The Brutal American

A new stereotype is emerging

I’ve been in several different European cities over the past few days - Warsaw, Vilnius, Berlin - and talked to many different kinds of people, from book publishers to politicians. Everyone I met, whatever their background, wanted to talk about Trump, Vance, and their performance in the Oval Office last week. In the Atlantic, I wrote about the immense shock felt in Europe, not just because of what that scene said about the war in Ukraine, but because of what it said about Americans:

In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand new stereotype for America: not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans—whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery—those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast.

Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterward, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho “win”…

These are the actions not of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but of the bad guys. If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are Mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too. “I never thought Americans would kowtow like that,” one friend told me, marveling.

Europeans also find it troubling that so many Americans now live in Trump’s alternate reality, one that is profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda:

Part of the Oval Office altercation was provoked by Zelensky’s insistence on telling the truth, as the full video clearly shows. His mistake was to point out that Russia and Ukraine have reached many cease-fires and made many agreements since 2014, and that Vladimir Putin has broken most of them, including during Trump’s first term.

But Trump and Vance are not interested in the truth about the war in Ukraine. Trump seemed angered by the suggestion that Putin might break deals with him, refused to acknowledge that it’s happened before, falsely insisted, again, that the U.S. had given Ukraine $350 billion. Vance—who had refused to meet Zelensky when offered the opportunity before the election last year—told the Ukrainian president that he didn’t need to go to Ukraine to understand what is going on in his country: “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories,” he said, meaning that he has seen the “stories” curated for him by the people he follows on YouTube or X.

But Europeans have to live in the real reality, one in which the Russian President has said nothing publicly about leaving Ukrainian territory or stopping the war. Russian planes continue to bomb Ukrainian cities, Russian spies commit frequent acts of sabotage across Europe. Russian hackers attack European infrastructure every single day. No wonder nearly three-quarters of French people now think that the U.S. is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavorable views of the U.S. as well.

This is a sea change, and the consequences will be with us for many, many years. A break in the American-European relationship will have an unfathomable impact on culture, science, commerce and trade as well as security. I’ve already heard from people who no longer want their children to study in the U.S., who have cancelled vacations in the U.S. Not only will Europeans rethink their defense, which is already happening, but their attitudes to American technology and products, maybe even to American culture and movies.