A book festival in Vilnius, meetings with friends in Warsaw, a dinner in Berlin: I happened to be at gatherings in three European cities over the past several days, and everywhere I went, everyone wanted to talk about the Oval Office performance last Friday. Europeans needed some time to process these events, not just because of what it told them about the war in Ukraine, but because of what it told them about America, a country they thought they knew well.

In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand new stereotype for America: Not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans—whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery—those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast.

Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterwards, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho “win.” They announced they would halt transfers of military equipment to Ukraine, and hinted at ending sanctions on Russia, the aggressor state. In his speech to Congress last night, Trump once again declared that America would “get” Greenland, which is a part of Denmark—a sign that he intends to run roughshod over other allies too.

[Read: A Greenland plot more cynical than fiction]

These are not the actions of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but the bad guys. If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too. “I never thought Americans would kowtow like that,” one friend told me, marveling.

The Oval Office meeting, the subsequent announcements, and the speech to Congress also clarified something else: Trump, Vance, and many of the people around them now fully inhabit an alternate reality, one composed entirely of things they see and hear in the ether. Part of the Oval Office altercation was provoked by Zelensky’s insistence on telling the truth, as the full video clearly shows. His mistake was to point out that Russia and Ukraine have reached many ceasefires and made many agreements since 2014, and that Vladimir Putin has broken most of them, including during Trump’s first term.

It’s precisely because they remember these broken truces that the Ukrainians keep asking what happens after a ceasefire, what kind of security guarantees will be put in place, how Trump plans to prevent Putin from breaking them once more and, above all, what price the Russians are willing to pay for peace in Ukraine. Will they even give up their claims to territory they don’t control? Will they agree that Ukraine can be a sovereign democracy?

But Trump and Vance are not interested in the truth about the war in Ukraine. Trump seemed angered by the suggestion that Putin might break deals with him, refused to acknowledge that it’s happened before, falsely insisted, again, that the U.S. had given Ukraine $350 billion. Vance—who had refused to meet Zelensky when offered the opportunity before the election last year—told the Ukrainian president that he didn’t need to go to Ukraine to understand what is going on in his country: “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories,” he said, meaning that he has seen the “stories” curated for him by the people he follows on YouTube or X.

Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance. This is not new. Back in 2016, at the height of the election campaign, Trump frequently repeated false stories launched by Russia’s Sputnik news agency, declaring that Hillary Clinton and Obama had “founded ISIS,” or that “the Google search engine is suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton.” At the time Trump also imitated Russian talk about Clinton starting World War III, another Russian meme. He produced a new version of that in the Oval Office on Friday. “You’re gambling with World War III. You’re gambling with World War III,” he shouted at Zelensky.

[David Frum: Trump, by any means necessary]

But what was ominous in 2016 is dangerous in 2025, especially in Europe. Russian military aggression is more damaging, Russian sabotage across Europe more frequent, and Russian cyberattacks almost constant. In truth it is Putin, not Zelensky, who started this conflict, Putin who has brought North Korean troops and Iranian drones to Europe, Putin who instructs his propagandists to talk about nuking London, Putin who keeps raising the stakes and scope of the war. Most Europeans live in this reality, not in the fictional world inhabited by Trump, and the contrast is making them think differently about Americans. According to pollsters, nearly three quarters of French people now think that the U.S. is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavorable views of the U.S. as well.

In reality, the Russians have said nothing in public about leaving Ukrainian territory or stopping the war. In reality, they have spent the last decade building a cult of cruelty at home. Now they have exported that cult not just to Europe, not just to Africa, but to Washington too. This administration abruptly canceled billions of dollars of food aid and health-care programs for the poorest people on the planet, a vicious act that the president and vice president have not acknowledged but millions of people can see. Their use of tariffs as random punishment, not for enemies but for allies, seems not just brutal but inexplicable.

And in the Oval Office Trump and Vance behaved like imperial rulers chastising a subjugated colony, vocalizing the same disgust and disdain that Russian propagandists use when they talk about Ukraine. Europeans know, everyone knows, that if Trump and Vance can talk that way to the president of Ukraine, then they might eventually talk that way to their country’s leader next.

European defence stocks are flying high as Trump's pause on aid to Ukraine spurs calls for continent's rearmament.

