This week we learned how badly Europeans want to be fooled

UK media were easily bought off with cheap flattery on Thursday, heralding Starmer's Trump visit as a grand success. Continental reactions to Macron's Monday visit were similar. Then came Friday.

On Friday morning, Britain’s papers of all political persuasions ran headlines celebrating UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s meeting with Trump as a grand success. The Daily Mirror called the prime minister "Charmer Starmer" and the i newspaper called the meeting a "diplomatic win". The Sun called it a "love-in", while the Daily Mail said Trump and Starmer had "struck up an unlikely bromance" which could "forge a fruitful partnership.”

Reading these headlines, I felt like they were somehow watching a different visit than the one I watched, which was painfully cringe. As I said in my Substack Live video yesterday afternoon, Starmer looked like a deer in headlights, terrified of saying the wrong thing. He read studiously from his notes when answering questions, almost afraid to look up. He seemed to get so caught up in the relief that Trump had decided to praise him rather than humiliate him as the Labour government had expected and feared that he forgot the seriousness of the moment.

It wasn’t just Starmer that seemed to get caught up in that relief - the British media gushed over Trump’s patronising compliments. All Trump had to say were the words “special relationship” and the UK press was eating out of his hand. “What a beautiful accent” Trump said of Starmer’s voice, calling him a “tough negotiator” and saying the UK is a great country. He said Starmer had tried his best to convince him not to tariff the UK, and Starmer grinned like a schoolboy who got a good review on his homework. But even though Starmer gave away his ace card - an unprecedented invitation from King Charles for a second state visit to the UK - he got absolutely nothing in return. You wouldn’t have been able to tell it from the exuberant UK press coverage, but when Starmer left Washington the situation was completely unchanged. Trump had not given any reassurances on security guarantees for Ukraine or on not launching a trade war against the UK.

To make matters worse, Starmer managed to enrage many Canadians by failing to show support for Canada when asked by a reporter about Trump’s tariff and 51st state threats, even saying (whether he meant to or not is unclear) that there is "no distance between the US and UK on this issue. He started to say more, and maybe he would have cleaned that up, but Trump interrupted Starmer and shouted “that’s enough” before taking another question - another humiliation that Starmer meekly accepted.

Not everyone in the British media was so bamboozled by Trump’s compliments. Times columnist Matthew Paris wrote on Friday morning that Trump had “patronised” a “simpering” Starmer, and the prime minister had “pandered to Trump with the cheap stunt” of a royal invitation. It must have taken Trump "a fair amount of self-control not to pat our prime minister on the head,” he wrote.

Reactions in continental Europe to Macron’s visit with Trump on Monday were not dissimilar. Back was the first term talk of a “bromance” between Macron and Trump, which is apparently what we call Trump’s relationship with anyone he doesn’t curse out and insult to their face. While Macron certainly looked stronger and more in control than Starmer, the outcome of his meeting was not any more consequential. Macron also walked away with nothing, despite his unsubstantiated claim that Trump had said he might consider security guarantees (the White House said after that this didn’t happen). But again, you wouldn’t know it from the triumphal media coverage upon the French president’s return. And few in the European media seemed to care when US Secretary of State Marco Rubio humiliated his EU counterpart Kaja Kallas (likely intentionally) by having her fly all the way to Washington on Wednesday to meet with him only to then blow her off. That went under the radar amid all the ecstatic Macron/Starmer visit coverage.

It’s like the media and politicians are fish swimming in circles in a fishbowl, unable to remember Trump’s first term. The weird sighs of relief after this week’s meetings are perhaps more understandable from a psychological level than a rational one. I find it very difficult to understand how so many in the UK media could have heard Trump’s vague reference to having a US-UK trade deal and decided that it meant major progress and there could be a deal done in a few months. It reminded of me of when the UK government and media were so thrilled that Theresa May got the first invite fore a foreign leader after Trump first took office in 2017. She sat there with him, he was reasonably polite to her and said sure sure, we’re going to do a trade deal very fast. She in return was effusive in her praise for him. She then got on a plane and went for a diplomatic visit to Turkey, and while she was in the air Trump came out with his ban on Muslim immigrants, which then made her praise for him only a few hours earlier look very unpalatable. Starmer is in the same situation now, only much much worse. And, spoiler alert, the UK never got that trade deal Trump told May he would deliver.

Look, nobody actually expected a “Love Actually” moment. Of course I’m not suggesting that Macron or Starmer should have travelled to Washington and told Trump off in front of the cameras. But they could have behaved as they would on a state visit to a country that is not considered an ally but also not an enemy, like Brazil or India. But instead they behaved as if everything was normal and said their countries are still unshakable allies. Trump gifted them the ability to maintain that artifice by not lashing out, and for that the media cheered. But nobody stopped to question why he was doing that, at the same time that his administration is attacking and denigrating the European Union. The reason is clear: Trump is pursuing a divide-and-conquer strategy where you flatter individual leaders when they come grovelling to you, while denigrating Europe as a whole. There is a reason Trump said this week that the EU was “born the screw” the United States - he knows that the EU is the only thing that would make Europeans not dependent on him.

Following yesterday’s ambush in the oval office, the relieved reaction to Macron and Starmer’s visits look completely absurd. So why were Europeans so irrational about this? It’s clear that in this extremely scary time, people are looking for any small sign that things could return back to normalcy, even that they could return to the way things were in Trump’s first term. Europeans have really wanted to delude themselves that what they’re seeing with their own eyes happening in America is not, in fact, actually happening. One friend in London texted me on Thursday, “see, it’s not going to be as bad as we thought.”

But it is bad, and Friday’s shocking scenes are a reminder of that. At some point, Europeans are going to have to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the United States is no longer an ally. Continuing these visits where European leaders pretend that everything was as it was before is going to be more and more untenable - and it is enraging to many European citizens who can see the disconnect between reality and what their leaders are saying. I found it also bizarre that the media was acting like European leaders were showing great courage Friday night by all together putting out boilerplate statements of their support for Ukraine. Take a look at those statements below compiled by Yashar Ali. None of them actually reference the oval office incident which they are responding to. If you didn’t know what had happened, you would wonder why all these leaders just suddenly felt like repeating their support for Ukraine at 10pm on a Friday night.

Tweets compiled by Yashar Ali

But there was one European in a position of power who was willing to acknowledge that had happened, and that was EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, who wrote: “Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.” For that, I hear, she’s getting flack today from some of the EU’s national foreign ministers who she presides over for speaking beyond her remit and not consulting them to take several days to craft a lowest-common-denominator statement. But she is right that the free world needs a new leader. But who will it be? The EU has so far looked completely incapable of responding (or even acknowledging) this crisis. Macron is a lame duck, Starmer’s caution is pushing him into irrelevence and Meloni is likely to side with Trump. NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte has been hamstrung by the American-controlled institution he runs into continually defending Trump, including today when he said the onus is on Zelenskyy to repair his relationship with the US president (ie, to apologize to Trump). The incoming new chancellor of Germany Friedrich Merz looks like he could be the only hope to defend Europeans from America during this crisis, as he is the only one who has acknowledged that Europe must become independent of the USA and that NATO may cease to exist within a few months.

Time have changed, but so far it seems that the European political and media elite has not caught up to the fact. And time is running out.

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