What Does MAGA Have Against Europe? --- You've heard about anti-Americanism. Welcome to anti-Europeanism

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"It was a text message the public was never supposed to see. Vice President JD Vance and other top Trump administration officials were using the messaging app Signal to discuss a planned military strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have been disrupting shipping through the Red Sea -- a vital commercial route, especially for Europe. "I just hate bailing Europe out again," Vance wrote. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth quickly agreed: "I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It's PATHETIC."

Because a journalist -- Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic -- was accidentally included in the Signal chat, the texts went public, offering evidence of a theme that is fast emerging as one of the hallmarks of Trump 2.0: a visceral dislike of Europe. Call it anti-Europeanism, a kind of mirror image of European anti-Americanism. The latter is strongest on the left; the former is rooted in the right. Both rely on stereotypes and caricatures that often contain a kernel of truth.

Europeans, even those who thought they were prepared for a second Trump presidency, have been stunned by the speed of events. In its first two months, the administration has targeted the EU with tariffs as part of a global trade war, adopted Russia's talking points about events in Ukraine, bypassed Europe while negotiating with Moscow about how to end the conflict and watered down commitments to defend European allies against attack. "If they don't pay, I'm not going to defend them," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in early March. "Think of it -- we're paying 100% of their military, and they're screwing us on trade," he added.

Just in case Europe isn't getting the memo, Trump also wants Denmark to hand over Greenland to the U.S.

Perhaps even more than the tectonic policy shifts, it's the tone of open contempt that has shocked Europeans, as well as many Americans who support the longstanding trans-Atlantic alliance. The verbal barrage began in February, when Vance spoke at a security conference in Munich that was meant to focus on the threat of Russia.

Instead, the vice president delivered a culture-war broadside against European governments, accusing them of suppressing free speech, particularly by conservative opponents of immigration and abortion.

Soon afterward, when Britain and France discussed sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine, Vance dismissed the idea of "20,000 troops from some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years." After a furious reaction in those two countries -- which deployed tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan over two decades to back up the U.S., hundreds of whom were killed in action -- Vance denied he had been referring to them.

Trump and Vance's dressing-down of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House was the most high-profile humiliation of a visiting European leader, but not the only one.

Polish President Andrzej Duda got only 10 minutes with Trump after crossing the Atlantic to see him, while the European Union's foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, who grew up in Soviet-occupied Estonia, was stood up by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio after flying to Washington, D.C., for talks. (Rubio's office blamed "scheduling difficulties.")

The EU is the result of a long process of European integration that the U.S. encouraged from the 1950s onward, but Trump has said that "It was formed in order to screw the United States." Little wonder that Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU's executive arm, has been unable to get face time with senior Trump officials.

Other figures close to Trump, including his billionaire benefactor Elon Musk and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, attack Europe on social and cultural grounds. MAGA leaders believe the continent is geopolitically irrelevant, economically moribund, morally decadent and demographically doomed by falling birthrates.

They also accuse Europe of turning its back on its Christian heritage, while allowing itself to be overrun by Muslim migrants. "Europe is at risk of engaging in civilizational suicide," Vance told Fox News earlier this month.

The leaked text messages offered clear evidence that the Euro-bashing isn't just political posturing. "There's a big difference between standing up in Munich and finger-wagging, which is obviously performative, and sending a text to one of your mates on Signal where you don't think anyone is listening," said Andrew Roberts, a British historian. "That is where you let your hair down and say what you really think. And they apparently feel hatred and resentment and fury against an entire continent which is pretending to be democratic."

Cultural friction between Europe and America is as old as the United States. In the 18th century, America defined itself as free, forward-looking and optimistic, in contrast to the repressive and hidebound Old World. American suspicion of European snootiness was matched by Europeans' contempt for Americans' vulgarity and materialism.

The trans-Atlantic relationship warmed up after World War II, as the U.S. promoted reconstruction and democracy in Western Europe. The European left remained critical of American capitalism, but the threat of Soviet Communism brought American and European governments together to form NATO, one of the most successful alliances in history.

Inevitably, the disappearance of the common enemy at the end of the Cold War brought tensions between Europe and the U.S. to the surface. In the 1990s, European leaders' failure to stop the wars in the former Yugoslavia bred frustration in Washington.

As America's high-tech sector boomed, Europe's slow adoption of digital technologies deepened perceptions of a sclerotic continent.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, opposition from France, Germany and other countries led to the sharpest tensions for decades. The aggressive policy and verbal stumbles of President George W. Bush played into European stereotypes about unsophisticated American cowboys. Meanwhile, Americans accused Europeans of being appeasers or even "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," a jokey insult for the French borrowed from TV's "The Simpsons."

