President Trump, venting his longstanding animus toward Europe at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, singled out Spain with particular spleen on Wednesday.
“I don’t want anything to do with Spain,” he said of the European Union’s fourth-largest economy. “Cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits.”
“They’re hopeless, bad people,” he added.
Whether Mr. Trump has the desire or the power to follow through on his threat to treat a European ally as a pariah like North Korea remains to be seen. He has often tried to bully others — including China, Iran, Greenland and Oman — only to subsequently back down.
As part of the European Union, Spain’s foreign trade is governed by the bloc’s trade deals. The most recent agreement was just finalized a few weeks ago — although Mr. Trump has already threatened to violate it by posting on social media that he would impose a 100 percent tariff on countries that levy a digital services tax.
Olof Gill, a spokesperson for the European Commission, said Wednesday: “We expect the U.S. to honor its commitments under that joint statement, as we have honored ours.”
He added, “The commission will always ensure that the interests of the European Union and all our member states are fully protected.”
If Mr. Trump were to follow through on his threats to Spain, “he would be targeting all of the E.U., and that, of course, would lead to a trade war,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a think tank in Brussels.
Mr. Kirkegaard was skeptical of the president’s ability to enact the kind of sweeping restrictions that he promised.
“This is sort of Trump aggressively lashing out at some level, trying to shift attention away from what’s going on right now in the Middle East,” he said. “But does he have a legal vehicle to make the actual legal changes that he is articulating? Yeah, I think the answer to that question is very clearly no.”
The U.S. Supreme Court in February curbed the president’s ability to slap tariffs on countries willy-nilly.
Mr. Kirkegaard added that Mr. Trump would also likely be deterred from implementing his threats by the reaction of financial markets, which Mr. Kirkegaard said would look askance at a resumption of a trade war with Europe. Mr. Trump has often shown he is willing to back down when markets recoil from his policies.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly criticized Spain for not committing to spend 5 percent of its gross domestic product on military spending in line with targets set by other members of the Atlantic alliance. Last fall, he threatened to impose higher tariffs on Spain than on the rest of the European Union in hopes of pressuring Madrid to get in line.
Spain has raised its defense spending and agreed to reach a level of 2.1 percent of the size of its economy.
The prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has further piqued Mr. Trump’s ire by criticizing the war in Iran as illegal and refusing to allow the United States to use its military bases during the conflict. That incident in March also caused the president to threaten to cut off trade.
Spain’s welcoming policies toward immigrants have also irked Mr. Trump. And Mr. Sánchez has portrayed his program, including in an opinion article in The New York Times, as a better alternative to policies pursued by “MAGA-style leaders.”
Immigrants are a major reason that Spain’s economy is one of the fastest growing in Europe. Economic activity is projected to grow by 2.3 percent this year, according to the Bank of Spain.
Spain is less dependent on the U.S. market than many other European countries. Trade between the two countries accounted for roughly 4.4 percent of Spain’s total output compared with around 10 percent of the euro area as a whole, said Miguel Otero-Iglesias, a senior analyst at Elcano Royal Institute in Spain. It also runs a trade deficit with the United States, making it less vulnerable to American pressure.
Still, targeted restrictions could bite. During Mr. Trump’s first term, his administration imposed tariffs on Spain’s black olives, arguing that producers received unfair subsidies. The policy was subsequently challenged and overturned by the World Trade Organization, but Spain’s share of the black olive market in the United States fell precipitously.
While Mr. Trump may no longer welcome Spanish trade or visitors, Spain will undoubtedly continue to open its arms to American investors, not to mention millions of tourists.
The United States is the biggest foreign direct investor in Spain. With some of the cheapest electricity prices in Europe, in part because of the country’s buildout of renewable energy, Spain is also drawing in new investment related to energy-hungry artificial intelligence projects.
As the U.S. State Department wrote in its 2025 investment report: “Spain’s excellent world-class infrastructure, well-educated work force in critical sectors, large domestic market, and relatively lower energy costs make it an appealing foreign investment destination.”
Spain’s health minister, Mónica García, responded to Mr. Trump’s comments on Wednesday: “We are a sovereign, democratic country that defends multilateralism and peace.”
She added: “What is terrible is confusing diplomacy with bullying.”
Carlos Barragán and Jeanna Smialek contributed to this story.
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