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Trump thrashes European leaders in wide-ranging interview: ‘I think they’re weak’
President Donald Trump denounced Europe as a “decaying” group of nations led by “weak” people in an interview with Blue Light News, belittling the traditional U.S. allies for failing to control migration and end the Russia-Ukraine war, and signaling that he would endorse European political candidates aligned with his own vision for the continent.
The broadside attack against European political leadership represents the president’s most virulent denunciation to date of these Western democracies, threatening a decisive rupture with countries like France and Germany that already have deeply strained relations with the Trump administration.
“I think they’re weak,” Trump said of Europe’s political leaders. “But I also think that they want to be so politically correct.”
“I think they don’t know what to do,” he added. “Europe doesn’t know what to do.”
Trump matched that blunt, even abrasive, candor on European affairs with a sequence of stark pronouncements on matters closer to home: He said he would make support for immediately slashing interest rates a litmus test in his choice of a new Federal Reserve chair. He said he could extend anti-drug military operations to Mexico and Colombia. And Trump urged conservative Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, both in their 70s, to stay on the bench.
Trump’s comments about Europe come at an especially precarious moment in the negotiations to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, as European leaders express intensifying alarm that Trump may abandon Ukraine and its continental allies to Russian aggression. In the interview, Trump offered no reassurance to Europeans on that score and declared that Russia was obviously in a stronger position than Ukraine.
Trump spoke on Monday at the White House with Blue Light News’s Dasha Burns for a special episode of The Conversation. Blue Light News on Tuesday named Trump the most influential figure shaping European politics in the year ahead, a recognition previously conferred on leaders including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Trump’s confident commentary on Europe presented a sharp contrast with some of his remarks on domestic matters in the interview. The president and his party have faced a series of electoral setbacks and spiraling dysfunction in Congress this fall as voters rebel against the high cost of living. Trump has struggled to deliver a message to meet that new reality: In the interview, he graded the economy’s performance as an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus,” insisted that prices were falling across the board and declined to outline a specific remedy for imminent spikes in health care premiums.
Even amid growing turbulence at home, however, Trump remains a singular figure in international politics.
In recent days, European capitals have shuddered with dismay at the release of Trump’s new National Security Strategy, a highly provocative manifesto that cast the Trump administration in opposition to the mainstream European political establishment and vowed to “cultivate resistance” to the European status quo on immigration and other politically volatile issues.
In the interview, Trump amplified that worldview, describing cities like London and Paris as creaking under the burden of migration from the Middle East and Africa. Without a change in border policy, Trump said, some European states “will not be viable countries any longer.”
Using highly incendiary language, Trump singled out London’s left-wing mayor, Sadiq Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrants and the city’s first Muslim mayor, as a “disaster” and blamed his election on immigration: “He gets elected because so many people have come in. They vote for him now.”
The president of the European Council, António Costa, on Monday rebuked the Trump administration for the national security document and urged the White House to respect Europe’s sovereignty and right to self-government.
“Allies do not threaten to interfere in the democratic life or the domestic political choices of these allies,” Costa said. “They respect them.”
Speaking with Blue Light News, Trump flouted those boundaries and said he would continue to back favorite candidates in European elections, even at the risk of offending local sensitivities.
“I’d endorse,” Trump said. “I’ve endorsed people, but I’ve endorsed people that a lot of Europeans don’t like. I’ve endorsed Viktor Orbán,” the hard-right Hungarian prime minister Trump said he admired for his border-control policies.
It was the Russia-Ukraine war, rather than electoral politics, that Trump appeared most immediately focused on. He claimed on Monday that he had offered a new draft of a peace plan that some Ukrainian officials liked, but that Zelenskyy himself had not reviewed yet. “It would be nice if he would read it,” Trump said.
Zelenskyy met with leaders of France, Germany and the United Kingdom on Monday and continued to voice opposition to ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia as part of a peace deal.
The president said he put little stock in the role of European leaders in seeking to end the war: “They talk, but they don’t produce, and the war just keeps going on and on.”
In a fresh challenge to Zelenskyy, who appears politically weakened in Ukraine due to a corruption scandal, Trump renewed his call for Ukraine to hold new elections.
“They haven’t had an election in a long time,” Trump said. “You know, they talk about a democracy, but it gets to a point where it’s not a democracy anymore.”
Latin America
Even as he said he is pursuing a peace agenda overseas, Trump said he might further broaden the military actions his administration has taken in Latin America against targets it claims are linked to the drug trade. Trump has deployed a massive military force to the Caribbean to strike alleged drug runners and pressure the authoritarian regime in Venezuela.
In the interview, Trump repeatedly declined to rule out putting American troops into Venezuela as part of an effort to bring down the strongman ruler Nicolás Maduro, whom Trump blames for exporting drugs and dangerous people to the United States. Some leaders on the American right have warned Trump that a ground invasion of Venezuela would be a red line for conservatives who voted for him in part to end foreign wars.
“I don’t want to rule in or out. I don’t talk about it,” Trump said of deploying ground troops, adding: “I don’t want to talk to you about military strategy.”
