Whenever I need to leave a boring party, I always get my press secretary to tweet the apologies, and so it was that White House spokesmonster Karoline Leavitt informed X users in the dead of night that Donald Trump had ditched the G7 after barely 24 hours of mid-price hotel drabness, thus avoiding the possibility of getting cornered by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the kitchen. Trump later said he had to leave the summit “for obvious reasons”, though failed to elaborate whether he meant he’d been expected to talk with leaders, not at them, or simply that the trouser press in his room was broken.
You probably can’t call it a French exit if the French president then claims you left early to work on a ceasefire. But you can definitely up the stakes on Le Bumptious by calling him “publicity-seeking”, someone who “always gets it wrong”, and adding – almost by way of an afterthought – that all Iranians should “immediately evacuate” Tehran. (Population: 9.8 million.)
