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Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.
Which is worse: Paris, Brussels or London? The answer is none of them; they are all lovely (only joking, it’s Brussels). That’s unless you are Donald Trump, in which case, you hate them equally.
The former golfer-in-chief and cheeseburger enthusiast loves nothing better than bashing European cities, which he sees as prime examples of all that’s wrong in the world.
The latest case of anti-Europe sentiment came at a campaign event in Wisconsin. “Look at Paris,” Trump said. “Look at London. They’re no longer recognizable.”
“I’m going to get myself in a lot of trouble with the folks in Paris and the folks in London,” the Republican wannabe presidential nominee continued, “but you know what? That’s the fact. They are no longer recognizable and we can’t let that happen to our country … I’ll never let it happen to the United States of America.”
The reason for the apparent destruction of these once-great capital cities is that they have “opened their doors to jihad,” Trump told his supporters, making it seem as if “jihad” is now going from door to door like an old-school encyclopedia salesman.
This fits into the right-wing narrative that there are “no-go areas” in big cities (back in 2015, Trump said that some neighborhoods in Paris and London are so dangerous that police refuse to go there). To steal a joke from the comedian Dara Ó Briain, there’s only one no-go area for ordinary Londoners, and it’s the giant M&M Store just off Leicester Square.
In remarks that he would doubtless later regret, Boris Johnson, who in 2015 was the mayor of London, said Trump’s comments on the dangers of London were “ill-informed” and “utter nonsense.”
Johnson added that “the only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.” That remark may not have been mentioned when the two later became BFFs.
Brussels has, famously, also been the subject of Trump’s ire. In January 2016, when he was a presidential candidate for the first time and we were all preparing for a Hillary Clinton presidency (the naivete of youth), Trump said that living in Brussels was like living in “a hellhole” because of the supposed lack of “assimilation” of the Muslim population as opposed to, say, the fact that there aren’t any cash machines.
Mind you, not everywhere in Europe annoys Trump. You may recall back in 2019 that he expressed an interest in buying Greenland.
Trump is said to have repeatedly asked advisers “with varying degrees of seriousness” whether the U.S. could buy the autonomous Danish territory, to which the Danes responded with varying degrees of outrage: “No.”
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“Rishi Sunak and Olaf Scholz were surprised and confused to find themselves standing on one of Donald Trump’s ties.”
Can you do better? Email [email protected] or on Twitter/X @pdallisonesque
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Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best from our postbag — there’s no prize except for the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far more valuable than cash or booze.
“She’s either behind me all the way or planning something behind my back,” By Joel Horowitz
Public service announcement: We’ve got a new weekly quiz about the EU election for you to try every Friday (after you’ve read this column, obvs).
Paul Dallison is POLITICO’s deputy EU editor.
