Trump has given up on doing the G7 meeting in June so now his red-hot plan is to hold the G19 or something in September so that he can invite Russia. The slight problem there is that the rest of the G7 doesn’t want to invite Russia. At all.

Trump’s new plan, outlined to reporters on Saturday, is to host an expanded G7 meeting including Russia, Australia, South Korea and India, dedicated to building an alliance against China. The plan is likely to be controversial because Russia has been banned from western-led summits since Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and is not seen as a natural ally in the defence of human rights in Hong Kong.

Or anywhere else. Putin isn’t a human rights kind of guy. Neither, of course, is Trump, so that’s awkward.

The G7 brings together the US, Japan, France, Germany, the UK, Canada and Italy.

Justifying the cancellation of the June meeting and his proposed new format, Trump said the group’s current makeup was “very outdated” and does not properly represent “what’s going on in the world”. 

There’s some truth in that, but probably not in the sense Trump had in mind. The US is not currently a good fit with the other G7 countries, because we have a corrupt incompetent authoritarian criminal as head of state.