Trump’s Address: Confounds America, Appalls Europe
President Trump listed numerous triumphs in his speech to Congress on Tuesday as part of his effort to create a new “golden age” in America. In reality, it’s all fool’s gold.
However, one that he neglected to mention is that he has put Washington up for sale. Literally.
As part of its push to reorganize the federal government, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday that several hundred federal properties are for sale. They range from the headquarters of the U.S. Census Bureau to the Justice Department.
By Tuesday evening, numerous buildings suddenly disappeared from the General Services Administration website, according to the Washington Post. “By Wednesday morning, it was unclear what the administration had planned.”
Something similar could be said about Trump’s approach to a variety of pressing issues, like Ukraine. After he flew into a rage during his Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump aborted their scheduled press conference and booted him out of the White House.
His vaunted mineral deal with Ukraine? Nowhere in sight.
Now Trump has cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine, rendering it vulnerable to Russian missile attacks, among other things. However, officials like national security adviser Mike Waltz are indicating that it could be short-lived.
“We are having good talks on location for the next round of negotiations, on delegations, on substance. So, just in the last twenty-four hours since the public statement from Zelensky, and then the subsequent conversations, which I’m going to walk inside and continue, I think we’re going to see movement in very short order,” Waltz said.
If we don’t, and if Trump permits Ukraine to collapse, then the administration would confront a foreign policy humiliation that dwarfed the Biden administration’s Afghanistan debacle.
Europeans, Canadians, Greenlanders: “What’s going on?”
Already the tumult in Washington is prompting European politicians to liken the Trump administration to Nero’s court, “with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a jester high on ketamine.” On Wednesday, German journalist Malte Lehming wrote in Der Tagesspiegel that the “last barrier” to Trump’s power grab is its justice system.
To Europeans, America is starting to look like an adversary, and suspicions are mounting that Trump doesn’t want a peace deal that results in a sovereign Ukraine. What he wants is for Putin to annex it.
Like many of the isolationists of the late 1930s, Trump isn’t neutral in the conflict between democracy and dictatorship. He actively seems to want the latter to win out, perhaps it may serve as a precursor to his treatment of Canada? He seems to regard it as covetously as Putin regards Ukraine.
Trump, after all, is declaring that he wants to make it the fifty-first state (along with Greenland) “one way or the other.”
Trump’s Favorite Word: Tariff
More upheaval has arrived with Trump’s tariff policies. On Monday and Tuesday, the stock market nosedived. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed on Fox Business that Trump would likely meet Canada and Mexico, “in the middle.”
Yet Trump’s remarks last Tuesday night did not indicate any receptivity toward easing tariffs, quite the contrary. He stated that tariffs were about, “protecting the soul of our country.” Meanwhile, Canada is imposing a raft of retaliatory tariffs against America as well as Mexico, preparing to issue them on Saturday.
Business is nervous and so are consumers.
Trump may live in a la-la land where his tariffs are cost-free, but inflation and unemployment are more than likely to increase. This is why consumer confidence dropped sharply in February, according to the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index, by seven points to 98.3. The Present Situation Index fell 3.4 points to 136.5. And expectations fell 9.3 points to 72.9. “For the first time since June 2024,” the Conference Board wrote, “the Expectations Index was below the threshold of eighty that usually signals a recession ahead.”
Trump’s credo is that America is resurgent, but his policies may drive capital inflows away from America and toward Europe.
Incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz has just concluded a special €500 billion for defense and infrastructure spending with the Social Democratic Party, his likely coalition partner. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Berthold Kohler observed that for Germany the deal constitutes, “an important and powerful signal to Putin, Trump, who can no longer claim that Berlin is doing nothing and its European allies. ‘America is back,’ Trump declared in his speech about the state of the union. Germany is as well.”
How America will adapt to an increasingly independent Germany in particular and Europe in general is an open question.
America is headed for a time of troubles. The amazing thing is that, for the most part, it is self-inflicted.
Trump may declare that a “big, beautiful ocean” shields Washington from foreign difficulties, but the notion that it can go it alone is a mirage.
About The Author: Jacob Heilbrunn
Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel.
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