election. But Trump made perfectly clear that he still rejects the view of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia was responsible for hacking and that, for policy purposes, he considers the matter to be closed. Any effort to get to the bottom of what happenedmuch less impose some real punishment on Moscowwill be subjugated to the imperative of working constructively with Russia.

That brings us to the nuttiest part of the tweetstorm, perhaps the nuttiest thing an American President has said in decades: the proposal to create a joint Cyber Security unit with Moscow to safeguard future elections. Whether Trump himself came up with this ingenious proposal, or whether it was Putins idea, the Tweeter-in-Chief didnt say. But it drew instant ridicule from both sides of the political divide.

Its not the dumbest idea I have ever heard but its pretty close, the Republican senator Lindsey Graham told NBCs Meet the Press. Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on CNN, If thats our best election defense, we might as well just mail our ballot boxes to Moscow.

What was Trump thinking? As ever, we have to consider the possibility that he wasnt thinking at all, and what he says doesnt mean anythingnot even when he is reporting on his dealings with the leader of a rival nuclear power. Donald Trump is a man who craves power because it burnishes his celebrity: to be constantly talking and talked about is all that really matters, Chris Uhlmann, the political editor of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, said , in remarks about the G-20 summit that went viral. And there is no value placed on the meaning of words, so whats said one day can be discarded the next.

The other reading is a darker one, and it involves taking Trump at his word. For whatever reason, he still appears to see Putin as a potential partnermaybe even one who can be trusted with some of Americas most sensitive secrets, such as the workings of its voting systems. If this is indeed the case, it matters little whether Trump is a Russian dupe or a Russian stooge: he needs to be stopped.

On Sunday night, Trump disavowed part of what he had said earlier in the day, writing in another tweet, The fact that President Putin and I discussed a Cyber Security unit doesnt mean I think it can happen. It cant-but a ceasefire can,& did! This message illustrated Uhlmanns point about the half-life of Trumps utterances, and also confirmed the truth of the Australian journalists over-all conclusion about the Presidents trip to the G-20 meeting: So what did we learn? We learned that Donald Trump has pressed fast forward on the decline of the United States as a global leader.

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Donald Trump Is Dragging Down America - The New Yorker

I dont tweet, but I do have a brief message for our president: Will you please get the hell out of the way for a few minutes? You and your antics are blocking our view of the damn world and its a world we should be focusing on!

Maybe it was the moment, more than a week ago, when I found myself reading Donald Trumps double tweet aimed at MSNBCs Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski who, on Morning Joe, had suggested that the president might be possibly unfit mentally.

I heard, the president tweeted, poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (dont watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Years Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!

In response to Trumps eerie fascination with womens blood, Brzezinski tweeted a shot of the back of a Cheerios box that had the phrase Made for Little Hands on it. And so it all began, days of it, including the anti-cyber-bullying first ladys rush (however indirectly) to her husbands side via her communications director who said, As the First Lady has stated publicly in the past, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder.

But one tweet truly caught my attention, even if it was at the very beginning of a donnybrook that, with twists and turns, including claims of attempted White House blackmail over a National Enquirer article (and Trumpian rejoinders of every kind), would monopolize the headlines and fill the yak-o-sphere of cable TV for days. That tweet came from conservative idol Bill Kristol, editor at large for The Weekly Standard. It said: Dear @realDonaldTrump, You are a pig. Sincerely, Bill Kristol.

Strange but at that moment another momentso distant it might as well have been from a different planet or, as indeed was the case, another centurycame to my mind. Donald Trump was still finishing his high-school years at a military academy and I was a freshman at Yale. It would have been a weekend in the late spring of 1963. One of my roommates was a working-class kid from Detroit, more of a rarity at that elite all-male school than this New York Jew (in the years when Yale was just removing its Jewish quotas). And here was another rarity: We had a double date with two young women from a local New Haven Catholic college.

That night, out of pure ignorance, we violated Yales parietal hours a reality from another century that no one even knows about anymore. Those young women stayed in our rooms beyond the time the school considered well, in that world of WASPs, kosher might not be the perfect word, but you get what I mean. Let me hasten to add that, in those forbidden minutes, I dont believe I even exchanged a kiss with my date.

Note to readers: Be patient. Think of this as my version of a shaggy dog (or perhaps an over-combed Donald) tale. But rest assured that I havent forgotten our Tweeter-in-Chief, not for a second. How could I?

