Are Trump’s attack dogs losing their bite in Europe?
Nationalism and opposition to immigration remain potent forces on both sides of the Atlantic. But interventions in Europe by Donald Trump’s henchmen don’t appear to be helping his political bedfellows.
London | With friends like US President Donald Trump and his attack dogs, who needs enemies?
Both Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth have gone back to the well in the past 36 hours to issue fresh denunciations of the dangers of “mass immigration” in Europe.
President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth. Does their schtick still work in a Europe that has heard it all before? AP
Vance blamed the murder of British teenager Henry Nowak on civilisational decline under lackadaisical European elites; Hegseth gave a speech commemorating the D-Day landings in Normandy to complain about foreigners storming continental beaches armed with “dangerous ideologies”.
But does their schtick still work in a Europe that has heard it all before?
First, any browbeating from Americans on the issue of policing and race is like being given lessons in fire prevention from a pyromaniac. Vance’s moral high ground is risible, given US law enforcement’s record, be it the shoot-to-kill policies of ICE agents, the lack of due process in Trump’s deportation surge or the country’s long and sorry history of police brutality and discrimination against minorities, most notably black man George Floyd in 2020.
Nowak’s murder has drawn parallels to that of Floyd, given that both victims’ final words included “I can’t breathe” as desperate pleas for help.
Floyd’s death at the hands of a white police officer, who pinned him down with a knee on the neck, sparked the global Black Lives Matter protest movement.
Nowak, in turn, was stabbed by a Sikh man, but treated as a suspect by police, who did not believe he was bleeding to death after his killer lied that the young white Briton had racially abused him.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage leapt on the death of Henry Nowak. Getty
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage leapt on the death as proof of two-tier policing, and the case has quite rightly sparked a debate about whether anti-racism training has swung the pendulum too far in how police go about their jobs.
But Vance has framed the debate in more existential terms.
“Henry Nowak died the same way a civilisation dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit,” he posted on X.
“He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”
Relations between the US and UK are at a low point amid Trump’s frequent hectoring of Prime Minister Keir Starmer for his caution over the folly that is the war on Iran. Against this backdrop, Vance’s comments are particularly provocative as they come just days before a crucial byelection in which Labour and Reform UK are waging war.
While not naming Vance, Downing Street hit back.
“We have seen people trying to interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division on our streets,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement.
Hegseth’s speech was also provocative, delivered as it was at an event most associated with the beginning of the end of Nazism.
“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies — beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece and Bulgaria; boats and men arrive,” he said.
“When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”
The question is, do such interventions still have the desired effect? Vance’s last-minute dash to help out authoritarian Viktor Orban in this year’s Hungarian election may have proved counterproductive.
JD Vance’s attempts to help Hungary’s Viktor Orbán did not pay off. Getty
Trump and his administration are unpopular in the UK and across much of Europe. While the far right may be surging in places like Germany and France, their leaders have carefully distanced themselves from Trump.
The European Policy Centre, in a new paper, has described this distancing as “recalibrating”.
“The reasons for this distancing are strategic, not ideological,” the report said. “European far-right parties are built on national sovereignty as a core organising principle, which made Trump’s more aggressive foreign policy moves – his threats to seize Greenland, his administration’s kidnapping of [former Venezuelan president Nicolas] Maduro, his trade tariffs and strikes on Iran – difficult to defend domestically.
“Aligning too closely with an administration that disregards the sovereignty of allied and third states, and whose ‘America First’ policy places European producers at a competitive disadvantage, risks undermining the very ideological foundations these parties stand on.”
It seems the White House hasn’t got the memo.
There is plenty of fertile ground over immigration and integration for the far-right to exploit in Europe and the UK. But while nationalism and opposition to immigration remain potent unifying forces on both sides of the Atlantic, the attacks being delivered in an American accent don’t appear to be helping political bedfellows in Europe.
