Donald Trump may have been speaking to the 192 other world leaders gathered in the United Nations, but the real target of his speech on Tuesday was Europe, which was hauled up repeatedly as the whipping boy for an antiliberal, blood-and-soil polemic that renewed an assault on the transatlantic relationship that has become a theme of his second administration.
In an hourlong address to the assembled world leaders and delegations, Trump told European leaders directly that they were destroying their own countries – and that they should be more like the US as he condemned their policies on immigration, green energy and political correctness.
These were not subtle digs. On migration, he told Europeans that “your countries are going to hell.” On Europe’s approach to climate change, he said it was “on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda”. On the war in Ukraine, he said Europe was “funding the war against themselves. Who the hell ever heard of that one?”
He even found time to target local politicians such as Sadiq Khan, whom he called a “terrible, terrible mayor” and said that London “wants to go to Sharia law”. There was a barrage of claims about immigrants and questionable statistics about the prison populations in Germany and “beautiful Switzerland”. At moments, he would not have been out of place running for European parliament.
“If you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail,” he said during the speech. “I’m the president of the United States, but I worry about Europe. I love Europe, I love the people of Europe. And I hate to see it being devastated by [green] energy and immigration, that double-tailed monster that destroys everything in its wake.”
This is red meat for his supporters, and observers from across the aisle in the United States quickly identified Trump’s likely audience as his own base. The first 10 minutes were almost a classic stump speech, with Trump telling foreign leaders about how well he had handled inflation and that after just eight months in office “we are the hottest country anywhere in the world, and there is no other country even close”.
But then he turned his gaze to the failures of the United Nations and other world leaders – in which an aide forecast that he would denounce “globalists”. US conservatives would have been delighted to watch Trump tear into European liberals, who were forced to watch and politely applaud as they were accused of gross mismanagement of their countries.
“Let’s not pretend this is a foreign policy speech or dignify it by calling it one,” wrote Ned Price, a former deputy to the US representative to the United Nations during the Biden administration. “This is basically Maga madlibs. Trump is speaking to his political base, hitting each of his campaign trail hits, while addressing a room of leaders who’d rather be just about anywhere else.”
If Trump’s speech did have a foreign policy predecessor, it would be JD Vance’s address earlier this year at the Munich security conference, when the US vice-president launched into a tirade against European leaders over conservative hobby horses including migration and claims that Europe was stifling free speech.
“No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants,” Vance told them during a speech that the EU’s top diplomat said sounded like he was “trying to pick a fight”. “If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”
Trump didn’t mention European voters on Tuesday, but he did accuse European leaders of “destroying your heritage” – a claim shared by rightwing groups in Europe with whom the US president and his allies have been increasingly friendly.
“You’re doing it because you want to be nice, you want to be politically correct,” he told them mockingly. Once again, it sounded very much like the administration was seeking to pick a fight with Europe.