Anyway, the four of us left our room just as a campus cop was letting another student, who had locked himself out, back into his room opposite ours. When he saw us, he promptly demanded our names and recorded them in his notebook for violating parietal hours (which meant we were in genuine trouble). As he walked down the stairs, my roommate, probably a little drunk, leaned over the bannister and began shouting at him. More than half a century later, I have no memory of what exactly he yelledwith the exception of a single word. As Bill Kristol did the other day with our president, he called that cop a pig.

Now, I wasnt a working-class kid. In the worst of times for my parents, the golden 1950s when my father was in debt and often out of work, I was already being groomed to move up the American class ladder. I was in spirit upper middle class in the fashion of that moment. I was polite to a T. I was a genuine good boy of that era. And good boys didnt imagine that, in real life, even with a couple of beers under your belt, anyone would ever call the campus version of a policeman, a pig. I had never in my life heard such a thing. It simply wasnt the way you talked to the police then, or (until last week) the way you spoke to or of American presidents. Not even Donald Trump.

In other words, when Kristol of all people did that, it shocked me. Which means, to my everlasting shame, that I must still be a good boy, even if now of a distinctly antediluvian sort. Mind you, within years of that incident, it had become a commonplace for activists of the left (though, I must admit, never me) to call the policethe ones out in the streets hassling antiwar protesters, black activists, and otherspigs. Or rather the pigs.

So heres a question Im now asking myself. If Kristol can do it with impunity, then why not Tom Engelhardt, 54 years later? Why not me all these years after American presidents green-lighted secret prisons and torture, invaded and occupied countries around the world; ordered death and mayhem without surcease; sent robotic assassins across the planet to execute, on their say-so alone, those they identified as terrorists or enemies (and anyone else in the vicinity, children included); helped uproot populations in numbers not seen since World War II; oversaw the creation of a global and domestic surveillance state the likes of which would have stunned the totalitarian rulers of the 20th century; and pumped more money into the US military budget than the next eight major states spent combined, which of course is just to start down a long list?

Under the circumstances, why not bring a barnyard animal to bear on the 21st-century presidency, the office that in its glory days decades ago used to be referred to as the imperial presidency? After all, as Ive written before, Donald Trump is no anomaly in the Oval Office, even when, as with Scarborough and Brzezinski, he tweets and rants in a startlingly anomalous fashion for a president. He is instead a bizarre symptom of American decline, of the very thing he staked his presidential run on: the fact that this country is no longer great.

Of course, tactically speaking, engaging in name-calling with Donald Trump is essentially aiding and abetting his presidency (something the media does daily, even hourly). He and his advisers are of a schoolyard sticks-and-stones-will-break-my-bones-but-names-will-never-hurt-me mentality. As The Washington Post reported recently, they consider such insult wars a form of winning and a way to eternally engage the fake news media on grounds they consider advantageous, in a way that will endlessly stoke the presidents still loyal base.

To my mind, however, thats hardly the most essential problem with such language. I suspect that the tweets and insultswhether Trumps, Scarboroughs, or Kristolsact as a kind of smoke screen. In readership and viewership terms, of course, theyre manna from heaven for the very fake news media Trump loves to hate. Theyre wins for them as well. In the process, however, the blood, the pigs, and all the rest of the package of Washingtons insult wars help keep our eyes endlessly glued on the president and on next to nothing else in our world. They blind us to our planet and its troubles.

Can there be any question that Donald Trumps greatest talent is his eternal ability to suck the air out of the media room? It was a skill he demonstrated in stunning fashion during the 2016 election campaign, accumulating an unprecedented $5 billion or so in free media coverage on his way to the White House. Its safe to say, I think, that never in history have so many cameras, so many reporters, and so many eyes been focused so never-endingly on one man. He looms larger than life, larger than anything in our screen-rich world. He essentially blocks the view, day and night.

In that sensein the closest Ive probably come to such an insult myselfI recently labeled him our own little big man. Hes petty, small in so many ways, but he looms so large, tweet by bloody tweet, that its hard to see the burning forest for the one flaming tree.

Take North Korea. On Friday, June 30, when the Scarborough-Brzezinski brouhaha was going full-blast, Trump met with the new South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, and the two of them spoke to the media in the White House Rose Garden, taking no questions. The presidents comments on the Korean situation were strikingly grim and blunt. The era of strategic patience with the North Korean regime, he said, has failed. Frankly, that patience is over. He then added, We have many options with respect to North Korea.

