We have all encountered the mildly irritating American friend who returns from a few weeks in Europe — maybe as much as an entire semester! — with a “global perspective.” Maybe they’ve come back with a new pair of shoes, a jacket from Galeries Lafayette or Van Graaf, some bits of useful foreign-language slang, a renewed commitment to grilled fresh fish and the perfect summer white wine. If you’re reading this now, in fact, there’s about a 50/50 chance you have been that American at some point in your life. (I certainly have.)
But the thing about this syndrome — which, in its more cringeworthy try-hard versions, comes with protestations that “I really don’t think of myself as American” — is its obvious and painful effort to separate the protagonist from those other Americans, the ones we eagerly join the rest of the world in deprecating, deriding and lamenting.
A fair amount of this is about invidious class distinctions: We certainly don’t wish to be conflated with the tour-bus hordes of bewildered Midwestern seniors in lamentable fashions, stock characters of European sitcoms a generation ago. These days we may dread a more contemporary version: Think Kimberly and Justin from the outer metropolitan suburbs, with their NCAA-branded leisure wear and mirrored shades, their Instagram “discoveries” of well-known Amsterdam or Ibiza nightspots and their exaggerated comic dismay at the unfamiliar food, volatile prices, small beds and tepid showers.
But beneath those time-honored stereotypes of the “ugly American” lies another one, more dimly apprehended and shadowed by fear, next to which the loud, innocent ignorance of Kimberly and Justin — who have ventured forth from Applebee-land to Venice or Edinburgh or the castles of the Rhineland largely to say they have done so — seems positively benevolent. Those mockable tour-bus and/or social-media tourists are the puzzling public face of the greatest military and economic superpower in world history, whose ability to dominate global affairs and, especially over the last half-century or so, to screw them up beyond repair, is without parallel.
The truly dangerous Americans, the ones from the corporate suites, the Wall Street banks and the national security agencies, wouldn’t be caught dead at the mall where Kimberly and Justin spend their Saturday afternoons. They have acceptable manners (or at least they did until recently), designer suits, top-shelf golf and tennis gear. They rarely need to speak to anyone who doesn’t speak English. They are well acquainted with the five-star hotels, gourmet restaurants and exclusive boutiques of several world cities. They have a favorite Italian red and, indeed, have dined with the winemaker and his family — an unforgettable experience!
You know who I’m going to bring up next, don’t you? In Donald J. Trump, the various species of ugly American have reached their conjoined apotheosis. His peculiar love-hate relationship with Europe — embodied this week in the launch of a ruinous trade war, a policy that comes with multiple “Do not use” labels affixed in the 1890s and 1930s — may seem inexplicable or anomalous, but arises from a long history of mutual incomprehension. As is so often the case with Trump’s “policies,” it’s no good pretending that his demolition of the transatlantic alliance came out of nowhere: The Euro-American marriage has been heading toward Ben and J-Lo territory for some time. The new world order that Trump and his Elon-flavored pals hope to create by blowing things up will not come into being; that doesn’t mean the old one was working.
For Trump, the supposedly political is always personal, and it’s more than reasonable to connect his well-known loathing for the European Union to a narrative of petty private grievance. (How many of those can exist within one individual’s psyche? It’s no wonder there isn’t room for anything else.) As Fintan O’Toole notes in an extended analysis for the New York Review, Trump appears to believe that malicious EU bureaucrats thwarted his plans for a “massive, beautiful expansion” of his “magnificent” golf resort in Ireland. That happened (or rather did not happen) more than a decade ago, but Trump felt impelled to spin the tale all over again last month, during Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s White House visit.
If you don’t find it credible that the president of the United States might make dreadful and highly consequential policy decisions because of a long-concluded regulatory dispute over a golf course, you haven’t been paying attention. As O’Toole also observes, Trump’s anti-European animus has a potent psychosexual subtext, simultaneously rooted in right-wing American macho posturing and his own infantile sense of narcissistic injury.
At least since the U.S.-EU split over the 2003 invasion of Iraq — in retrospect, the most obvious early symptoms of the impending transatlantic divorce — “antagonism toward Europe has been shaped by a highly sexualized binary opposition of American masculine potency to European feminine feebleness.” As Salon contributor and former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren observes in a memorable column this weekend, that was also when Rep. Bob Ney, a soon-to-be-disgraced Ohio Republican, decreed that French fries would henceforward be called “freedom fries” in the House cafeteria. In fact, I think those gendered stereotypes — Americans as virile and manly; Europeans as emasculated or effeminate — go back much further than that, and were inhaled by nearly all American men of Trump’s generation.
