Snubs, slights and cold shoulders
Trump’s bile over what he calls the “very nasty” EU is nothing new. It has long riled him as a trade heavyweight that runs bumper surpluses in goods with the United States, while relying on America for military protection. Most famously he has fumed over the number of luxury German cars on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Belgium, seat of the EU institutions, is one of his “shithole” countries.
But he still had to deal with top EU officials. And in the course of transatlantic arguments, he even took a liking to 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 at times droll in the trade war of the first term.
“There was always a bit of a show,” said Schinas, who was chief spokesperson under then President Jean-Claude Juncker, before becoming a commissioner himself under von der Leyen. “But the fact is that he liked Juncker. He liked [then European Council President Donald] Tusk. They sniffed each other, and they saw it was OK.”
When Juncker travelled to D.C. in July 2018, at the height of EU-U.S. trade tensions, the talks between Trump and the EU’s multilingual Luxembourgish president were “very colorful,” with “lots of jokes, innuendo, petites phrases … It was this very transactional give-and-take that worked.”
This time, however, Trump seems to be in no mood to engage with EU officials. Of all EU leaders, only Italy’s nationalist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, secured an official invitation to his presidential inauguration, just like other far-right European politicians who crowded the Capitol for the event.
While von der Leyen met with Vance — who’s repeatedly incurred European outrage — in Munich, neither she nor Costa have scored an in-person meeting with Trump since his inauguration.