President Donald Trump’s offensive behavior toward Christians and his unnecessary and unpopular war in Iran isn’t just splitting his political base at home — it’s also alienating his allies abroad. Right-wing nationalists in Europe are becoming more and more wary of association with Trump and growing inclined to keep him at a distance to protect their own political projects. The trend marks a blow to Trump’s aspirations of creating an international bloc of right-wing nationalist states that work in concert to quash the left.
This week, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni criticized Trump’s recent attacks on Pope Leo XIV as “unacceptable” and called it “right and normal for [the pope] to call for peace and to condemn every form of war.” Trump lashed back at Meloni for defending the pope, marking his first criticism of her. He did so even though he has few allies left in Europe.
The Trump administration has also been criticized by right-wingers in Europe for its aggressive, but failed, attempt to bolster Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who lost in a landslide in last week’s election. The Trump administration’s efforts — which included Vice President JD Vance campaigning for Orbán in the final days of the race — may have hurt Orbán more than it helped him.
Trump’s lack of discipline is at the core of his own unraveling.
Since then, multiple German lawmakers from the far-right Alternative for Germany party have openly criticized Trump as politically toxic for their movement. AfD parliament member Matthias Moosdorf said on X that the Trump administration’s close ties to Orbán “hung like millstones around [Orbán’s] neck” during his failed reelection attempt. Lawmaker Torben Braga said that in the context of elections, it’s “not a particularly promising approach” to keep close ties with Trump.
Diana Sosoaca, a far-right member of the European Parliament for Romania, said last week that it was “a big mistake” for Orbán to invite Vance to stump for him, particularly as Trump has become a source of great “disorder in this world” with his war on Iran.
In recent weeks, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has also criticized Trump’s disastrous war in Iran, calling his conduct “erratic” and his war “a mistake.”
Those bold criticisms speak to how incredibly damaging Trump’s war on Iran has been for his standing within his movement. The surge in global oil prices is politically radioactive; far-right leaders and parties in Europe affiliated with Trump risk becoming associated with the energy crisis unless they take steps to create distance from him.
While Trump’s criticism of the pope hasn’t been as salient or as materially significant as his hapless war, it, too, has global implications, with some 1.4 billion Catholics around the world who might take offense at Trump’s extraordinary broadsides against their spiritual leader. And then there are the hundreds of millions of people, Catholic or otherwise, who might be offended by Trump sharing on social media a blasphemous artificial intelligence-generated depiction of himself as Jesus Christ. One does not have to be Christian — or even religious at all — to recognize his behavior as repellent and megalomaniacal.
Trump’s lack of discipline is at the core of his own unraveling. Swept up in self-worship and a belief in his own infallibility, he’s now struggling to uphold his side of the deal with right-wing Christians and at least pretend he cares about their spirituality. And his desire to remold the world has alienated the isolationist part of his coalition that believed his promise that he wouldn’t start any wars.
Trump does not need European right-wingers, ultimately, in order to achieve his core political projects. But he has made alliances with right-wing nationalists in Europe a part of his foreign policy and described opposing European “civilizational erasure” in the face of immigration as a plank of his national security strategy. That those right-wingers see him as a political albatross shows that their collective assault on liberalism has major weaknesses. One hopes that these far-right movements in Europe aren’t able to shed their association with Trump only because that association is no longer convenient. We should hope their political influence declines right along with his.
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