Category: Transatlantic News

Will We Someday Ask Ourselves, Maybe Trump Wasn’t That Bad?

Recently it occurred to me that no matter how bad how presidents tend to be, their successors are usually worse. So much worse, in fact, that we’re obliged to re-think our terrible opinions of previous presidents.

Take Nixon, the president who was impeached and resigned from office. “Well, he was a vindictive anti-semite who tried to subvert the Constitution… but on the other hand, he did establish the Environmental Protection Agency. So maybe he wasn’t that bad.”

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Trump doesn’t crave war, but he does crave its TV ratings

Now that the America-firsters are more or less in place, others are saying that the President has assembled a ‘war cabinet.’

That strikes me as giving Psycho Trump too much credit. His goal isn’t war. His goal is attention, and he pursues it through a borish, juvenile belligerence that could result in war but more through hare-brained miscalculation than any conscious strategy.

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The Ghost War: What Europe Should Remember about Trump and Trade

Trump’s steel and alluminum tariffs are scheduled to go into effect around 24 March, and Europe’s getting angry about it. The European Parliament has come out swinging, exploring options from “appealing to the WTO” to a “full-out trade war”.

Look, we probably know what Trump will do on tariffs. He’ll make grandiose and ridiculous claims and threats, back off, and then take credit for fixing a non-existent problem. That’s his go-to move, because all parts of that move focus attention upon himself without actually causing a crisis that could reflect badly upon him.

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Why Rednecks Should Stop Worrying and Love Europe

The following article appeared in The Huffington Post in February 2017.

I was a redneck, but a year in Europe changed my life.

My hometown was Harlan, Kentucky, a coal-mining hub set deep in Appalachia. By 1989, through circumstance and chance, I gained a scholarship to study at a prestigious prep school in Massachusetts. My classmates included a Hilton, a Roosevelt and a son of the King of Jordan. Deerfield Academy offered a career trajectory far higher than I had any right to expect, if I could seize it.

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Are Europeans and Americans Drifting Apart?

The following article appeared in The Huffington Post in 2014.

Broader surveillance was supposed to be about catching terrorists, not about eavesdropping on a German leader who’s been one of America’s best friends.

Revelations that the National Security Agency tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private mobile phone have made a big impression here in Brussels and across Europe. They have given concrete form to a long-held European suspicion: that sometimes when America talks about protecting the West from terrorism, it really means conducting surveillance for its own economic and political advantage. It turns out that it’s not about your security, this example seems to say; it’s about our prosperity.

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