When we’re serious, we don’t every day say the opposite of what we said the day before,” French President Emmanuel Macron said last week adding, cuttingly: “And, maybe, one shouldn’t speak every day.”
It sounded like a grown-up speaking down to an obstreperous child, and that was probably what the French president intended. The target of his admonition was, of course, Donald Trump. Macron was speaking shortly after the US president had issued another boorish rant that included rude comments about the French president and his wife.
Macron is one of the few European leaders who have dealt with Trump almost from the first day of his first term. His transition from initial deference and feigned friendship to very public rebuke reflects the degree to which respect for the US president has fallen among European leaders and their publics. Trump’s war on Iran, about which NATO allies were not consulted and in which they subsequently declined to participate, has made clear that Europeans no longer defer to Trump as the de facto “leader of the free world.”
Trump’s comments about Macron and his wife were made at an Easter lunch with Christian leaders and close allies. But that luncheon talk was only a squall in a period in which Trump, fired up by an Iran war that was not going as he liked, let loose fiery threats to annihilate the country. On Tuesday, he declared that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” effectively threatening a grave violation of the Geneva Conventions. Eighty-eight minutes before the apocalyptic 8 pm deadline, Trump backed down.
There was a time when Trump’s stream of insults, falsehoods, expletives, threats and malice would have raised questions among foreign leaders as to whether Trump was being deliberately obnoxious to achieve a goal — say, to get European allies to pay more for NATO, or as a variant on the “madman theory” strategy devised by President Richard Nixon to convince rivals that the president was dangerously unpredictable. They tried to appease Trump with praise and pomp, hoping to steer him in a more productive direction.
But more than a year into Trump’s return to the White House, the Europeans, and much of the world, have concluded that no amount of bowing or scraping will win more than fleeting approval from him. His words and actions have erased any illusion among most Europeans that Trump is anything but an unpredictable, vindictive and uncontrollable danger.
Trump’s current beef with NATO is that none of its members responded to his call for military help in opening the Strait of Hormuz, raising questions about whether he will try to pull the United States out of the alliance, or whether the alliance even has any meaning now. So far, however, that has not persuaded any European leaders to capitulate, despite Trump’s constant trolling. Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, has said he would stick to his position on the war “whatever the noise.” Last month, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius struck a similar note, saying, “This is not our war.” Trump responded by calling NATO allies “cowards.”
Even Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, one of Trump’s closest European allies, distanced herself from his seemingly unprecedented threats to Iran this week. That effectively left Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, as Trump’s most loyal ally in Europe. Orbán’s stance on the Iran war, however, is unclear.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who is considered something of a Trump whisperer, may be one of the very few — if not the last — European leader still clinging to the policy of flattery. But in a social media post after talks with Rutte, the president reiterated his ire and threw in Greenland for good measure.
The shouty missive elicited no major pushback from foreign leaders. This was Trump being Trump: tedious, repetitive, vulgar. He is still dangerous, and he could still unleash terror on the people of Iran should the ceasefire collapse. But his uppercase blasts, chest-thumping rants and coarse insults are more likely now to draw a Gallic shrug.
The New York Times