Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, was having a rough year. Corruption scandals engulfing his government were monopolizing newscasts, even on the usually slavish state TV. Polls were tanking. Even a favorable court decision was blowing up in his face.

Then, Sanchez appears to have seized on an idea: Why not use President Donald Trump as a bogeyman to revive his fortunes? That worked for Canada’s Mark Carney, who rushed from being well behind in the polls to see his Liberal Party win elections earlier this year after a well-publicized tiff with Trump.

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So, with a NATO summit at the Hague last week, at which the allies were going to display unity and pledge at least 5% of gross domestic product to defense spending, Sanchez decided to be the odd man out. He gambled with his country’s interests in exchange for some hoped-for political respite. In the end, he got neither.

Sanchez said at the Hague that, no, Spain was not going to join the rest of NATO. Its spending on defense would remain an anemic 2.1% of GDP. Despite all of Sanchez’s big talk on world events, especially Ukraine and Gaza, his government would remain Europe’s deadbeat dad. To make matters even worse, Sanchez then told one of his usual whoppers. It was OK not to meet the 5% threshold because, he claimed, NATO had granted him an opt-out. The head of the alliance, Secretary General Mark Rutte, had agreed to this in an exchange of letters, Sanchez said.

“The Spanish government has just reached an agreement with NATO,” Sanchez said on TV. “Spain will, therefore, not spend 5% of its GDP on defense, but its participation, weight, and legitimacy in NATO remain intact.” Sanchez added that it was an “agreement that, in our judgement, is very positive, that will allow us to comply with our commitments with the Atlantic Alliance and preserve something very important, which is its unity, without having to increase our spending on defense.”

Whoa, said Rutte, not so fast. “NATO has no opt-out, and NATO doesn’t know side deals,” he said. “Spain thinks they can achieve those targets with 2.1% spending. NATO is absolutely convinced that Spain will have to spend 3.5% to get there,” Rutte added.

Sanchez’s antics threatened to derail the summit. Bloomberg reported that European officials “expressed irritation at the spoiler role that Sanchez is playing when their No. 1 task is to line up behind a pledge to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP. Rutte needed to keep Spain in line while preventing others such as Slovakia from breaking ranks.”

And what did Sanchez get in return?

Well, he was isolated at the Hague, even in the famous family photo, where he was shunted to the side. Trump vowed retribution. “There’s always a problem with Spain,” Trump said. “We’re going to make them pay twice as much” by hiking tariffs, he promised. Even Sanchez’s own European Union allies were miffed. “I was a bit frustrated that not everybody was enthusiastic about this 5% commitment. I will not hide it,” said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Poland currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency. Tusk has previously made plain his frustrations with Sanchez’s freeloading.

Sanchez also convinced 60% of his countrymen that his confrontational attitude with the U.S. and NATO was harming the interests of their country. Even 48% of voters in his Socialist Workers’ Party agreed with the notion in a poll published Saturday by the newspaper El Mundo.

And, no, Sanchez didn’t solve his problems by breaking NATO unity and isolating himself at the Hague. Friendly justices in Spain’s Constitutional Tribunal may have found an amnesty that Sanchez gave Catalan separatist politicians, in exchange for their support for his minority government, constitutional, despite all evidence to the contrary. But the politicians now say that this isn’t enough to continue their support for the government.

NEPA IS BROKEN BUT THE STATES CAN FIX IT

And yet one more poll published Sunday dealt him a really low blow: More than 66% think he should call early elections because he knew about the corruption payoffs scandals in his government. Things have gotten so bad that the grand old man of Spanish politics, Felipe Gonzalez, who was prime minister from 1982 to 1996, and hails from Sanchez’s own party, rendered this baleful verdict on his successor: “Sanchez no longer has a political life.”

Sanchez “has no power whatsoever. All the power belongs to the Bildu-etarras. It belongs to Puigdemont,” added Gonzalez, referring to the pro-Basque terrorist party Bildu and to Carles Puigdemont, whose Catalan separatist party, like Bildu, allows Sanchez to hold power in a minority government.

Trump is not the forgiving type. Sanchez will now have to await what the White House decides to do with him, while his countrymen turn their backs. Sometimes it’s lonely at the bottom, too.