Snubs, light and cold shoulders
Trump’s bile on what he calls the EU “very nasty” is nothing new. He agitated it for a long time as a commercial heavyweight which manages excess bumper in goods with the United States, while relying on America for military protection. The most famous, he failed on the number of German luxury cars on the fifth avenue de New York. Belgium, the seat of EU institutions, is one of its “Shithole” countries.
But he still had to face the senior EU officials. And during transatlantic arguments, he even took a taste for some of them. Margaritis Schinas, who was chief spokesperson for the European Commission during Trump’s first term, recalls transatlantic relations as being tense, but functional and sometimes funny in the first term trade war.
“There has always been a little show,” said Schinas, who was the chief spokesperson under President Jean-Claude Juncker, before becoming a commissioner himself under Von Der Leyen. “But the fact is that he loved Juncker. He loved (then the president of the European Council Donald) Tusk. They woven each other and they saw that it was going. »»
When Juncker went to DC in July 2018, at the height of the EU-US trade tensions, the talks between Trump and the Multilingual Luxembourg president of the EU were “very colorful”, with “a lot of jokes, innuendos, Phrases … It was this very transactional appearance that worked. »»
This time, however, Trump does not seem in a mood to engage with EU officials. Of all the leaders of the EU, only the Italian nationalist prime minister Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán of Hungary, obtained an official invitation to his presidential inauguration, as well as the other European politicians of the far right who cluttered the Capitol for the event.
While Von Der Leyen met Vance – who has repeatedly engaged in European indignation – in Munich, neither she nor Costa has marked a meeting in person with Trump since its inauguration.
Politices
