President Donald Trump has always craved validation, but his latest attempt to manufacture it — right in front of a room full of business leaders — landed with such awkward desperation that critics couldn’t resist poking fun. Trump, in true form digressed from the conversation, as he usuall y does, to brag about a recent accomplishment. U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a roundtable discussion with top business leaders in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on December 10, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) During the meeting Wednesday, Dec. 10, the President suddenly began crowing about his trip to the Middle East last May. “When I left the Middle East, we brought back $3 trillion and lots of Boeing airplanes like 300,” Trump blustered, “and Boeing gave me the award for the greatest salesman in the history of Boeing, which was a nice little award.” ‘Gavin’s Not Playing Around!’: Newsom Avoided Insulting Stephen Miller’s Wife — Until She Came for Him, and He Finished Her on the Spot But the room’s reaction took an unexpected turn when they erupted into laughter. An odd reaction to someone boasting about an acomplishment. And instead of reading the moment, Trump doubled down. The laughter seemed to fuel him and he embellished even further. “Which is a nice little award … I think I’ve sold a thousand Boeing planes — can you believe? Now all they have to do is make them, OK? They gotta make them.” The actual numbers tell a different story. During his Middle East trip, Qatar Airways ordered 210 planes and Saudi Arabia ordered 30 — nowhere near 300, and galaxies away from “1,000.” His claim of bringing back $3 trillion is equally false; the combined pledges amounted to around $1.4 trillion — speculative future investments, not U.S. revenue. But for viewers, this wasn’t just standard Trump exaggeration. It was the neediness, the visible thirst for approval, that stole the spotlight. And social media let him have it. “He’s the preschooler with his hand waving in the air, yelling ‘pick me, pick me, pick me.’ Such a sad sack,” one person wrote. View on Threads “Trump’s mind is broken. Person, woman, man, camera, TV,” another mocked. Another commenter added, “Trump is so easily played — he’s candy for anyone smarter than he is, meaning almost everybody.” And one viewer didn’t mince words about what they believed was really happening. “He is so obsessed with “attention” that he just can’t see that it’s because everyone now knows he’s a sucker for it — and will get them benefits otherwise unavailable.” “How does he not know this is embarrassing and just makes people laugh at him even more,” another pointedly observed. But after all the President’s bragging about Boeing, the aircraft maker apparently missed out on a multimillion-dollar deal with Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. The Washington Post reported Wednesday, Dec. 10, that DHS signed a $140 million deal with Virginia-based Daedalus Aviation which will in turn buy six Boeing 737’s to operate deportation flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. NEW: The U.S. just spent $140 million to buy a fleet of Boeing 737s so ICE can run its own deportation airline.Not healthcare. Not housing.Airplanes for mass deportations.This is the future Trump is building. pic.twitter.com/Zz4qWy3yzz— Carolyn Barber, MD (@cbarbermd) December 10, 2025 It means DHS will have its own fleet of aircraft to speed up mass deportations instead of having to depend on charter flights A DHS spokesperson confirmed to the Guardian that, “This new initiative will save $279 million in taxpayer dollars by allowing ICE to operate more effectively, including by using more efficient flight patterns.” The Post reported the money for the contract will come from the $170 billion budget Congress approved for Trump’s border and immigration plans. Trump set a goal of  deporting a million people by the end of his first year in office which also reported ICE will have removed more than 600,000 this year by the end of the month with another 70,000 in detention centers in the U.S. Boeing, meanwhile, has been in hot water over the past seven years and narrowly avoided criminal charges after hundreds of people died in two jet crashes months apart in 2018 and 2019 involving faulty 737 Max airliners and calling into question the safety of the manufacturer’s planes. A federal judge in Texas ruled last month that the company won’t face criminal conspiracy charges over the crashes and dismissed the government’s case, NPR reported. But Boeing is still on the hook for more than a billion dollars, which includes compensation to victims’ families and fines. ‘His Mind Is Broken’: Trump Tries to Impress a Room He Can’t Even Read — and When They React, His Desperate Pivot Turns Him Into the Total ‘Sucker’ ...read more read less