Donald Trump’s first foreign trip of his presidency

During a meeting with European Union leaders in Brussels on Thursday, President Trump delivered what’s quickly becoming his classic diplomatic maneuver: harsh criticism of an ally that doesn’t make sense.

“The Germans are bad, very bad,” he said during the meeting, according to a Der Spiegel report. “See the millions of cars they are selling to the U.S. Terrible. We will stop this.”

President Donald Trump’s first foreign trip is nearly over. Some events were near disasters; some went surprisingly well. But nearly all of them were deeply revealing about Trump, saying something important about his administration’s policies and his own diplomatic style.

The trip also generated some fairly astounding images: Trump grabbing a giant glowing orb in Saudi Arabia, bizarrely aggressive handshakes between the presidents of France and the United States, or the look on Benjamin Netanyahu’s face when Trump blurted out a state secret in a Q&A with reporters.

Friday evening, Donald Trump leaves for his very first foreign trip as president. The first stops on his itinerary are Saudi Arabia, to give a speech about Islam and meet with more than 50 Muslim leaders; Israel, where he’ll visit the Western Wall and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as well as the prime minister; and the Vatican, where he’ll meet with the pope.

If going to symbolic centers of three of the world’s major religions — Islam, Judaism, and Christianity — on his first trip abroad sounds like a risky agenda, it is. And expectations aren’t high for how well he’ll be able to pull it off without a major gaffe.

For US presidents, their first big overseas trip is basically a debutante ball: It’s meant to introduce the new president on the world stage and induct them into the high society of powerful world leaders. And for most US presidents, it’s an important but still relatively low-stakes affair, with kings, emirs, and presidents rolling out the red carpet to wine and dine the American president and stage smiling photo ops.

But Donald Trump isn’t most US presidents, and the stakes couldn’t be higher for his first trip abroad. All eyes will be watching Trump’s every move to see if he can really hack it as a serious world leader or whether he’ll have the same stumbles abroad that he’s been having at home.