That photo of President Trump being glared at by the leaders of the big democracies has certainly gone viral. The picture from Quebec was met by the Times’ David Leonhardt with a column headlined “Trump Tries To Destroy the West.” The picture shows the President seated with his arms crossed and chin out, as he’s being frowned upon by Chancellor Merkel, President Macron, and Prime Ministers Abe and May, among others.

Say, does that remind of anything? Like, oh, possibly, one of those debates in the 2016 Republican primary? Remember that situation? There were 17 candidates at the start. It made for a veritable free for all. Only one of them, though, refused to promise to endorse the winner handed up by the GOP nominating process. Only one of them broke with Republican orthodoxy. And only one of them ended up in the White House.

CHIN UP: President Trump has the G-7 leaders right where he wants them and is right to stand apart. Let them remember how he routed all 16 of the Republican presidential primary candidates from whom he, too, stood apart. Better for Mr. Trump to stand apart from the Groups and focus on bilateral relations. (Image source: Bundesregierung / Denzel)

Mr. Trump had the whole gang against him — including the Sun, on trade and immigration — but he stuck to his principles, if that’s what they were, and routed all 16 variations on GOP orthodoxy, from neoconservatives to paleo-conservatives to libertarians to the Bush dynasty. The party handed up a president like no other, to borrow the phrase that our columnist Conrad Black uses as the title of his new biography of Mr. Trump.

The thing to remember here is that Mr. Trump didn’t create the European crisis. It began to come into focus in the 1980s, five years before the United Kingdom Independence Party emerged. The EU had become statist and corrupt — and, to an astonishing degree, anti-American. In 1988, Prime Minister Thatcher declared, at Bruges, that Britain had not rolled back the frontiers of the state at home only to see them re-imposed in Europe.

Our editor swung behind the idea of Britain leaving the EU back then. A generation later, Mr. Trump was almost alone in understanding that Brexit was a logical reaction to the EU and an opportunity for Britain and America. There is no doubt that, as Mr. Leonhardt noted, the alliance between America and Europe has achieved great things. That doesn’t mean, though, that America has to sit forever for the kind of truculence we’ve been getting from Europe for decades.

Our sentiments go back to Vietnam and European waffling in the Cold War. We recoil at European obnoxiousness in respect of Israel. France switched, in 1967, to the Arab side. It is still siding against America and Israel in respect of Jerusalem. It is operating against us on the Iran deal. One can talk free trade theory (we’re with Professor Donald Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek). Whoever reckons the EU is friendly toward the United States on trade, though, hasn’t covered Brussels.

The New York Sun has long been an Atlanticist newspaper, but we’ve long since lost any taste for these multilateral institutions and the Groups. In our view, Larry Kudlow was spot on when he defended Mr. Trump’s refusal to sign the G-7 communique. We don’t see the point in bringing Russia into the G-7 to make it the G-8. Better we ourselves should pull out and, where possible, confine our dealings with the large countries — hard to call Russia a democracy — to a bilateral basis.