Trump claims 'people of Europe like me' as approval polls reveal the truth
Topics: Donald Trump, Europe, JD Vance, Military, Climate Change
William Morgan
Featured Image Credit: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Topics: Donald Trump, Europe, JD Vance, Military, Climate Change
After one of the most difficult years for US-European relations since World War Two, President Donald Trump has claimed that the 'people of Europe like me'.
It's a rather hard claim to find evidence for in the year since the Trump administration took office, which kicked off its cross-Atlantic diplomacy in February 2025 with Vice President JD Vance telling the Munich Security Conference that the greatest threat facing Europe was not Russia but the 'threat from within'.
He also took the unprecedented step of blasting a number of key NATO allies, including the US' closest ally, the UK, on culture war issues, arguing that the liberal democracies on the continent faced 'civilizational erasure' in the face of immigration.
If this early moment in Trump's second term went down like a lead balloon, the president's repeated threats to take the European territory of Greenland by military force or economic coercion were like dropping an Atomic bomb on the post-war order, leaving EU nations looking elsewhere for security guarantees.
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This shift in global allegiances has not been lost on Trump, who has repeatedly and successfully threatened the sanctity of NATO to force its European counterparts to increase their contribution to the military alliance.
At a White House event on Wednesday (February 11), the president signed an executive order telling the Department of Defense to prioritize purchasing electricity from coal-fired power plants.
In a show of deference and fealty now a regular feature of Oval Office events, Trump was awarded the title of 'Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal' at the meeting, where he also blasted his European allies for investing in renewable energy.
Ridiculing the use of wind turbines across Europe, where each 300ft turbine is capable of powering up to 1,500 homes and wind power accounts for up to one-third of total energy production, the president claimed 'every time [a wind turbine] goes around it loses a fortune'.
Unlike the architectural magnificence of a coal-fired power plant, or the tranquil beauty of an area where surface mined coal has stripped huge areas of the landscape, Trump claimed that wind turbines had ruined the ancient beauty of Europe.
He said: "And you know, I was recently there and it's not recognizable what they've done to their beautiful fields and those beautiful, beautiful scenic areas and they put those wind turbines all over the place and they're chugging, chugging, chugging, not doing a damn thing."
While he slammed decades of European policy making in the face of climate change, Trump claimed the continent's people agree with him.
"But you know who likes me over there? The people like me over there. I can tell you because they know I'm right," he added.
But someone should have told the people of Europe that, as a January YouGov poll showed fewer than 19 percent of people in UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, sharing favorable views of the American president.
For the people of Denmark, this number was even lower. Just four percent expressed support for Trump, which is unsurprising after he threatened to take the country's Greenland territory by force.