Greenland—the largest island in the world (that isn’t a continent) and a self-ruling Danish territory—has recently undergone a national election, seen protests seeking autonomy from Denmark, and has prominently become the target of President Donald Trump, who wants to somehow “get” the territory as part of the United States. Several news agencies recently sent photographers to the cities of Nuuk, Ilulissat, and more to cover the local population, their reactions to the larger stories, and their own moves toward independence. The winning party of the March 11 elections is described by the AP as “a pro-business party that favors a slow path to independence,” and opposes Trump’s recent efforts.

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Great Britain's Jack Draper claims the biggest title of his career with a straight-sets win over Denmark's Holger Rune in the Indian Wells final.

Britain's Jack Draper claims the biggest title of his career with a straight-set win over Denmark's Holger Rune in the Indian Wells final.

Britain's Jack Draper claims the biggest title of his career with a straight-set win over Denmark's Holger Rune in the Indian Wells final.

He denounced the European Union as “hostile” and “abusive” while threatening to ratchet up tariffs on some of its most famous goods by 200 percent. He openly mused about annexing Greenland while sitting in the Oval Office across from the head of the military alliance that would be called to defend it. He vowed to escalate a trade war with Canada while threatening its very right to exist as a sovereign nation.

But when it came to the authoritarian leader in Moscow, President Donald Trump boasted of his relationship with Vladimir Putin and declined to say that he would pressure his Russian counterpart to agree to concessions as part of a cease-fire deal with Ukraine. Trump’s sympathies seemed to lie with America’s foe over its friends, further unnerving already-whiplashed allies watching anxiously as the president’s handpicked envoy met with Putin at the Kremlin.

And that was all today—a day not unlike many in the early weeks of this new administration.

Trump’s proclamations underscored how quickly the new president has reoriented U.S. foreign policy and the nation’s global priorities. Old allies are now economic rivals. Friendly neighbors are territories to be seized. Authoritarians—not just Putin, but also the leaders of China and North Korea—are to be respected and, potentially, transformed into partners with whom to carve up spheres of influence.

The dizzying day began, as it so often does, with an early-morning social-media post.

Trump took to Truth Social to escalate his trade war with the European Union, vowing to impose 200 percent tariffs on European wine and champagne in a move that worsened anxiety among consumers on both sides of the Atlantic. He reacted angrily after the EU retaliated against a first wave of U.S. tariffs, with the bloc hitting back by levying 50 percent tariffs on imports of U.S. whiskey and other products. Trump deemed the tariffs “nasty.”

Trump wrote, “The European Union, one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the World [was] formed for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the United States.”

His claim was both untrue and adversarial. The EU, which has long prized good relations with the U.S., was acting in response to Trump’s initial tariffs, established the day before on goods such as aluminum and steel. EU leaders have made clear their hopes to do away with the tariffs but vowed to stand up for the continent by targeting politically sensitive goods in the U.S. in response to the Trump administration’s aggressive posture.

“We will not give in to threats,” Laurent Saint-Martin, France’s minister delegate for foreign trade, posted on X. He added that Trump “is escalating the trade war he chose to unleash.”

The tariffs were greeted with dismay by Americans who enjoy the continent’s wine—and by Wall Street, which took yet another trade-war tumble.

The markets were further buffeted by Trump’s insistence later in the day that he would not back down from an April 2 deadline to impose an additional 25 percent tariff on Canadian goods. The president has waffled on tariffs with America’s neighbor to the north, imposing one set on steel and aluminum earlier this week only to remove it hours later, but he declared in the Oval Office today that this time, he will follow through.

Trump has repeatedly misstated the size of Canada’s existing tariffs on U.S. dairy and lumber products and has wildly exaggerated the amount of fentanyl coming across the border. His broadsides against Canada have poisoned feelings toward the U.S. in Ottawa. “We didn’t ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves,” the nation’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, said this week. Yet Trump has not stopped talking about adding Canada as his nation’s 51st state, his rhetoric escalating from taunt to threat, with many Canadians viewing it as an existential worry.

“We don’t need anything that they got. We [buy Canadian goods] because we want to be helpful, but it comes a point when you just can’t do that. You have to run your own country,” Trump said today. “And to be honest with you, Canada only works as a state.”

Trump delivered that ominous observation in his first meeting of his second term with Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general. Canada is a member of NATO, and an attempt to annex it by force would trigger the 75-year-old alliance’s mutual-defense pact, known as Article 5, which theoretically could pit the rest of the West against the United States. But Trump further poked at NATO by suggesting that he also has his eye on another piece of land—Greenland, a territory of Denmark—and hinting that he may even send troops there.

“We really need it for national security. I think that’s why NATO might have to get involved in a way, because we really need Greenland for national security,” Trump said. “You know, we have a couple of bases on Greenland already, and we have quite a few soldiers, and maybe you’ll see more and more soldiers.”

For years, Trump has lusted after Greenland, which is rich with minerals and sits in a strategic location in the North Atlantic. But Denmark has refused to discuss a transfer or sale, even as Greenland this week elected a party that favors gradual independence. Rutte chuckled while Trump discussed Greenland, drawing the ire of some Danish officials, including Rasmus Jarlov, the chairman of Denmark’s defense committee, who said that his nation does “not appreciate” Rutte “joking with Trump about Greenland like this. It would mean war between two NATO countries.”

But even as Trump delivered those threats, he pulled his punches with Putin. For weeks, he and his administration have aligned themselves with Moscow’s view of the war in Ukraine. Trump has declared that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is “a dictator,” that Ukraine started the conflict, that Ukraine would not be allowed to enter NATO, the alliance designed as a bulwark against Russian aggression. Trump belittled Zelensky in the Oval Office last month, and his now-lifted pause in U.S. intelligence sharing with and military supplies to Ukraine allowed Russia to gain territory on the battlefield. Even as Trump’s emissary Steve Witkoff traveled to the Kremlin to see if Russia would agree to the 30-day cease-fire proposal developed by the U.S. and Ukraine, the president declined to say today that he would push Putin to take the deal or to make any concessions.

“I don’t want to talk about leverage, because right now, we’re talking to them, and [the talks] were pretty positive,” Trump said. “I hope Russia is going to make the deal too, and I think once that deal happens … I don’t think they’re going back to shooting again. I think that leads to peace.”

Moments later, Trump went on to declare that he “got along very well with President Putin.” This time, Rutte didn’t laugh.

The voting was dominated by US President Donald Trump's pledge to take over Denmark's autonomous territory.

The desire independence from Denmark grows while most reject US proposals to acquire the icy island.

The decision will end 400 years of the company's letter service, and postboxes will disappear from June.

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.