Europe on Five Trumps a Day

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

It’s no secret that President Donald Trump and his talking dummy Vice President JD Vance only have contempt for Europe as a political entity or military ally. Clearly, Trump’s views about Europe (beyond those he gleans playing golf in Scotland twice a year) come from his Kremlin handlers / Gaza playmates—the likes of Vladimir Putin, Aleksandr Lukashenko, and Viktor Orbán, for whom Europe stands in the way of a Soviet Risorgimento. Vance’s views are that only right-wing parties around Europe represent his personal brand of white Christian nationalism (sorry, Usha), and that the rest of Europe is nothing more than an endless Gay Pride parade or variations on Swedish socialism.

The Greenland shakedown had nothing to do with Golden Domes or enhancing American security, and everything to do with following Putin’s marching orders to deposit a Trojan horse at the center of Europe’s security alliance, NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization). Clearly Putin is taking the view that as the war in Ukraine hasn’t (so far) destroyed the NATO alliance (if anything, it brought Sweden and Finland into the military fold), the next best thing is to dispatch his agent-running-in-the-field (Trump) to Europe with the message that the United States is determined to take Greenland, even if it means American withdrawal from NATO. What more could Putin want from his Rezident in Washington than an end to NATO, withdrawal of American support for Ukraine, and clear Russian sailing (even for its broken-down tanks) to the frontiers of Moldova and the Baltic States?

Trump and Vance are indifferent to Europe’s fate (take that for all of your pre-K lunch programs, health clinics, and trans bathrooms), and happy to see it dissolve between new Soviet hegemony in the east and right-wing nationalists in the west, so long as Trump can carry on with his looting of Venezuela oil money and cash in on his Qatari resorts. I know Trump scores brilliantly in his weekly aptitude and cognitive tests (“beautifully” recognizing the difference between a horse and a zebra), but it will hardly merit him a Nobel Prize if he decides to trade in the European enlightenment for the corrupt values of Vlad the Impaler. For his part, Vance does not mind giving up on Club Med, so long as in 2028 he gets the American franchise for white Christian nationalism (of the Orbán variety) and gets to run alongside men on horseback or armed brown shirts goose-stepping in the streets.

Having lived in Europe for the last 35 years, I don’t get the origins of the Trump-Vance line that Europe is a “hellhole” that has “lost its way” and given up on its “values” (Trump’s rant at Davos and Vance’s lip-syncing at Munich). But then both men only see Europe from 35,000 feet, on their way to bend knees in the direction of kings. In the last year or so, I have been to most European countries, including the Baltics, Finland, and Slovakia. I take trains and ride my bicycle. Along the way (except in parts of the Balkans), I see schools that are well-maintained and inviting; hospitals that run efficiently (except maybe in Brexited Britain); roads that are free of potholes; and cities (from Gdansk to Lisbon and Dublin) that have cultural and nightlife, plus attractive neighborhoods that can be accessed on foot. Poland has rebuilt its railway network and brutalist cities; Kosovo is becoming prosperous; and even Belgrade is showing signs of new life. Granted, sections of North Macedonia and Bosnia are in distress, but Romania is thriving, as is unified Berlin. Is all this a “hellhole”?

As much as I love traveling around Europe, I also like—maybe for historically sentimental reasons?—traveling around the United States. (My new book is called Playing in Peoria, and it’s an account of bike-bus-and-train travels from Chicago to New York.) If Trump and Vance are looking for “hellholes,” might I suggest that they drop by some neighborhoods of Hannibal (the Missouri hometown of Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain), St. Louis, Buffalo, Auburn, or Syracuse. For that matter, if they want to experience world-class potholes, ride a bicycle up Madison Avenue and down Fifth Avenue in New York City. Or to test the limits of trickle-down economics, do what I did in December with my friend Tom Leonard, which was to drive from Harrisburg to Scranton, and see how the anthracite coal industry has left its ugly footprint on central Pennsylvania (which has abandoned schools, decrepit hospitals, boarded-up apartment buildings, no passenger trains, polluted streams, and ugly strip malls). Trump likes to tell anyone who is listening what a “hot country” the United States has become and how “rundown” Europe is, although his only basis of comparison are hotel suites in London and Florida.

Economically, with all his tariffs (both real and threatened), Trump seems to dream of gifting Europe to the Russians and going it alone in the United States (or maybe just in some billionaire bubble around Mar-a-Lago); and he might get his wish. At the same time, Trump might also be brought to justice after his presidency (for running his administration as a racket) and wind up in the Auburn state prison, in upstate New York. And there, under the harsh klieg lights above the prison walls, he can brood over whether he would have been better off ending his days in The Hague, maybe in the company of his Gaza Peace Board.