When President Trump stepped off his plane in Ankara on Tuesday afternoon, he received an over-the-top welcome comparable only to the one the pope got when he visited Turkey late last year.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was there on the tarmac to greet him — the Turkish autocrat did this for none of the other more than 30 world leaders who arrived in Ankara for a NATO summit — accompanied by dozens of Turks on horseback. A band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” as cannons fired and fighter jets flew low overhead trailing streaks of red, white and blue smoke.
The second Mr. Trump landed on his Qatari-gifted jumbo jet, the center of gravity at the summit shifted right to where Mr. Trump likes it best: himself.
“He takes all the oxygen out of the room for everybody else,” Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, said Tuesday at a reception on the sidelines of the summit in the Turkish capital.
He added: “He’s bigger than life here.”
As usual, Mr. Trump’s idiosyncratic style of governing had ensured a spectacle on the world stage. Indeed, even before he arrived, he was creating big drama between himself and many of the people he would be coming face to face with here this week.
Last month, he said he would deign to take the 10-hour flight only because the summit was being hosted by his good friend Mr. Erdogan. And last week, he called the head of FIFA to ask him to review the red card given to the United States’ top goal scorer in the World Cup. The player was later reinstated for the game against Belgium, setting off fury in Brussels, the de facto capital of the European Union where NATO is headquartered.
Perhaps the most personal drama gripping NATO this week is Mr. Trump’s scrap with Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni — until very recently among the most Trump-aligned leaders in Europe. The president has been picking on her over her refusal to allow her country to be drawn into the war against Iran.
Mr. Trump has been all over the front pages of the Italian papers for weeks. “TRUMP È UN COGLIONE,” screamed the front page of the right-leaning newspaper Libero, using an Italian term of art that has many colorful translations — all of them vulgar.
But the feud really crescendoed this weekend, when Mr. Trump posted a doctored picture of Ms. Meloni staring at him longingly with the caption, “RESTRAINING ORDER NEEDED.”
It has all contributed to a carnivalesque quality at this year’s NATO.
After Mr. Trump arrived, he sat beside Mr. Erdogan at a bilateral meeting in the Turkish presidential complex and promptly stirred up some fresh drama. He criticized Denmark and reminded NATO leaders that he still had designs on Greenland; complained that Britain, France and Italy did not do enough to support the United States in its war against Iran; said Europe was a lot better 20 years ago; and mused on Ms. Meloni, characterizing his quarrel that has caused so much international agita as something verging on playful.
“I think she’s a nice person,” he said breezily. “I didn’t put a heavy press on her.”
Mr. Trump’s conduct has been awkward for his supporters in Ankara, who say they’re happy with the results he gets even if they can’t always abide the way he goes about getting them.
“I think there’s a lot of ways of communicating back and forth,” Mr. Rounds said when asked what he thought of the president’s “restraining order” post about the Italian prime minister. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what was there, so I don’t comment on everything he says, but I do look at his actions.”
Mr. Rounds credited the president’s style for its results: NATO countries are coughing up more for defense spending.
The Republican senator was standing in the middle of a tented party Tuesday evening thrown by the Atlantic Council, a pro-NATO think tank, at the Ankara Palas, a former state guesthouse converted into a presidential museum by Mr. Erdogan. It was a stuffy affair. Like so many of the parties thrown here this week, there was no alcohol, since it’s prohibited from being served at government buildings under Mr. Erdogan’s conservative Muslim administration.
Arms salesmen, American Embassy staff, European diplomats and Turkish bureaucrats crowded around him to bat around the finer points of transatlanticism. As ever, Mr. Trump was the elephant in the tent.
“We know that the road to this summit has not been without its difficulty,” Jenna Ben-Yehuda, an Atlantic Council executive, said in a speech to those in attendance. She talked about “honest and tough conversations” between allies.
Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, said she saw it as her mission in Turkey this week to remind European allies that no matter what drama the American president may be fomenting, Congress supports NATO. It was a not-so-subtle reminder that even as Mr. Trump threatens withdrawing from the alliance, he cannot do so without congressional approval.
“On this, the 250th anniversary of the United States, there was a reason why the colonists wrote the Constitution the way they did because they didn’t want a king,” said Ms. Shaheen, who is retiring after three terms in the Senate. “They wanted to have a government that was governed by the people. That’s what we’re here to remind people of.”
