The United States’ populist right has its calling cards. “Make America Great Again” hats. A distaste for immigration. A love of tax cuts.
But a more subtle unifying thread has been creeping into Republican discourse for years — one that has exploded onto the global stage, with the potential to reshape the contours of alliances and redirect the flows of global trade.
MAGA deeply dislikes the European Union.
And the pronounced skepticism could have real consequences as Mr. Trump wages a trade war on the bloc — especially in the coming weeks, after American and European officials vowed to “fast-track” their negotiations toward closing a deal.
It is not just President Trump, who has said that the European Union was formed to take advantage of America. Or only Vice President JD Vance, who warned that Europe was retreating from its “fundamental values” during a speech in Munich this year. Or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who in a leaked Signal chat called America’s continental allies “pathetic.”
The ethos is also a mainstay of right-leaning television in the United States. “Europeans for the most part do not share our values,” Laura Ingraham, the conservative TV host, said this year, citing European climate policies that might drive society into “economic ruin,” differences in views of free speech, and the right to bear arms — sacrosanct in America, but something not fundamental and subject to restrictions in Europe.
It crops up in conservative commentary. European negotiators “move slower than a French escargot,” a recent Fox News opinion article about trade negotiations quipped, before predicting that Europeans will spend trade talks waltzing “us through their organic, manicured gardens again with no result.”
And it surfaces during podcasts from right-wing technologists, like the wildly popular “All-In” podcast co-hosted by David Sacks, now Mr. Trump’s cryptocurrency and A.I. czar. Europe has been described as “dysfunctional” and not “going the right way” on the program in recent months.
A slice of Republicans have long been skeptical of the European Union, blasting it for being bureaucratic, for its embrace of regulation as a way to make the world better, and for its comparatively liberal stances on issues like climate change. But in the Trump era, that disdain has deepened.
While about half of American conservatives have taken a glum view of the European Union for years, the share who say they rate the bloc “very” unfavorably has been increasing. About 18 percent rated the it very poorly last year, up from 14 percent in 2020, a Pew Research survey showed.
And though Europe has traditionally been an American ally, the United States is treating it more as a geopolitical rival as the two define the contours of their future relationship.
“It’s clear that MAGA hates the E.U., and this is obviously a view that is frequently articulated by the president himself,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “In many ways, the E.U. should expect the worst in the ongoing trade negotiations.”
The United States has agreed to the blueprint for a trade deal with Britain, but the 27-nation European Union has made less progress toward an agreement. Right now, Mr. Trump’s 50 percent tariff on European imports — made because, he said, negotiations were “going nowhere” — has been delayed until July 9 and is subject to a legal challenge. How the two sides may come to an agreement to avoid an escalation remains profoundly unclear.
That is partly because Europe is a much bigger economy than Britain, with more market power. Given that, its officials have felt they should not have to accept the same concessions as London made.
But negotiations between Europe and the United States have also simply gone worse.
Both the Treasury secretary and the commerce secretary have recently suggested that while it would be feasible to negotiate with individual countries like Germany, the E.U. bureaucracy was getting in the way of a deal.
That divide-and-conquer language — expressing friendliness toward individual European nations but not toward the bloc — has become a mainstay of the Trump administration.
While he has met regularly with European national leaders, Mr. Trump until recently had not chosen to meet, or even talk, with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, which is responsible for trade negotiations.
“Now, I love the countries of Europe. I guess I’m from there at some point a long time ago, right?” Mr. Trump said during a cabinet meeting this year. “But the European Union’s been — it was formed in order to screw the United States.”
While it is true that banding together gives the nations of the European Union more bargaining power on the global stage than they would have individually, the United States has historically maintained a tight relationship with European powers. They have been close partners on defense and diplomacy since the end of World War II, a relationship that seems increasingly likely to suffer lasting damage.
“The attitude toward Europe appears very hostile,” said Brando Benifei, the chair of the delegation for relations with the United States at the European Parliament.
Ms. von der Leyen warned on Thursday that Europe must think about how to fend for itself in a new and more antagonistic era. She advised against thinking that “things will go back to how they were before — if only the war would end, or a tariff deal be struck, or the next elections have a different outcome.”
While President Ronald Reagan embraced the shared “ideals of the West” in a famous address before European Parliament 40 years ago, modern conservatives have found a lot to complain about in Brussels.
“There is this new aggressiveness, vis-à-vis the E.U.,” said Ignacio García Bercero, a nonresident fellow at the think tank Bruegel who was formerly a top trade negotiator at the European Commission. “To understand it, you need to go outside of the world of trade.”
Bureaucracy and regulation often top Republican complaints when it comes to the European Union. The bloc more aggressively insists that social media sites police content on their websites, leading to accusations from the American right that it is engaging in censorship.
It also more intensely regulates large technology firms in general, and it has embraced green energy and attention to climate change in a way that the United States has not.
Plus, in a world where national identity stands at the core of Republican ideology — “Make America Great Again” is the tagline, after all — the European Union is 27 diverse nations, which have chosen to band together despite their varied languages, ethnic backgrounds and cultures.
More recently, Republican cultural skepticism of the European Union has found a clear focal point. Republicans and even some Democrats have taken issue with what they see as insufficient spending on defense among many European nations. While America has long been the largest funder of NATO, the fact that Europeans rely on the United States to shore up their defenses was made more glaring by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Adding to Mr. Trump’s ire is the reality that the bloc exports more goods to America than it imports from there.
“The European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States on TRADE, has been very difficult to deal with,” Mr. Trump recently wrote on Truth Social.
Animus goes both ways. Roughly half of Europeans consider Mr. Trump an “enemy of Europe,” said one survey commissioned by Le Grand Continent and Cluster 17 and conducted in the bloc’s eight largest countries earlier this year.
Still, Mr. Trump also has fans in Europe — people who are themselves often skeptical of the European Union, and some of whom claim allegiance to the MAGA movement. The British population in 2016 voted to exit the European Union, in part because of skepticism about the bloc’s benefits.
And more recently, a rising group of populist leaders across the bloc and continent seem to be taking their cues from Mr. Trump — questioning administrative overreach when it comes to free speech and climate regulation, blasting border policies and embracing nationalism over multilateralism.
Mr. Trump and his movement have found especially good friends in places like Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban this past week spoke at a gathering of right-wing politicians.
“Brussels has stolen the European dream,” Mr. Orban said. “Let’s make Europe great again!”
Jeanna Smialek is the Brussels bureau chief for The Times.
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