The biggest risk that Brussels faces after the pair’s fireside chat is that Europeans might start learning some inconvenient truths from each other
When X owner Elon Musk announced a digital fireside chat on the app with former US president and current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, at least one EU official promptly went ballistic.
EU Internal Markets Commissioner Thierry Breton reacted to the online promotion of the exclusive event with a threat – the kind of thing that goes over far better on an official company letterhead (the European Commission’s in this case) than, say, in a whispery, untraceable phone call.
“I am writing to you in the context of recent events in the United Kingdom and in relation to the planned broadcast on your platform X of a live conversation between a US presidential candidate and yourself, which will also be accessible to users in the EU,” Breton wrote to Musk.
He warned the billionaire about ongoing compliance investigations and insisted on the need to mitigate “amplification of harmful content” which “if unaddressed might… generate detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security.”
Ah, yes. Because anything that goes against the official EU establishment narrative and agenda is generally considered to be a threat to public order. The plebs might actually discover some inconvenient realities that better explain why daily life in Europe has become more challenging than that of our gatekeeping overlords.
Worse, they may decide to do something about it, which presents an even greater inconvenience to the ruling establishment in that they may actually have to rework some of their policies to the detriment of some opaque special interests.
How fitting that Breton evoked the recent unrest in the UK, which wasn’t caused by an actual migrant but nonetheless sparked public outcry over migration and asylum issues – something that’s so “fake” that the British government itself has tried to hide the extent of the problem by stocking migrants on an offshore barge and proposing to send them to Rwanda.
Breton also CC’d X CEO Linda Yaccarino on his letter in the same way that a principal chewing out an unruly student in writing would also copy the kid’s mom so she could give him a good spanking at home. But Breton found out that getting mom onboard is hard to do when the “kid” in this case supports the whole household.
“This is an unprecedented attempt to stretch a law intended to apply in Europe to political activities in the US,” replied Yaccarino. “It also patronizes European citizens, suggesting they are incapable of listening to a conversation and drawing their own conclusions.”
Usually, when the EU is accused of foreign interference, it’s because it’s riding shotgun with Uncle Sam, who wasn’t around for backup this time when Musk himself fired back with a meme from the movie, Tropic Thunder – a still image of actor Tom Cruise in his role as a talent agent, captioned with the line, “Take a big step back and literally, f**k your own face!”
Chief editor of France Inter’s digital operations, Stephane Jourdain, cited European Commission sources who told him that Musk’s reply would be added to their files against X. Aye, aye, commissars!
Oh, but wait. It appears that Breton got out ahead of the EU clownmobile and is now about to get a deep back massage from the jalopy’s tire tracks. The European Commission “denied Breton had approval from its President Ursula von der Leyen to send the letter,” reported the Financial Times. Breton now knows exactly how every EU citizen feels when unelected “Queen Ursula” makes the same kind of top-down decisions for all Europeans as that which the unelected Breton just tried to unilaterally impose on Musk.
All this drama for what, exactly? The fact that Trump might say something that doesn’t jibe with the EU’s propaganda, which apparently is so tenuous and fragile that it needs to be preemptively protected from any potential future challenges, however rational or nutty?
It turns out that the EU didn’t have much to worry about. Trump doesn’t seem to have a clue about what’s actually going on here.
“They take great advantage of the United States in trade,” Trump said of Europe, which was goaded by the Biden administration into foregoing its trade relationship with Russia, whose cheap energy allowed it to compete with the US on the global playing field. It now has a greater dependence on pricier American liquified natural gas. And the trade deficit that the US has with the EU is largely the result of all the protectionist tariffs that it slaps on its other competitors, like China – an idea that Trump has long supported himself – leaving the US with fewer suppliers, like the EU. The US is doing a far better job of screwing itself than anyone else could.
“Why is the United States paying disproportionately more to defend Europe than Europe? That doesn’t make sense,” Trump said to Musk. “That’s unfair, and that is an appropriate thing to address.” Except that the US cash “for Ukraine” is mostly just being dumped into the US military industrial complex, which is actually a great deal for Washington cronies. And when the US demands that Europe spends more on weapons for itself, guess who the big winner is? “In the 2019-2023 period, 55% of imports to Europe were from the US, up from 35% in the 2014-2018 period,” French state media outlet, France 24, said of EU weapons.
As if the EU is going to clarify any of those Trump statements. If Brussels had to be honest, it’d be like, “Well, actually, Trump was spreading fake news when he said that we’re not paying enough for Ukraine. Our own arms industries are also starting to cash in on the charade now, too.”
The EU also probably won’t want to admit that it has become more dependent on the US for everything – including trade – despite the whole idea of breaking up with Russia having been in the interests of avoiding getting too committed to any one partner. Yet here’s Trump sounding like he has no clue why Brussels has become such a stage-five clinger that it needs the US to buy more of its stuff.
The more Trump blabs, the more the average European citizen can assess for themselves how much his reality jibes with theirs. And the more daylight that exists between them, the less influence Trump will have on them. Which is why it could actually serve the EU’s own agenda to let him talk as much as possible.
The downside, of course, is that open debate on anything EU-related evoked by Trump – even cluelessly – risks sparking an online public dissection of EU actions that would bleed into the more conventional media. And the danger there is that there is a high probability of EU politicians being outed as inept jokers.
