It’s good of Donald Trump to re-enact the role of the Mad King to commemorate 250 years since the United States left the British empire. As the nation turns to celebrate its anniversary this 4 July, Trump is reversing history by projecting arbitrary power back across the Atlantic. But instead of “the mad king who lost America”, Trump is gunning to be the “mad king who lost Europe”.
The fate of nations is now based on whether a committee of five wily Norwegians awards the Nobel Peace Prize to the US president. He has written to European capitals to inform them that because he was spurned by the committee, he “no longer feel[s] an obligation to think purely of Peace” and is therefore flirting with the idea of ordering marines into Greenland. Trump wanted the vast island in his first term, but the capricious, almost regal entitlement with which he now grabs at territory suggests he sees no difference between his own whims and the imperial power of the United States.
For all the pain Trump is inflicting on the Atlantic alliance, don’t yet expect the domestic reckoning for Trump that some analysts confidently predict. Liberal America remains fixated on the seething, occasionally armed protests against Ice (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in Minneapolis. The fate of European security – and the world at large, beyond Gaza – barely registers in the grim battle taking place inside the Democratic Party ahead of the 2028 election.
Meanwhile, Trump’s allies incant the mantra that the US has been trying to acquire Greenland for decades. (It is “overwhelmingly in America’s national interest to acquire Greenland”, says Senator Ted Cruz.) Chatter that more independently minded Republicans might impeach the president feels like a coping mechanism considering the midterms are in November and Trump’s persecution of those who cross him is a daily news item.
Many in Washington – Republicans and even some Democrats – simply have no respect for the European elite. Maga sees Europe as a geopolitical shrew run by a decadent and myopic ruling class that has plunged a great civilisation into ethnic strife by forcing mass immigration on to an unwilling native population. It scoffs that such a wealthy continent can’t even handle a threat like Russia – “A gas station masquerading as a country,” quipped the late John McCain – by itself. One person close to the White House said that the US is sick of picking up the tab for European defence. And if that means the end of Nato, so be it. “There is no ‘alliance’; we provide everything,” they told me. “There is no logistical infrastructure for [European] defence – only what America provides.” At the same time, some in the administration long for a kind of alliance with Russia in preparation for a potential war with China.
But here comes the irony. The administration’s National Security Strategy blames the liberal elite for Europe’s decline and calls for the US to help nationalist parties take power there instead. But Trump’s designs on Greenland have handed the old Brussels elite the chance to shake off their reputation for impotence. Even if they don’t take it – the lackadaisical tweets from EU officials and private messages from Emmanuel Macron and the head of Nato, Mark Rutte, that Trump posted publicly on his Truth Social platform on 20 January so far suggest they won’t – then those on the hard right who call Trump a friend still have to explain to their voters why they are siding with a predatory foreigner. Transatlantic nationalist populism is cracking from its internal contradictions – Marine Le Pen was quick to condemn the US assault on Caracas in the name of national sovereignty well before the issue of Greenland emerged.
Those close to the administration are bullish that the Europeans won’t be able to turn away from Washington and towards Beijing. “Europe is not going to be allowed to turn to China – just like Canada, Greenland and Australia,” the source said. In other words, the administration could use sanctions, tariffs and financial punishment to keep Europe away from the Chinese embrace. Some members of the Trump government are looking askance at Britain’s deal to give away the Chagos islands and to allow the construction of a large Chinese embassy in London. The Chagos deal, Trump decided in another Truth Social post on 20 January, nine months after backing it, was “stupid”. Keir Starmer has belatedly realised Trump is impervious to his hammy charms. Niceties about a shared heritage and language matter little in negotiations with mad kings.
What of those other mad kings? For a moment last year, I thought Trump was entering his Augustan period as Father of the (Maga) Nation. He was sitting above the civil wars roiling the Republican Party and spent his time planning a triumphal arch across the Potomac river in DC. But the president seems to have accelerated to later Julio-Claudians. Suetonius tells us that Nero would bribe his fellow contestants in singing competitions in order to win the top prize, and that the similarly spendthrift Caligula would remark that Caesar could not afford to be frugal.
As for George III, the supposedly Mad King lost America long before his mind. Until then he amassed a library of 65,000 books, listened to Handel’s arias, sponsored the founding of the Royal Academy and wrote a treatise on crop rotation. Historians now think that King George’s mind was corrupted by dementia. For Trump, power got there first.
[Further reading: Europe must break from America]
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This article appears in the 21 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Europe is back
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Subscribe here to commentThe WH advisor who said ““There is no ‘alliance’; we provide everything… There is no logistical infrastructure for [European] defence – only what America provides,” could use a lesson from an Old European who was quite an expert on cognition, William Blake.
“To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit — General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess.”
That advisor is going to be surprised by the *particulars* of possible European responses to a Greenland invasion: expropriation of American bases and materiel, expulsion of tens of thousands of American troops, rapid sell-off of US treasuries…. “Oh, I didn’t think of that!“ he’ll say.
Idiocracy.
I suspect only the American military can rein in Trump, but that would probably cause even more problems, we can only hope America finds its Vespasian and skips Domitian.