Historian Robert Kagan captured the divergence in a memorable phrase: "Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus." He meant that Europe believed in a world governed by rules and multilateral institutions, while the U.S. recognized the anarchic nature of international affairs, where raw power mattered.

Back then, most Americans didn't hate Europe, Kagan says: "The animosity was mostly coming from Europe." That is changing now that MAGA Republicans see Europe as an extension of blue-state America, full of latte-sipping progressives who love high taxes and open borders.

"When they say 'Europe,' they mean liberal Europe," says Kagan. "This is being driven primarily by domestic ideological and political battles." He notes that Trump and his top aides have no problem with European nativists such as Hungarian leader Viktor Orban or the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD).

As for Trump's pivot toward Russia, "The warmth for Putin is partly because he's an anti-liberal world leader," Kagan says. "Trump and Co. have decided this is the thing. And his supporters will follow."

Europe's democracies aren't the only targets of Trump's claim of unfair treatment, as Canada and Mexico can attest. And Trump's anti-Europeanism is partly an expression of longstanding U.S. frustrations, especially over the unequal burden of defense spending within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. American conservatives have long argued that Europe can afford generous welfare benefits only because the U.S. is paying for its security. But such critics, including Republicans like former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, tended to be strongly pro-NATO; they just wanted Europe to step up.

Trump's scorn is deeper. Long before he ran for president, he believed that the U.S.'s role as the guardian of world trade and security was bad for Americans. As early as 1990, he said the U.S. was being ripped off by "our so-called allies," singling out Germany and Japan for selling too many cars in the U.S. This week, that long-term grievance inspired Trump's announcement of a 25% tariff on all car imports, starting April 3. "Frankly, friend has been oftentimes much worse than foe," he told reporters this week.

Meanwhile, since returning to the White House Trump has continued to express admiration for people whom Republicans used to view as America's enemies, such as Russia's Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un.

For Trump and his inner circle, the EU is the beating heart of the globalist elite they blame for rigging the rules of world trade to hurt American workers and espousing multiculturalism and wokeness.

Much of MAGA would be thrilled to see other European countries follow in the footsteps of Britain, which left the EU in 2020, says Mujtaba Rahman of Eurasia Group, a political-risk consulting firm. "They believe in strong nation states, with power drained away from Brussels," he said. "They would much rather have equivalent MAGA-type allies in power."

Vance and other critics of Europe say they're unhappy with Europe's governing establishment, not its people. "I think JD seriously loves Europe," says Rod Dreher, a conservative writer who is a longtime friend of the vice president. Dreher says he showed Vance around Paris on a trip in 2018 and that he raved about it. But, Dreher adds, "it's hard for any American to feel sanguine about where Europe is, watching their inability to get a grasp on migration."

MAGA commentators argue that out-of-touch technocratic elites are mismanaging the continent while running scared from their own voters, who are increasingly turning to far-right parties like AfD. After a little-known far-right candidate came first in Romania's presidential election last November, the country's constitutional court annulled the vote, citing intelligence about Russian interference. For many right-wing populists, it was another example of European elites ignoring the people's will.

Yet the truth is that many of Europe's problems -- including chronically low economic growth, burdensome welfare states and military weakness -- are a result of popular policies. Voters in many European countries have long been skeptical of market-oriented economic overhauls and higher defense spending.

The real sore point in European politics is immigration. Large numbers of refugees and economic migrants have entered Europe from the poor and war-torn regions around it, and growing frustration among voters is driving support for anti-immigration parties across the continent. Elon Musk regularly predicts violent conflict in Europe between the indigenous population and radicalized Muslim migrants: "Civil war is inevitable," he posted on his social-media platform X last August during anti-immigrant riots in the U.K. Most Europeans view this prospect as an absurd exaggeration, despite the continent's real problems of poor integration.

What scares America's European allies the most is Trump's about-face on Ukraine. The U.S. has been cutting back its military commitments since before Trump's first term, but now it is actively pursuing a rapprochement with Moscow. Europe fears that this will embolden Putin's ambitions, at the expense of Ukraine's sovereignty and European security.

European leaders believe the Trump administration is changing U.S. policy on a real conflict to reflect its preferences in the culture wars. But for MAGA, which has refrained from criticizing Russia, it would appear liberal Europe poses more serious a threat to freedom as Putin's power.

"There's something fundamentally deeper here that shows a huge difference and divergence between the values that President Trump and Vice President Vance are fighting for, versus those of many of the European countries who are coming to Zelensky's side," Gabbard told Fox News after the Ukrainian leader was castigated in the Oval Office as WWIII enthusiast.

 "EU claims to champion freedom, but their actions tell a different story."” [1]

 1. REVIEW --- What Does MAGA Have Against Europe? --- You've heard about anti-Americanism. Welcome to anti-Europeanism. Luhnow, David; Walker, Marcus.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 29 Mar 2025: C1.