Now, keep in mind that, leaving its still modest but threatening nuclear arsenal aside, the conventional firepower the North Koreans have arrayed along their border with South Korea, aimed at that countrys capital, Seoul, a city of 25 million only 30 miles away, is believed to be potentially devastating. Add to that the 28,500 US troops stationed in that country, most relatively close to the border, not to speak of 200,000 American civilians living there, and you undoubtedly have one of the most explosive spots on the planet. If hostilities broke out and spiraled out of control, as they might, countless people could die, nuclear weapons could indeed be used for the first time since 1945, and parts of Asia could be ravaged (including possibly areas of Japan). What a second Korean War might mean, in other words, is almost beyond imagining.

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At the Trump-Moon Rose Garden event, the president also announced sanctions against a Chinese bank linked to North Korea and a $1.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, both clearly meant as slaps at the Chinese leadership. In other words, when it came to getting Chinas help on the Korean situation, Trumps strategic patience, ignited in early April at his Mar-a-Lago meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, seems to have worn out, too, in mere months.

In this context, if you thought that the Trump-Scarborough-Brzezinski feud was a tinderbox, think again. But tell me, did you even notice the Korean news? If not, Im hardly surprised. On that Saturday morning, my hometown paper, The New York Times you know, the all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print rag of recordmade The Battle of Morning Joe: A Presidential Feud its front page focal piece (with a carryover full page of coverage inside, including a second piece on the subject and that days lead editorial, Mr. Trump, Melting Under Criticism.)

As for the Korean story, it made the bottom of page eight (Trump Adopts a More Aggressive Stance with U.S. Allies and Adversaries in Asia) and didnt even mention the presidents strategic patience comments until its 16th paragraph. (There was also a page-eight story on Trumps Chinese bank sanctions and arms deal with Taiwan.)

And the Times was anything but atypical. Under the circumstances, you might be forgiven for thinking that the greatest story in our world (and its greatest danger) now lies in the Tweet-o-sphere. It took the first North Korean test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, carefully scheduled for July 4, to break that country into the news in a noticeable way and even then Trumps tweets were at the center of the reportage.

Similarly, if Trump and his antics didnt take up so much room in our present American world, it might be easier to take in so many other potential dangers on a planet where matches seem in good supply and the kindling prepared for burning. You could look to the Middle East, for example, and the quickly morphing war against ISIS, which could soon become a Trump administrationlit fire involving Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and even Russia, among other states and groups. Or you could look to the possible future passage of some version of a Republican health-care bill and the more than 200,000 preventable deaths that are likely to result from it in the coming decade.

Or you could focus on a president who has turned his back on the Paris climate agreement and is now plugging not just North American energy independence but full-scaleAmerican energy dominance on a planet on which he promises a new fossil-fueled golden age for America. In such an age, with such a presidentif youll excuse the wordhogging the limelight, whos even thinking about the estimated 1.4 billion climate-change refugees who could be produced by 2060 as the worlds lowlands flood? As a comparison, the 2016 figure on forcibly displaced people globally that set a postWorld War II record, according to the UN refugee agency, is 65.6 million, a staggering number that would be but a drop in the bucket in our overheating future if those 2060 figures prove even close to accurate.

Donald Trumps recent tweets do make one thing clear: Weve been on quite an American journey over the last four decades, one that in some ways could be thought of as a voyage from Brzezinski (Jimmy Carters national-security adviser, Zbigniew, who just died) to Brzezinski (Mika, his daughter).

In a way, you might say that, back in 1979, Brzezinski, the father, first ushered us into a new global age of imperial conflict. He was, after all, significantly responsible for ensuring that the United States would engage in a war in Afghanistan in order to give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam, or what Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would later call its bleeding wound. He launched what would become a giant CIA-organized, Saudi- and Pakistani-backed program for funding, training, and arming the most fundamental of Afghan fundamentalists, and other anti-Soviet jihadists, including a young Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden. (President Ronald Reagan would later term those Afghan Islamist rebels the moral equal of our Founding Fathers.) In doing so, Brzezinski set in motion a process that would drive an Islamic wedge deep into the heart of the Soviet Union and, after Soviet intervention in Afghanistan resulted in a disastrous decade-long war, would send the Red Army limping home in defeat, all of which would, in turn, play a role in the implosion of the Soviet Union.

On this subject, he would be forever unrepentant. As he said in 1998, What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War? And as for those millions of Afghans who would end up dead, wounded, or uprooted from their homes and lives, well, really, who cared?

We are now, of course, fully in that world of stirred-up Moslems and, as it happens, the United States is still fighting a war in Afghanistan as the new administration gets ready to surge militarily there, perhaps for the fourth or fifth time since October 2001, and whos even paying attention? Who could with the latest presidential tweets headlining the news and all hands on deck in Washington for the insult wars?