But the president said he would consider using force against targets in other countries where the drug trade is highly active, including Mexico and Colombia.
“Sure, I would,” he said.
Trump scarcely defended some of his most controversial actions in Latin America, including his recent pardon of the former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a decades-long sentence in an American prison after being convicted in a massive drug-trafficking conspiracy. Trump said he knew “very little” about Hernández except that he’d been told by “very good people” that the former Honduran president had been targeted unfairly by political opponents.
“They asked me to do it and I said, I’ll do it,” Trump acknowledged, without naming the people who sought the pardon for Hernández.
Health Care and the Economy
Asked to grade the economy under his watch, Trump rated it an overwhelming success: “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” To the extent voters are frustrated about prices, Trump said the Biden administration was at fault: “I inherited a mess. I inherited a total mess.”
The president is facing a forbidding political environment because of voters’ struggles with affordability, with about half of voters overall and nearly 4 in 10 people who voted for Trump in 2024 saying in a recent Blue Light News Poll that the cost of living was as bad as it had ever been in their lives.
Trump said he could make additional changes to tariff policy to help lower the price of some goods, as he has already done, but he insisted overall that the trend on costs was in the right direction.
“Prices are all coming down,” Trump said, adding: “Everything is coming down.”
Prices rose 3 percent over the 12 months ending in September, according to the most recent Consumer Price Index.
Trump’s political struggles are shadowing his upcoming decision on a nominee to chair the Federal Reserve, a post that will shape the economic environment for the balance of Trump’s term. Asked if he was making support for slashing interest rates a litmus test for his Fed nominee, Trump answered with a quick “yes.”
The most immediate threat to the cost of living for many Americans is the expiration of enhanced health insurance subsidies for Obamacare exchange plans that were enacted by Democrats under former President Joe Biden and are set to expire at the end of this year. Health insurance premiums are expected to spike in 2026, and medical charities are already experiencing a marked rise in requests for aid even before subsidies expire.
Trump has been largely absent from health policy negotiations in Washington, while Democrats and some Republicans supportive of a compromise on subsidies have run into a wall of opposition on the right. Reaching a deal — and marshaling support from enough Republicans to pass it — would likely require direct intervention from the president.
Yet asked if he would support a temporary extension of Obamacare subsidies while he works out a large-scale plan with lawmakers, Trump was noncommittal.
“I don’t know. I’m gonna have to see,” he said, pivoting to an attack on Democrats for being too generous with insurance companies in the Affordable Care Act.
A cloud of uncertainty surrounds the administration’s intentions on health care policy. In late November, the White House planned to unveil a proposal to temporarily extend Obamacare subsidies only to postpone the announcement. Trump has promised on and off for years to unveil a comprehensive plan for replacing Obamacare but has never done so. That did not change in the interview.
“I want to give the people better health insurance for less money,” Trump said. “The people will get the money, and they’re going to buy the health insurance that they want.”
Reminded that Americans are currently buying holiday gifts and drawing up household budgets for 2026 amid uncertainty around premiums, Trump shot back: “Don’t be dramatic. Don’t be dramatic.”
Supreme Court
Large swaths of Trump’s domestic agenda currently sit before the Supreme Court, with a generally sympathetic 6-3 conservative majority that has nevertheless thrown up some obstacles to the most brazen versions of executive power Trump has attempted to wield.
Trump spoke with Blue Light News several days after the high court agreed to hear arguments concerning the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, the automatic conferral of citizenship on people born in the United States. Trump is attempting to roll back that right and said it would be “devastating” if the court blocked him from doing so.
If the court rules in his favor, Trump said, he had not yet considered whether he would try to strip citizenship from people who were born as citizens under current law.
Trump broke with some members of his party who have been hoping that the court’s two oldest conservatives, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, might consider retiring before the midterm elections so that Trump can nominate another conservative while Republicans are guaranteed to control the Senate.
The president said he’d rather Alito, 75, and Thomas, 77, the court’s most reliable conservative jurists, remain in place: “I hope they stay,” he said, “’cause I think they’re fantastic.”
The Senate Ethics Committee has dismissed allegations of misconduct levied against Sen. Ruben Gallego, who stood accused by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of “campaign finance violations and inappropriate conduct of a sexual nature.”
The charges came following the resignation of the Arizona Democrat’s longtime friend, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who was forced to step down amid accusations of serious sexual misconduct. Luna, a Florida Republican, sought to implicate Gallego by claiming in an interview on CBS that a woman would come forward about an “incident that occurred between the two of them at the same time and the event was sexual in nature allegedly.”
But in a letter to Gallego sent Monday — which he shared in a public news release — the notoriously inactive Ethics Committee cited Gallego’s “prompt contact with the Committee following media reports of the allegations and appreciated your full cooperation with the Committee throughout the investigation.”
Gallego has maintained he was unaware of the allegations against Swalwell and said in a statement he was a victim of “right-wing conspiracies peddled by far-right activists like Anna Paulina Luna, the White House, and their allies.”
