The Trump administration and the European Union are fast-tracking discussions toward a trade deal, but America’s right sometimes treats the bloc as more foe than friend.
The United States’ populist right has its calling cards. “Make America Great Again” hats. A distaste for immigration. A love of tax cuts.
But a more subtle unifying thread has been creeping into Republican discourse for years — one that has exploded onto the global stage, with the potential to reshape the contours of alliances and redirect the flows of global trade.
MAGA deeply dislikes the European Union.
And the pronounced skepticism could have real consequences as Mr. Trump wages a trade war on the bloc — especially in the coming weeks, after American and European officials vowed to “fast-track” their negotiations toward closing a deal.
It is not just President Trump, who has said that the European Union was formed to take advantage of America. Or only Vice President JD Vance, who warned that Europe was retreating from its “fundamental values” during a speech in Munich this year. Or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who in a leaked Signal chat called America’s continental allies “pathetic.”
The ethos is also a mainstay of right-leaning television in the United States. “Europeans for the most part do not share our values,” Laura Ingraham, the conservative TV host, said this year, citing European climate policies that might drive society into “economic ruin,” differences in views of free speech, and the right to bear arms — sacrosanct in America, but something not fundamental and subject to restrictions in Europe.
It crops up in conservative commentary. European negotiators “move slower than a French escargot,” a recent Fox News opinion article about trade negotiations quipped, before predicting that Europeans will spend trade talks waltzing “us through their organic, manicured gardens again with no result.”