If, in 1978, you had predicted that, between 1979 and 2017, the United States would twice find itself at war (for more than a quarter of a century so far) in, of all places, Afghanistan, and with no end to its Second Afghan War in sight, any American would have laughed you out of the room. And if you had tried to explain that, almost 40 years in the future, a billionaire president, literally a casino capitalist, would be running the White House as an adjunct to his family business and sending out bizarre messages about the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, which would functionally be the news of that moment, you would surely have been institutionalized as a raving madman. Media obsessed with the travails of Zbigniew Brzezinskis daughter Mika at the fervently tweeting hands of President Donald J. Trump? Who woulda thunk it?

Make America great again? You must be kidding. Its time to stop insulting pigs and focus instead on the state of our planet.

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Stop Insulting Donald Trump - The Nation.

President Donald Trump is coming to his daughter's defense and goes after Chelsea Clinton and the the fake media all in one tweet. Susana Victoria Perez (@susana_vp) has more. Buzz60

Seemingly distressed over how media organizations reported onhis daughter sitting in for him during partof the G20 summit, President Trump on Monday criticized the media, saying "fake news" organizations would have treated another presidential daughter differently.

"If Chelsea Clinton were asked to hold the seat for her mother,as her mother gave our country away, the Fake News would say CHELSEA FOR PRES!" the president tweeted.

Chelsea Clinton wasn't about to let him have the final say, though.

"Good morning Mr. President. It would never have occurred to my mother or my father to ask me. Were you giving our country away? Hoping not," she replied.

Trump's early morning tweet was a response to storiesabout and criticisms over daughter Ivanka Trump literally taking his seat among world leaders during a G20 session on Saturday. The president stepped away to meet with the leader of Indonesia. The White House insisted it was not an unusual arrangement.

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President Trump lashes out about Ivanka reports, Chelsea Clinton replies - USA TODAY

The White House is rallying around the presidents oldest son after Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged meeting last June with a Kremlin-linked lawyer promising information about Hillary Clinton, deepening the Russia-related scandal for those closest to the president.

Theres no evidence of collusion, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told Good Morning America, a position seconded by deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who told reporters later Monday in an off-camera briefing that there was simply no collusion.

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The presidents campaign did not collude in any way. Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election, Sanders said. No one within the Trump campaign colluded in order to influence the election.

The White House sent Sanders and Conway out to defend Trump Jr. in addition to representing President Donald Trump himself at the daily press briefing and on the morning shows, respectively. The presidents son came under fire this weekend following reports that he, senior White House adviser Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer inside Trump Tower last summer after Trump clinched the GOP nomination. Trump Jr. said he was told the meeting could yield damaging information about Clinton. He also said an acquaintance had set it up.

Trump Jr. has denied any impropriety and has hired Alan Futerfas, a lawyer based in New York, to represent him in the Russia-related probes.

Sanders said she wasnt aware of any additional meetings between Trump Jr. and foreign agents, although she conceded that she hasnt held an extensive conversation with him.

The only thing I see inappropriate about the meeting, Sanders said, was the people that leaked the information on the meeting after it was voluntarily disclosed.

The revelation of campaign members meeting with someone from Russia to potentially discuss information damaging to Democrats comes as the FBI and multiple congressional committees continue to investigate Russias role in the 2016 campaign, including possible collusion between Russian officials and Trump associates.

In an often combative interview with CNNs Chris Cuomo, Conway accused the host of trying to convince his viewers that the meeting was imbued with some type of seriousness because three principals were involved.

That just simply is not true. This was standard operating procedure for the campaign, she said. Lets focus on what did not happen in that meeting. No information provided that was meaningful. No action taken. Nothing.

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Members of Congress two intelligence committees investigating Russian interference nevertheless have indicated that their panels will interview Trump Jr. Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday that the House panel will likely want to question everyone that was at that meeting, a sentiment Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) echoed Monday.

Our intelligence committee needs to interview him and others who attended the meeting, she said.

For his part, Trump Jr. answered Collins call, tweeting that he is Happy to work with the committee to pass on what I know.

His account of the meeting, however, has shifted over the past few days. He claimed Saturday that the meeting was about an adoption program that had been cut off by the Kremlin in retaliation for a U.S. law that targeted Russian human rights abusers. But in a statement Sunday, he said an acquaintance from Moscows 2013 Miss Universe pageant asked him to have a meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, whose name wasnt given before they met.

Trump Jr. said he was told she might have information helpful to the campaign, and that in the meeting, the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton in statements he described as vague, ambiguous and that made no sense.

No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information, he said, suggesting her agenda all along was to discuss the adoption program and the Magnitsky Act.

