JD Vance brings 'Trump tornado' to Paris at AI summit

At a far-right rally in Madrid this weekend, Orban, Le Pen and Salvini called on the US president to go even harder against Europe. The vice president arrives in Paris today intending to do just that.

US Vice President JD Vance, who in September threatened that the US could pull out of NATO if the EU refuses to drop its laws governing content on American-owned social media platforms like X, is set to chastise the old continent as he delivers a keynote speech at the AI Summit taking place in Paris’s Grand Palais. He is expected to demand the EU drops its recently-adopted legislation protecting online users from disinformation and harmful content (the DSA and AI Act). It will fall to EU President Ursula von der Leyen, who will also be giving a keynote speech, to either defend the rules she adopted or to raise the white flag and signal she will surrender in the face of Vance’s threats.

Vance is delivering on the instructions of X’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom have called on the Trump administration to pressure the EU into dropping its content rules which they say amount to “censorship”. They are particularly aghast at the idea that the EU would have the audacity to regulate American companies - despite these companies having more users in the EU than in the United States. Vance is also likely to criticise European courts. Just on Friday, a German court ordered Musk to hand over its data about interference in the German election using the platform X ahead of the national vote in two weeks. Last week the French public prosecutor also opened an investigation into allegations that X has algorithmic bias which is boosting the French far right. Vance will likely also be bringing his threats to von der Leyen directly when he meets with her on the sidelines of the summit tomorrow.

Vance’s tough talk will delight Europe’s far right, who this weekend gathered for a rally in Madrid, full of effusive praise for Donald Trump and his threats to Europe. They have for years complained about censorship against them online and have welcomed Musk’s promotion of them on his powerful social media platform. French far right leader Marine Le Pen told the crowd that Trump’s win will bring “real change” to Europe, and complained that the EU’s rules have left Europe handicapped in the ongoing technological revolutions - particularly in AI. She said Europeans must now vote the far right into power because “We are the only ones that can talk with the new Trump administration.”

“Yesterday we were the heretics - today we are the mainstream!” bellowed Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban. “In America, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria and Hungary, the patriots are winning. The next step will be the Czech Republic!” “Our friend Trump, the Trump tornado, has changed the world in just a few weeks. An era is over. Today, everyone sees that we are the future,” Orban added. Le Pen agreed: “Every election that comes in Europe sees the dominoes fall one after the other, as if the political game were aligning in an inexorable movement.”

Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini and Spanish far right leader Santiago Abascal both welcomed Trump’s attacks on Europe and downplayed his tariff threats. “The real tariff is the EU Green Deal and the confiscatory taxes of Brussels and socialist governments across Europe," said Abascal. Salvini said a “historic opportunity” is around the corner as the German far right stands poised for a great victory in the election on 23 February. “We are living in a historic age, and my message to all the old leaders from Macron to Scholz, to your own Pedro Sanchez: It's your time. It's over now. They are history,” said Geert Wilders, who leads the largest party in the Dutch government.

But the European far right could be playing with fire in its enthusiastic embrace of a man who is deeply unpopular with the European public, and is growing ever more so as he threatens Europe both militarily and economically.

Today in Strasbourg the European Parliament is holding a debate about the coming EU-US trade war. It is an opportunity for MEPs from the center and the left to point to the comments from the far right rally over the weekend and say these people are selling out Europeans to the highest bidder. “The extreme right never ceases to praise Trump and Musk whose policy aims quite simply to destroy our factories, our agriculture, our viticulture,” said Aurore Lalucq, the French center-left chair of the Parliament’s economic committee. “Marine Le Pen has joined the sect of Donald Trump worshipers and is part of a European Trumpism. It is up to the French to judge this choice of the RN to support an American president who threatens Europeans,” added liberal MEP Nathalie Loiseau.

The problem, of course, is that while they see a tight embrace of Trump from Europe’s far right leaders (both those in power like Orban and Meloni and those in opposition like Le Pen and Abascal), they are not seeing a strong denunciation of him from Europe’s centrist leaders in power. President Von der Leyen has been so cautious about criticising Trump in any way that Le Pen mocked her at the rally as being in hiding. “Ursula von der Leyen has almost disappeared from the screens,” she laughed. President Macron, eager to rekindle his 2017 bromance with the US president, has also held his fire. The UK’s Keir Starmer has looked terrified to say anything any time the subject has come up, and has resolutely kept his head down. Only in Germany have politicians, uncharacteristically, been willing to speak up forcefully against Trump’s trade war and his threats against Greenland and Gaza. And that is because there is an election coming in two weeks. They can see that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, still polling in second place, may be falling into a trap with its effusive praise of Trump and his tariffs which will hurt all Europeans. And so we see Merz for the first time acknowledge the danger Trump presents at a campaign rally last week.

But the only way that European voters will punish the far right’s firm embrace of Trump at the expense of Europeans is if they are given a clear choice between those who support him and those who vow to protect Europeans against him. They are not getting that message from Europe’s leaders, however, because the European political and foreign policy elite come from a generation of Atlanticists who are psychologically unable to admit what the United States has become. On one hand voters see far right politicians who say they can weather the storm because they are allies with Trump. On the other hand they see centrist politicians who seem to be in denial that there’s any storm coming at all. It is time for Europe’s leadership to grow a spine and defend their citizens from the American threat. If they don’t, they are living on borrowed time.