Six Ways Trump And The EU Are The Same

The EU likes to posture as a progressive alliance of nations and staunch opponents of the Trump administration yet beneath their liberal mask they share the same policies as Trump’s Whitehouse.

ONE: They adore Margaret Thatcher and want to implement neoliberal policies.

Neoliberalism means privatisation, outsourcing, the sell off of public services and public assets. It’s enshrined in every EU treaty. They are Thatcher’s children and her rivalry with the European powers was based on asserting the interests of British capitalism against it’s continental rivals, not on any difference of economic policy.

Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” is the same old neoliberalism dressed up in new clothes. They want to slash government departments that support workers, students and the poor while subsidies to corporations remain.

They just want a form of Thatcherism that operates behind tariff walls. It’s still about asserting the interests of US corporations.

Talk of “small government” was a favourite of Thatcher as she sat in a tank and used “big government” to invade the Falklands and batter the miners’ strike. The same goes for Trump who’s dropping very expensive bombs on Yemen while talking about cutting out waste.

The EU and Trump - they’re all anti-worker Thatcherite hypocrites who talk about small government while overseeing immense state bureaucracies that funnel taxpayer’s cash into corporate pockets.

TWO: They are all warmongers.

The EU is imperialist. The nations that make up the EU include former colonial oppressors like Spain and France. But even today President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen recently announced €800 billion in arms spending.

They like to blame their recent surge of warmongering on Trump but an EU army has been in the pipeline for a long time and that’s why miltary clauses were included in EU treaties. They resent being under the “protection” of the USA. Germany and France want the EU to act as a world power in its own right.

Trump’s just as bad. Leaked chats from the Signal app showed his administration planning the bombing of the poorest people in the planet - in Yemen. He’s threatened Canada, Greenland and wants to use peace talks in Ukraine to take as much of their wealth as he can.

They should have expected that being a proxy of the Western powers would lead to being stabbed in the back. That’s what happens when you trust Washington.

Imperialism isn’t an accident of personality though - it’s about economic competition spilling over into military competition and it’s built into the DNA of capitalism whether in Brussels or in Washington.

THREE: They would destroy workers in Ireland to defend their system.

The EU threatened to set of an “economic bomb” in Dublin if we didn’t bail out the banks in 2008. They didn’t care about the consequences for working class jobs and our communities. The results was a lost decade for the working class in Ireland and countless lives lost, not to mention the trauma and stress many went through.

They did this to save French and German banks. They were willing to sacrifice workers in Ireland at the altar of greed. They did it without hesistation and would do it again.

Trump is the same. He’s threatening 50,000 pharma jobs in Ireland. He’s willing to use those workers as bargaining chips in his rotten games. This spoiled child of rich parents has never worked a day in his life and can ruin lives on a whim.

His Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, is the former CEO of hedge fund Cantor Fitzgerald, they’re the biggest holder of Irish government debt. They’ve €9 billion in assets in Ireland. These are the parasites sitting in the Whitehouse threatening us.

FOUR: They both fear the rise of China as a world power.

The EU wants to get tougher with China. In reality this is about rival world powers fighting for dominance on the world stage. They claim they’re arming to deal with the threat of Russia. But in reality China is the real enemy.

They’ve put huge tariffs on Chinese cars and have recently said that China is “the greater threat” - not Trump. Trump is the acting the same way. The US is upping it’s economic competition with China and this could easily spill over into military conflict in the Pacific.

FIVE: They both support Israel.

Von der Leyen got stick when she said she supported Israel’s right to “defend itself” - decades of ethnic cleansing and genocide isn’t defence though. The EU is the second-largest arms supplier to Israel after the USA, between 2018 and 2022, EU member states sold arms worth €1.76 billion euros to Israel.

New research by the Transnational Institute and Stop Wapenhandel reveals that European taxpayers’ money to the tune of €426 million is funding companies that arm Israel.

Trump has said he fully supports Israel and his friend “Bibi” Netenyahu. He even published an A.I. video showing casinos on land to be stolen from the Palestinians. The US gives Israel billions every year and expects that Israel will act as a guard dog for US interests in Middle East.

SIX: They’re all racist bastards.

Keeping the working class divided is essential to all of the parasites who sit on top of this corporate system. So it’s no surprise that both the EU and Trump are racist bastards and foster division, to keep us weak.

From its headquarters in Warsaw, Poland, Frontex hunts down refugees trying to make it into Europe. It has made the politicians’ goal of creating a “Fortress Europe” into a reality.

Frontex runs a sprawling network of barbed wire, border guards, war planes and ships along the European Union’s border. Frontex is the nightmarish reality of where the EU is heading — becoming an increasingly militarised regional block that regulates the workers coming to the EU and controls those already at home here.

Trump’s cabinet of corporate parasites likes nothing better than playing the game of distraction by pointing to some poor Mexican that’s trying to enter the USA to earn minimum wage plucking food from the soil.

All these similarities of policy between the EU and Trump are because they are all members of the same class, the capitalist class. Most politicians whether they wear a liberal or authoritarian mask are puppets of the rich. The Trump administration is more brazen and has the capitalists in the cabinet, governing directly.

The working class needs to overthrow them all.