He continued, “I look forward to an apology from Rep. Luna for weaponizing the ethics process while refusing to investigate historic corruption that’s making life harder for families.”
Luna, in a post on X, defended her referral to the Senate Ethics Committee.
“The good news about DC is everyone talks, and eventually the reporters come forward with your texts,” Luna wrote on social media. “Do yourself a favor and keep raising for your legal defense fund. Once a creep always a creep, and you’re gonna need it.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misstated Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s state. She represents Florida.
Top deputies of President Donald Trump will brief Congress on the Iran peace talks in a Monday conference call — the first time administration officials have addressed a broad group of lawmakers since Trump signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Tehran earlier this month.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, will lead the briefing for all House and Senate members at 4 p.m., according to seven people granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting.
Republicans and Democrats have called for more transparency about the 14-point agreement inked on June 18, which initiated a cease-fire between the two countries. Since then, the U.S. and Iran have continued to engage in hostilities.
House Republicans finally cleared a runway this week to finish some of their top legislative priorities before the July 4 recess.
That is, unless a small band of hard-liners trip up those plans at takeoff.
Speaker Mike Johnson is hoping to move quickly to pass fiscal 2027 appropriations legislation, the annual defense policy bill and a kids online safety bill that has been years in the making. The movement comes after President Donald Trump instructed GOP hard-liners to stop holding up a procedural vote amid a protest from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and others that the Senate hadn’t passed Trump’s election security bill.
But Luna and other hard-liners are still threatening to tank the procedural vote that could delay the defense policy bill and other measures until they get concessions on the SAVE America Act, amid other demands.
Johnson, for example, had also promised hard-liners a vote before July 4 on a sweeping GOP immigration bill introduced in the prior Congress as H.R. 2, which is highly unlikely to happen.
Johnson for his part has said the House will “pass the SAVE America Act again” by folding parts of it into a third party-line reconciliation bill. But the slimmed-down version he’d need to pursue in order to meet strict Senate rules for the budget process is already being panned by hard-liners as insufficient.
That reconciliation bill is also already delayed. House Republicans aren’t on track to meet their goal of advancing its framework before the July 4 recess as members on the Budget panel balked over how to pay for the legislation in a closed-door meeting last week.
“Time is of the essence, given how many legislative days we have,” House Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie, who is sponsoring the kids online safety legislation, said in an interview last week. “If we lose a week, that would be important.”
Meanwhile, Democratic leadership is grappling with their own heated internal divisions this week. Members are split over supporting the adoption of an amendment to a fiscal 2027 spending bill from Rep. Thomas Massie that would end Israel aid and cut the overall foreign military aid program by $3.3 billion.
Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro did not instruct her colleagues on how to vote during a rare Sunday evening caucus call, two sources granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting tell Mia and Riley. Leaders did, however, criticize the amendment as poorly written.
One other item this week that could split members of each party: House lawmakers are also slated to vote on a rewritten war powers resolution from Rep. Rashida Tlaib to reign in Trump administration military actions in Lebanon. Leadership worked with Tlaib to come up with new language last month that is expected to garner more Dem support, but the resolution is still expected to fail without GOP votes.
What else we’re watching:
— SENATE GOP GETS ANTSY ABOUT NOMINATIONS: Some Republican senators are unsettled by Trump’s apparent lack of urgency in filling vacant posts, even as GOP control of the chamber beyond the midterms is increasingly in doubt. There are more than two dozen federal court vacancies. Labor secretary, FDA commissioner and scores of other open positions do not have nominees, and a senior White House official said Trump is in no rush to fill them. “We’re running short on time,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a member of Senate HELP, which oversees health, labor and other issues.
—RICK SCOTT SAYS HE’S JUST TRYING TO HELP: Fresh off his controversial Trump invite to a Senate GOP lunch last week, Sen. Rick Scott told Blue Light News in an interview he’s trying to make a mark — not trying to challenge Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Scott insists that neither his invitation to the president nor a letter he circulated afterward outlining how the Senate GOP should be preparing for the midterms should be seen as a prelude to a leadership challenge. The Florida Republican said he’s perfectly happy running the conference’s conservative Steering Committee and predicted Thune would easily secure another term as leader. What has become eminently clear in recent weeks is that Scott — after a long career in business, two terms as governor and nearly eight years as senator — just isn’t a back-bench kind of guy.
Meredith Lee Hill, Riley Rogerson, Alex Gangitano, Jordain Carney and Cheyenne Haslett contributed to this report.
- Johnson says he will send housing bill to Trump on Monday
- GOP infighting threatens critical defense bill
- Johnson says he will send housing bill to Trump on Monday
- Senate Ethics dismisses allegations against Ruben Gallego
- Johnson says he will send housing bill to Trump on Monday
- Rubio, Witkoff to brief Congress on Iran
- Coons released from hospital after car crash caused minor injuries
- US, Iran agree to ‘stand down for now,’ resume peace talks: Official
- Trump: Reflecting Pool will be drained after July 4; algae ‘criminally made’
- Capitol agenda: Red, white and GOP hard-liner blues
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