This extends beyond schoolyard misogyny into full-on homophobic terror with Trump’s claims that “the European Union was formed in order to screw the United States,” as he said to Bob Woodward during a first-term interview and repeated verbatim this February. (He has a mynah-bird propensity for saying exactly the same thing, in exactly the same cadence, over and over again.) What could possibly be worse than the frustrating failure to defeat a bureaucratic organization run by “nasty” women like European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde? Only the prospect of being “screwed” by them or, shall we say, turned into their b**ch.
All of this is unquestionably relevant, but I think it’s important to perceive another layer of the semi-conscious Trumpian mind, below or alongside his seething, uncomprehending rage toward the supposedly female-centric order of contemporary Europe and its mystifying refusal to bend the knee. JD Vance, Elon Musk and other factotums of the Trump regime may have “developed a malevolent interest in destroying the EU,” in O’Toole’s words, by trying to empower its various whackadoodle far-right parties (which are definitely not pro-American, whatever else they may be). Those dudes are trying to play the sinister “ugly American” roles, although with a singular lack of suavity and not much success. (For the most part, their schemes are backfiring almost as badly as Musk’s Wisconsin meddling.)
But Trump almost never thinks in larger strategic terms, or at least not about anything beyond his own whims and desires. I said earlier that Trump had a love-hate relationship with Europe, and I meant it: He’s a lot closer to the befuddled accidental-tourist character in plaid shorts and flip-up sunglasses, gazing open-mouthed at the Changing of the Guard or wondering why there aren’t tours of the Bastille, than the smooth assassin out of a jewelry commercial. Like so many Americans of a certain class and character, he’s besotted with the British royal family and insisted, in defiance of all available evidence, that he was good friends with the late Queen Elizabeth. He was delighted when Emmanuel Macron, to the latter’s indelible shame, played host for a Bastille Day military parade (and became obsessed with staging his own).
I’m virtually certain Trump would tell us that he loves Europe — that is, he loves the idea of Europe as he thinks it used to be: picturesque, charming and distinctly second-rate. He preferred it, of course, when its most visible residents were overwhelmingly white, relatively poor and obsequiously grateful for American tourism and American investment. It was a lot more fun — not to mention easier to exploit in commercial terms — when all those countries had their own currencies, and you could bring a wad of colorful but nearly valueless banknotes home for the kids. The fact that Europe’s uncharismatic currency union (and the “nasty” regulatory regime that came with it) is clearly correlated with rising living standards, including better health care and longer average life expectancy than the U.S., must be especially indigestible.
Of course Trump isn’t much interested in facts, let alone other people’s theories. He may have halfway listened while Musk or Vance or some other genius underling laid out a crackbrained scheme for weaponizing Europe’s (very real and undoubtedly hazardous) social and political divisions in order to carve up the continent, Yalta Conference-style, between Russian-dominated and American-dominated zones of captive authoritarian regimes. (That’s O’Toole’s approximate theory of the case.) But probably not. His view of the world, as you may have noticed, lacks any strategic coherence: Withdrawing from NATO and ditching foreign aid don’t mesh well with his neo-feudal or neo-imperial fantasies, nor does a trade war that’s likely to send the global economy into recession and torpedo his own party’s political fortunes.
This brings us back around to the fundamental problem that underlies all versions of ugly-American roleplaying, both historically and in the rebooted Trump regime: It’s rooted in weakness, not in strength. That’s clearly true of fascist-flavored politics in general, which is often based on projecting forbidden attitudes and desires onto a despised opponent, but in this case it also reflects the longstanding American inferiority complex regarding the culture and history of the “Old World.”
That anxiety never entirely evaporated, even as the U.S. rose to dominant superpower status over the course of the 20th century. A quarter of the way through this century, the arrogant swagger associated with American cultural, economic and military hegemony — which was, without a doubt, highly seductive to much of the world for quite a while — now looks both clownish and dangerous. Europeans began to perceive the danger long before Americans did, and now the transatlantic rupture has become unavoidable, even for those wearing reality-distorting Yank-goggles. In this as in so many other ways, Donald Trump serves as history’s alarm clock.
But what Trump and his minions cannot do, as they blunder around breaking things and congratulating each other by emoji, is to force Europe backward into picture-postcard fantasyland, or build a new American empire. They are too weak for that, and much too stupid. They can certainly extort a painful price from the world while trying to, and the full reckoning may be more than we can bear.