Rob Goldstone told The Associated Press that he set up the meeting between Trump and Veselnitskaya on behalf of singer-songwriter Emin Agalarov (President Trump has a cameo in Agalarovs 2013 music video). Goldstone, a music publicist, said Veselnitskaya had information about purported illegal campaign contributions to the Democratic National Committee that she thought Donald Trump Jr. might find helpful.

Trump Jr. shrugged off reports of his meeting earlier Monday, sarcastically tweeting, Obviously Im the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent.

He said it went nowhere but that he had to listen, and added in a follow-up post that there was no inconsistency in his statements to The New York Times, which reported the meeting Saturday and the potential for damaging Clinton information Sunday.

No inconsistency in statements, meeting ended up being primarily about adoptions, he said. In response to further Q's I simply provided more details.

A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin said the Kremlin wasnt aware of the meeting, according to AP. A spokesman for Trumps lawyer said the president wasnt aware of his sons meeting and didnt attend. He learned of the meeting only in the last couple of days, Sanders said, and isnt concerned.

Trump, who has no public events on his schedule Monday, fired off a series of tweets Monday morning but avoided the scandal around his son. He largely went on the offensive against former FBI Director James Comey in addition to posting about the Senates health care bill, Ivanka Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Chelsea and Hillary Clinton seemingly trying to use his bully pulpit to steer the conversation away from his eldest son.

He accused Comey, the man he fired in May, of illegally leaking classified information to a friend and shared two Fox & Friends tweets that were critical of the former FBI chief.

That is a bombshell that people should know about, Conway said on CNN.

Meanwhile, much of Washington was focused on a different bombshell, forcing Conway off her talking points of touting the success of Trumps meeting last week with Putin and highlighting the report on Comey. She instead found herself dismissing questions about Trump Jr.s meeting, which White House chief of staff Reince Priebus on Sunday morning labeled a big nothing burger.

I dont think you had to go very far, respectfully, to find damaging information or negative information about Hillary Clinton. She was a gusher at all times of negative, damaging information, Conway said on Good Morning America.

She contrasted that to Trumps two-hour conversation with Putin, which included topics such as election meddling, cybersecurity and a deal on a cease-fire in parts of Syria.

Thats meaningful, she said. The conversations real. The collusions not.

Kelsey Tamborrino and Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.

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White House rushes to defend Donald Trump Jr. in Russia meeting scandal - Politico

French president Emmanuel Macron has, once again, gotten physical with his US counterpart Donald Trump.

The latest incident took place at the G20 summit in Hamburg. When the world leaders gathered for the traditional family photo, Macron is seen pushing through the crowd to stand next to Trump. Once Macron reaches the front row, he claps Trump on the shoulder, before taking his place beside the US president.

According to one British newspaper, Macron took the opportunity to zone in on Trump like a cruise missile. While some commentators saw the encounter as yet another example of Macron going mano a mano with Trump, French media had a simple explanation.

Macron was actually following a strict diplomatic rule, Le Parisien newspaper reports (link in French). According to protocol, the first row is reserved for heads of state, with the longest-serving leaders positioned towards the center and newer arrivals at the ends. Macron thus moved to stand next to Trump, another recently elected president. The middle rows feature heads of G20 governments (Canadas Justin Trudeau, second row) as well as leaders from non-G20 countries invited as guests (Singapores Lee Hsien Loong, third row). The back row is intended for representatives of international bodies, such as the director of the IMF Christine Lagarde and head of the World Bank Jim Yong Kim.

There was an exception to these rules for Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany (a head-of-government position), who stood in the center of the first row because she was hosting the summit, and her immediate neighbors, Argentinas president Mauricio Macri (host of the next summit) and Chinese president Xi Jinping (host of the previous summit).

In May, during the NATO summit in Brussels, Macron and Trump engaged in a death-grip handshake, in which their knuckles turned white and their jaws seemed to clench. The photos showed Macron grabbing Trumps hand hard and refusing to let goeven when Trump tried to pull away. Trump, who is notorious for his uncomfortably long handshakes, was seen to have lost at his own game.

Macron went on to explain that the handshake wasnt an innocent encounter but a moment of truth. He added: We must show that we wont make small concessions, even symbolic ones, but not to over-publicize it either. I dont believe in the diplomacy of public invectives but in my bilateral talks, I dont let anything pass, its how one gets respected.

Correction (July 10): This post was updated to clarify that the middle rows are reserved for heads of governments and guest leaders, and also to explain the arrangement protocol in more detail.

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Donald Trump and Emanuel Macron's awkward G20 encounter actually has a simple explanation - Quartz