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Having arrived at Nato’s annual summit under a familiar cloud of resentment and grievance, Donald Trump’s farewell message on Wednesday was an unlikely tale of love and darkness.

Addressing journalists in the presence of his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the US president surprised everyone by directing his affections at an alliance he spent much of the previous day spewing bile over, citing the now well-worn gripe about Greenland, among others.

“We just had our Nato meeting, and it was a great meeting,” he said. “There was a lot of love in that room today, a lot of unity. It couldn’t have gone much better.”

It was quite the transformation from earlier, when the US president had sat beside Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, and spouted a well-rehearsed litany of complaints, including a perceived lack of support on the war with Iran, and Spain’s refusal to comply with new defence spending targets.

Even Zelenskyy – once the butt of a notorious public browbeating in the Oval Office – seemed to have risen in Trump’s estimation. “We have some good stories to tell,” he said, talking up the prospects of a deal to end Ukraine’s four-and-a-half years war with Russia. “He has done an amazing job.”

The unexpected comity was partly explained by Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, who – invited by Trump to describe the harmonious gathering – said: “Sir, all the Europeans attributed [to] you, saving Nato and they want to do what they’re supposed to do and you go right there.”

Darkness descended when the subject turned to Iran, with which Trump recently agreed to a memorandum of understanding that ushered in a 60-day halt to hostilities.

The US president declared the ceasefire all but over on Wednesday after US forces struck Iranian targets the previous day, asserting that Iran had violated the terms by attacking three vessels in the strategically vital strait of Hormuz, supposedly re-opened under the recent agreement.

“We have a score to settle,” he said in the middle of an extended monologue that invoked past Iranian transgressions, including the manufacture of roadside bombs that killed and wounded numerous US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Having hailed his own deal just two weeks ago as necessary to prevent an economic disaster equalling the great depression if the strait of Hormuz remained closed, Trump now wrote off the possibility of agreement with Iran’s leadership – which he recently praised as more reasonable following the assassination of key figures.

“They violate the agreement every day. They lie, they cheat, they kill people. They’ve been killing people for 47 years. They knocked out the USS Cole,” the US president said, citing Iran’s alleged role in facilitating an al-Qaeda attack on a US war ship in October 2000.

Having previously settled for re-opening the Hormuz strait – through which 20% of the world’s fuel supplies pass – Trump said the goal was now “denuclearization”, a reference to Iran’s capacity to build a future nuclear bomb and an objective that is supposed to be addressed through negotiations during the 60-day ceasefire.

“We’re going to have a deal. We may just do it without a deal, because you know what, it’s easier,” he said, menacingly.

Circumstances, it seemed, were not ripe for the Art of the Deal, although he paid cursory homage to Steve Witkoff, his chief envoy, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, and JD Vance, who were instrumental in negotiating the ceasefire.

“My whole life is deals, [but] I don’t see it with them. Maybe a big attack, and it’ll knock out a lot of stuff,” he said. US forces would “probably” carry out major attacks on Wednesday evening, he said in response to a reporter’s question, including potentially power stations and desalination plants.

On several occasions, his diatribe strayed into malapropisms and vaguely comical misnomers.

At one point, referring to missiles supposedly aimed at the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, he said they have been fired by “the Islamic Republic of Japan”.

In the middle of a homily about Iran’s military forces being destroyed, he suddenly switched course in mid-flow to say “one of the thing we are going to be talking about to today is … we’ll give them the right to make patriot” missiles – although he appeared to be referring to Ukraine.

On another occasion, after a succession of questions about the Russia-Ukraine war, he asked journalists if they had a question for “President Putin” – while Zelenskyy, the Russian leader’s arch-foe, sat just feet away.

The moment resembled a similar verbal miscue by Joe Biden at the annual Nato summit in Washington 2024, shortly after the disastrous televised debate with Trump in Atlanta that ultimately ended Biden’s presidential candidacy.

Possibly mindful of that, Trump attempted a contrived cover-up – doubling down and insisting that he meant to say Putin after all because he had a scheduled phonecall with him later.

Yet perhaps his most revealing misstatement was of the name of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, buried this week in a state funeral four months after being killed in an Israeli strike at the start of the war.

“They wanted to go to the funeral of Khomeini,” Trump said, mispronouncing Khamenei’s name as that of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution, who ushered in decades of enmity with Washington after the the 444-day siege of the US embassy in Tehran and the holding of 52 American hostages.

Trump presumably knows that Khamenei and Khomeini were different people. But by conjuring the more historical name of the latter, he may have been subconsciously revealing his preoccupation with an age-old US grievance – and signalling his urge to get even.