“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” has a ring to it, doesn’t it? US President Donald Trump certainly thought so, as he indulged in some performance art last Thursday in the White House Rose Garden.

Mr Trump removed the US from the Paris Climate Treaty, one of Barack Obama’s signature achievements in office. This was of course greeted with a hearty round of applause from all the climate change deniers he had gathered to hear his announcement.

In true reality TV style, he had kept the world waiting for days to make the statement; creating suspense, he must have imagined.

Yet for a president who prides himself on his prowess and unpredictability, this move was entirely predictable; a mere confirmation of a departure which was already evident in his administration’s decisive dismantling of Obama’s domestic work to cut carbon emissions and move to renewables.

Mr Trump’s pompous speech was riddled with inconsistencies, ironies and idiocy. It exposed:

  1. Misunderstanding of the agreement

Obligations to cut emissions are self-imposed voluntarily; no specific rate of reduction in emissions is required for the United States. It was Mr Obama who pledged to cut emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025, but that pledge could be altered without abandoning the agreement. It is unclear whether Mr Trump understands that the treaty does not allow for withdrawal until 3 years after signing, which would take us into the 2020 US presidential campaign period. The withdrawal process itself takes a further 4 years.

  1. Failure to identify the economic potential

For someone who claims to know the art of deal-making, Mr Trump seems to have completely missed the huge, long-term business opportunity presented by the green economy. Other top emitters like China and India have shown no such foolishness; indeed, China’s renewables job market has been growing steadily. It is estimated that out of the 8.1 million jobs in the sector worldwide, 3.5 million of them are in China. Furthermore, the Chinese have just initiated the world’s largest floating solar power plant.

  1. Complete disregard for the moral foundation of the pact

Mr Trump said his ‘solemn duty to protect America and its citizens’ was the basis for his decision to withdraw from a treaty designed precisely to protect America’s citizens and all the world’s citizens against the greatest threat facing them. Climate change is killing us but practical policies could reverse it. The Paris agreement is not above criticism but the premise is correct: a curb in the rise of global temperatures can only be achieved with complete international cooperation, nothing less. The treaty may not have felt the absence of smaller emitters like Syria and Nicaragua but the more a country emits, the more their compliance is necessary. While the US is now second to China in terms of global emissions, it is by far the leader in emissions historically; it therefore owes us its commitment more than any other nation.

The overarching problem is that the president is incapable of getting his head round a multilateral accord, because, in his one-dimensional worldview, if America isn’t “winning,” i.e. benefiting more than the rest of the world in an agreement, it doesn’t work. The old zero-sum game.

But, of course, withdrawal means the US becomes the loser on the world stage, and the president’s steps leave a vacuum for global leadership which is quickly being filled by China and Europe.

The newly elected president of France, Emmanuel Macron, for one, is brilliantly monopolising on Mr Trump’s errors, boisterously inviting American scientists to come to France and brazenly stealing The Donald’s own campaign slogan and giving it a twist: Make the Planet Great Again.

Mr Macron’s voice was one of a chorus of world leaders to condemn the American President’s decision.

The backlash has been just as strong within the US. Within hours of the announcement, key state governors, mayors and heads of industry reasserted their commitment to the original pledge. Jerry Brown, the Governor of California (a state which recently broke the energy record by producing 80% of its power through renewables) has signed an agreement with China to work together on emissions reductions.

Bill Peduto, the Democrat mayor of Pittsburgh, a city which employs more people in renewables than in steel and which Trump misguidedly referenced in his speech, has moved to issue an executive order which commits Pittsburgh to the Paris deal.

So, Mr Trump may feel comfortable in his rose garden, flanked by climate change sceptics and Republicans essentially bought by the fossil fuel industry; and he may enjoy the fiction of power he experiences when snubbing the rest of the world.

The reality, however, is that his rejection of such a crucial treaty has only served to bolster the rest of the world’s commitment to it.

He finished his speech insisting that the world would no longer laugh at America, which is accurate: the world is laughing at its president.