President Donald Trump’s “giant miscalculation” on Europe’s nationalist right just backfired, a conservative New York Times columnist warned.
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David French, an Iraq War veteran and longtime conservative writer, laid out the diagnosis on MS NOW on Wednesday. Trump assumed Europe’s nationalist leaders were his natural allies. French said that the numbers prove that the assumption was wrong.
“You’re not much of a French nationalist or a German nationalist or a British nationalist if you’re gonna let an American president stomp all over your country,” French said.
Trump tried to acquire Greenland. He slapped tariffs on European allies. He launched a war in Iran that Europe never wanted. Fellow MS NOW panelist David Ignatius, a veteran foreign affairs columnist, said the damage landed hard.
“Trump simply wasn’t reliable,” Ignatius said. “He was erratic in his judgments. He leaped before he looked.”
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A new Pew Research Center survey of more than 42,000 people across 36 countries, conducted February through May 2026, found just 23% have confidence in Trump’s global leadership. Among right-wing Italian populists — once among his most loyal European supporters — confidence dropped from 49% to 30% in a single year.
Those were supposed to be his allies.
“He has been thinking of himself, and a lot of people in that larger Trump movement have thought of themselves as having all these friends and allies out there in the European nationalist right,” French said. “But if you’re going to have nationalist allies, you have to treat their nations with respect. That is absolutely not what Trump has done.”
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, once Trump’s closest European partner, has publicly broken with him over Iran, reported Newsweek. British populist Nigel Farage has distanced himself too. The leaders Trump counted on are now the ones pushing back.
According to French, their voters love them for it.
“Other democratic leaders are now gonna see their popularity rise when they confront the president of the United States,” French warned. “It’s going to be the popular thing to confront and to frustrate the will of the president of the United States.”
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“In the long run, that is bad for America,” he said.
