NATO on Trump: ‘It’s like they’re preparing to deal with a child’

NATO is scrambling to tailor its upcoming meeting to avoid taxing U.S. 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 said.

On May 25, NATO will host the heads of state of all 28 member countries in what will be Trump’s first face-to-face summit with an alliance he has bashed repeatedly. Trump has the alliance more on edge than any previous new president, forcing organizers to look for ways to make the staid affair more engaging.

“It’s kind of ridiculous how they are preparing to deal with Trump,” said one source. “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.

Despite these changes, experts are wary of Trump’s reaction to NATO meetings and their long-winded, diplomatic back-and-forths. Rankand-file diplomats always try to push for shorter, more efficient meetings at NATO. “It’s not so unusual that they strain to try to keep it interesting and short and not dragged down into details,” said Jim Townsend, who served as the Pentagon’s top NATO envoy until January. But what is unusual is the president.

“Even a brief NATO summit is way too stiff, too formal and too policy heavy for Trump. Trump is not going to like that,” said Jorge Benitez, a NATO expert with Washingtonbased think tank the Atlantic Council.