Apparently, President Trump's public image in Europe is severely underwater with only a few countries giving him a positive favorability number and the rest having -30 to -75 opinions. (This may change after the many FIFA tourists get home, many of them now distrusting their government propaganda media as much as we distrust ours, but that will be a slow process at best.)
That Trump is held in low esteem in Europe is easily explained. For over 80 years, the Marshall Plan has annually injected billions of dollars into Europe's consumer economy at virtually no cost to them. It's the reason Europe has been able to afford things like 6-month paid maternity/paternity leave, generous vacation packages, free healthcare, zero-carbon boondoggles, and the ability to use the United States as their de facto military defense establishment among many others.
Trump has pulled the plug on the Marshall Plan — which should have ended not later than 1970. Suddenly, Europe's free cash inflows have abruptly stopped, and NATO nations are being told to get out their checkbooks. No wonder Trump is broadly despised! He's closed the candy store! The three-martini lunch is over and the waiter has presented the check. Wait... what? This wasn't all free? In the words of Robert Heinlein, TANSTAAFL.
Suddenly, all that money that used to fund generous benefit packages now must be used for other things. Things like 'military preparedness', and 'energy infrastructure', and 'industrial development', and ...
Oops.
At the same time, USAID, the Agency for International Development, has been largely gutted. The old USAID model — in which NGOs are given lavish funding much of which is spent on salaries and some of which manages to make its way back into the campaign accounts of select politicians — is permanently gone. It's not a coincidence that within months of Elon Musk's DOGE torching the bulk of USAID funding, our very own DNC finds itself in financial dire straits. The same largesse that laundered U.S. taxpayer money to the DNC also funded anti-American NGOs in Europe, Africa, and Latin America. One predictable result of defunding leftist NGOs is that South America has suddenly taken on a strong right-wing appearance with its entire Pacific coast from Colombia to Tierra del Fuego now enjoying right-wing governments.
The old saying is that "money is the mother's milk of politics", and that appears to be true not just here, but everywhere, as Europe is just finding out.
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