The near-total freeze on foreign aid from the United States has many vocal detractors, but it also has passionate backers—and nowhere more so than in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s self-styled “illiberal democracy” has made him a darling of the global far right and an ally of President Donald Trump.

Hungary recently escalated its efforts to stamp out pro-democracy groups and media organizations that rely on foreign funding by naming a government minister to investigate USAID’s activities. Today, that minister, András László, was received in Washington by Peter Marocco, the top American official disassembling the agency from the inside. The meeting, which was confirmed to me by a U.S. official and another person familiar with the gathering, reflects the convergence of interests between Budapest and Washington. Like the Trump administration, the Hungarian government has giddily embraced the idea that U.S. aid programs are not only wasteful and unnecessary but also criminal.

“The Hungarian government has decided to closely follow the politically corrupt USAID funding scandal revealed by DOGE and Elon Musk,” László, a member of the European Parliament from Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party, wrote on social media last week. He added, “American and European patriots should work together to dismantle the globalist networks operated by Democrats.”

Before today’s meeting, Marocco ordered the termination of all USAID contracts in Hungary, according to the U.S. official I spoke with. Marocco also requested data from the agency’s staff about U.S. programs in Hungary stretching back years.

The goals of the Hungarian investigation, now furthered by U.S. officials, are wide-ranging. It aims to reveal the recipients of U.S. funds and, according to Hungarian right-wing media, “dismantle what officials describe as a deeply embedded international corruption network.” Musk, the billionaire DOGE co-founder who boasted last month of “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” has repeatedly referred to USAID’s work as “criminal,” without providing evidence. Since the inauguration, a DOGE team has embedded itself within USAID, gaining sweeping access to the agency’s payments system while thousands of USAID workers globally have been fired or placed on leave.

The State Department, USAID, and the Hungarian embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance have scolded and spurned traditional European allies. For solidarity, they have looked instead to Hungary, which has embraced its role as Europe’s enfant terrible, seeking closer ties to Russia and flouting European Union rules (it recently refused to pay a 200-million-euro fine for failing to comply with the bloc’s asylum policies).

Orbán’s standoff with Brussels is one aspect of a larger effort to steer his country in a more nationalist, authoritarian direction. The prime minister and his allies have steadily gained control over the country’s media landscape as part of a years-long effort to limit dissent and consolidate power within government and across civil society. In the process, Budapest has cracked down on independent organizations reliant on foreign funding, painting them as enemies of the Hungarian state. The crackdown has included the ejection from the country of the Central European University, endowed by the billionaire financier George Soros.

These actions have endeared the Hungarian prime minister to Trump. Orbán traveled to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, multiple times during the U.S. presidential campaign last year, and then again in December to meet with the president-elect.

Today’s meeting wasn’t Marocco’s first audience with Hungarian-government representatives since he became the director for foreign assistance at the State Department. Last month, he reportedly met with Tristan Azbej, a Hungarian official responsible for programs aiding persecuted Christians.

The same week, Orbán vowed in comments on state radio that his government was taking legal action to eradicate nongovernmental organizations and media outlets receiving funding from the U.S. and other foreign sources. He cheered Trump’s moves against USAID and promised that Budapest would examine “line by line” groups funded by the agency.

USAID has supported a wide range of independent media and literacy programs in countries worldwide. In 2023, the agency funded training and other support for 6,200 journalists and aided 707 nonstate media outlets, according to Reporters Without Borders, a press-advocacy group based in New York. The 2025 foreign-aid budget allocated $268.4 million for “independent media and the free flow of information.” Among the media organizations in Hungary that relied on USAID funding is the investigative news website Átlátszó, which received up to 15 percent of its budget from USAID, according to the Financial Times.

The Hungarian government, meanwhile, argues that foreign-funded media organizations are “used as political tools to manipulate public opinion.”

“Their mission?” wrote Orbán’s spokesperson, Zoltán Kovács, of USAID-funded outlets. “To promote a specific ideological agenda, one that aligns with left-liberal interests, supports mass migration, and undermines governments that refuse to toe the globalist line.”

László, the Hungarian official tasked with leading Hungary’s probe of USAID activities, said in a video on X last week that he would “reach out to our American friends to understand how U.S. taxpayers’ money finally ended up in political projects in Hungary.”

“I believe we can work together based on mutual interests,” he added.

Trump-administration officials appear to agree.