Donald Trump’s ambassadors to Europe are undermining American interests as they offend their host countries in an effort to score points with the president.
The U.S. ambassadors to France and Poland have been particularly willing to burn their host governments, with Ambassador Charles Kushner, whose son is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, accusing France’s president of antisemitism in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
He then then blew off multiple summonses from the Foreign Ministry, one involving the op-ed and the other an inflammatory post from the State Department’s counterterrorism bureau.
“If you refuse to go to a meeting when summoned so you can work on improving the relationship, why are you even there?” a U.S. diplomat told Politico. “It’s childish, it’s embarrassing, and it drops any pretense you’re there to help your country.”
A former senior State Department official told the outlet, “Frankly, it’s rude.”
The fact that Kushner didn’t send his complaints, which were written in the form of a letter addressed to Macron, to the Élysée Palace or even a French newspaper such as Le Monde suggested his primary intended audience was Trump, according to Politico.
In the case of the letter, Kushner sent his deputies to attend the meeting in his place, while a “frank and amicable” phone call smoothed things over regarding the social media post, the U.S. mission in Paris said Monday.
State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott told Politico that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had made it clear that the U.S. was “seeking a revitalized Europe based on our shared history and common values.”
“President Trump is leading the way by ending climate-alarmist and mass-migration fueling policies in the U.S. that did such destruction under the previous administration — and now he is calling on our European partners to do the same,” he said.
Similarly, the president’s National Security Strategy released late last year explicitly calls for U.S. diplomats to “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
The problem is that the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations prohibits interference in host countries’ internal affairs, as French President Emmanuel Macron reminded the Americans after Kushner’s antisemitism letter.
And Kushner isn’t the only ambassador ruffling feathers.
Ambassador Tom Rose in Warsaw announced on X.com earlier this month that he was cutting all contact with the speaker of the lower house of Poland’s parliament over his “outrageous and unprovoked insults directed against President Trump.”
The politician in question, Włodzimierz Czarzasty, had said Trump did not deserve to win a Nobel Peace Prize, making him a “serious impediment to our excellent relations” with the Polish government, Rose wrote.
Once again, Rose, a former Jerusalem Post editor, Mike Pence adviser, and conservative radio host, declined to send a formal communication to a high-ranking politician. Instead, he wrote a social media post to express his outrage—and tagged Trump twice.
Warren Stephens, Trump’s ambassador to the U.K. also gave a speech to British officials, including Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy, blasting the country’s domestic energy policy and free speech protections.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the State Department for comment.
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