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From the moment that Donald Trump was elected for the first time in 2016, his negative influence has been a constant shadow looming over the United States. He has stacked the U.S. Supreme Court with judges favorable to the conservative agenda, started a crusade to strip transgender people of their rights, and cut domestic and global HIV funding.
But while he was using his time in office to make decisions that make every Democrat's blood boil, he has also been consistently embarrassing himself at every turn.
Some of these moments are historically humiliating, some will leave you scratching your head, and others are downright hilarious. Check out Trump’s most embarrassing moments since he first took office back in 2016.
World Cup cold shoulder
Spain took home soccer’s biggest award when they beat Argentina at the 2026 World Cup, but their win was soured when Trump tried to jockey his way into their victory photos. Video footage of the historic moment shows several players trying to politely push Trump toward the edge of the dais so that he wouldn't be in their photos, and when Spain’s national football league shared an image of the team lifting the trophy over their heads, Trump had been cropped out of the shot.
Hair mishaps
Trump’s hair has provided fodder for comedians for years, and much has been written about the president’s coif. Trump’s hair usually seems frozen in place, but every once in a while the wind catches his comb-over just right and it lifts off his head. Back in 2018, Trump was mercilessly ridiculed when a strong wind swept his hair off of his head when he hit the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. When Trump was on trial in April 2024, his hair also flapped off his head during an interview with reporters, and again on August 3, 2026, when it flew up and exposed a portion of his bald head as he disembarked from Marine One.
Falling asleep on the job
Trump has been accused of struggling to stay awake and dozing off during several high-profile events, but the most egregious instance may have been when New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman reported that Trump fell asleep during his own hush-money trial, the first criminal trial of a former or sitting president. According to Haberman, Trump “appeared to nod off a few times” during his court appearance when she saw “his mouth going slack and his head drooping onto his chest.” The president, who repeatedly referred to former President Joe Biden as “Sleepy Joe,” was called out for falling asleep at an inopportune time again on July 28, 2026, when he was filmed nodding off at Lindsey Graham’s funeral.
Bombing hurricanes
Trump reportedly suggested senior Homeland Security and national security officials consider using nuclear bombs to contain a severe weather crisis. During a hurricane briefing at the White House in 2019, Axios reported that Trump said, "I got it. I got it. Why don't we nuke them?" The publication also reported that a 2017 National Security Council memo stated that the president floated the idea that we should “bomb the hurricanes.” Trump called the allegations ”ridiculous” and claimed on social media that he “never said this.”
Being mocked by world leaders
A hot mic moment at a NATO summit in 2019 revealed that other world leaders had no qualms about openly mocking Trump. A video emerged during the summit showing Boris Johnson, Justin Trudeau, and Emmanuel Macron at a function at Buckingham Palace, where they gathered to make jokes that appeared to be about Trump. Johnson can be heard asking Macron, “Is that why he was late?” before Trudeau says, “He was late because he takes a 40-minute press conference off the top.” This exchange was interpreted as about the American president because Trump had done an unscripted 50-minute back-and-forth with reporters just days before, and done much the same thing at the previous year’s Nato meeting.
Freedom 250 disaster
Trump’s Freedom 250 event was supposed to be a huge celebration of the nation’s historic anniversary, but things quickly fell apart, and the event ended up being a huge embarrassment. UFC owners lost $30 million staging the Freedom 250 fight, almost all of the musicians backed out of performing, six states opted out of sending official representatives for their state booths over budget constraints, the 110-foot-tall Ferris wheel kept shutting down, and the event was roundly mocked by critics for the low turnout that left much of the National Mall empty.
Caught exaggerating crowd size
Trump started off his first term with an embarrassing lie. After photographs comparing the smaller crowd size at Trump’s inauguration relative to the large crowd covering much of the National Mall for Obama’s inauguration, Trump’s then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer claimed that the event drew “the largest audience to ever see an inauguration.” The new president refused to let it go and dubbed media who reported on the crowd size "among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” and Spicer vowed, "to hold the press accountable.”
The time he almost destroyed his retina
There is one thing every school-aged child learns about solar eclipses: don’t look directly at them. This is a piece of advice Trump forgot all about in 2017 when he looked directly into the sun multiple times without wearing any sort of protective eyewear. “At approximately 2:39, the President initially gesticulated to the crowd below and pointed at the sky. As he did so, one of the White House aides standing beneath the Blue Room Balcony shouted ‘don’t look,’” wrote The Guardian’s White House reporter Ben Jacobs.
Stormy Daniels testimony
TV personality and former bisexual adult entertainer Stormy Daniels spent two days testifying during Trump’s hush money trial, where he was accused of paying her $130,000 to keep their alleged affair quiet in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. Trial testimony is often stale and boring, but when Daniels spent two days testifying in the trial, she managed to pepper the information she provided with barbed insults at Trump’s expense — and the whole world was paying attention. She managed to call Trump an “orange turd” on the court record, and talked repeatedly about how bad the president was in bed, including calling their encounter “brief,” and claiming that she stared at the ceiling when they had sex because she was “trying to think about anything other than what was happening there.”
Trump being ignored at Mar-a-Lago
You know you’re not respected as a leader when no one will listen to you give a speech at a property you own. A video clip went viral in December 2024 that showed Trump walking into a crowded room at Mar-a-Lago and being ignored by everyone while trying to give a speech. “We had a great victory. It was really — we won everything,” Trump said of his win at the ballot box to a smattering of applause from the handful of people who were actually paying attention to him.
