Brendan Hoban: It’s time the EU stood up to Trump’s bullying                        

Western People  22.7.2025

I wasn’t aware until quite recently who Rosie O’Donnell was. And even though she starred in the film Sleeping in Seattle, her name didn’t ring a familiar bell. An American comedian, Donald Trump has had her in his sights for some time. He even mentioned her to Micheál Martin in the Oval Office, though An Taoiseach had never heard of her!

Rosie and Trump have, as they say, a lot of history.

Rosie got depressed when Trump was first elected president and, in her own words, she knew that ‘she couldn’t take’ a second Trump presidency. So she upped sticks last January and fled to a new life in Ireland. Now she awaits Irish citizenship and Trump has threatened to divest her of American citizenship.

Rosie could become an unlikely American hero because she is of a tiny minority who have called Trump out for what he is and have refused to be part of a growing constituency who, for a variety of motives, are ‘taking the soup’ by attempting to manipulate the shameless Trump for their own purposes.

In the Oval Office, Keith Starmer, the UK PM, shamelessly exploited Trump’s absurd infatuation with royalty, by producing as if out of a hat an invitation to Trump (and the long-suffering Melania) to an official visit to King Charles (and Camilla) in Windsor Castle. The resulting immediate transformation of Trump into an emotional wreck should have shamed Starmer but not Trump, of course, who lives in a world that knows no shame.

Another example of cringe country was when Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of Nato, praised Trump and sycophantically called him ‘Daddy’, a grotesquely embarrassing interlude that must have shamed most of the population of his native Netherlands. ‘I think he likes me’, Trump innocently responded. (No, Donald, he doesn’t, he was just buttering you up.) As, incidentally was Peter Mandelson, the UK ambassador to the USA, when he recently said: ‘There’s a kernel of truth in everything Trump says’. This is the same man who once described Trump (accurately as it turned out) as ‘a bully’ and ‘a danger to the world’.

There are, it must be said, good reasons – political and otherwise – for this appalling level of gratuitous obsequiousness, as indeed could be offered in defence of Micheál

Martin’s enthusiastic nodding in agreement with Trump in his difficult assignment in the Oval Office.

But there comes a time when politicians, media and associated ‘plámássers’ diminish themselves and those they represent by not calling out Trump and, effectively, accepting what in a civilized world is clearly unacceptable.

As I write, we await the response of the EU to Trump’s latest outrageous effort to bully us by increasing tariffs by an outlandish 30% and a further threat if the EU response to his coercion is anything other than simply succumbing to his wishes. If ever there was a time when the EU – for our own reputation and for our own sense of self-worth and self-respect – needed to slay or to tame this disrespectful dragon then this is surely it.  

It’s time for Ursula Von Der Leyen to own this moment in history by refusing to be bullied by a lesser political entity – after all the EU’s population of 449 million dwarfs the USA’s comparable figure of less than 350 million – and, for example, does the figure for Russia at just 146 million.  

Trumpian politics – his agenda and his strategy – is infecting political life with his immorality and amorality. His fundamental game plan is to reject reality and abandon truth.  So Trump has made a signature policy of blurring the boundary between truth and falsehood. (When boundaries that have been hallowed by time are ignored or transgressed at will, a first casualty is the truth.) Truth is what Trump says is true and he reserves the right to make what’s true untrue by repeating it so often that people start believing what they know to be untrue – (as with the allegation that he was robbed of the 2020 election Biden won).

It seems at times as if the world, for so long following a steady and predetermined course mapped out by leaders with a moral compass and a sense of due responsibility, is now a boat adrift on the open seas being shunted this way and that as the prevailing currents determine. And the captain, a strange man with a weird haircut and approaching his 80th birthday and with no credible CV for either public service or intelligence to speak of, is making up policy as he goes along based on nothing more substantial than his own strange opinions and a vast ego. The not unimportant distinction between what is true and what is a lie seems to have evaded ‘the man who now rules the world’ – even though parents and teachers, as a matter of course, successfully communicate it to young children. 

And as this ‘new messiah’ sets about solving all the problems our world presently faces (within timetables that vary from a self-prescribed ‘hour to two weeks’) he prowls around the Middle East, a political powder-keg now exploding with unforeseen consequences for the world, bringing his own brand of mayhem to his campaign for international adulation by way of a Nobel Prize for Peace!

How can all this be true? And yet it’s all happening. And we can see it almost every evening in the television news as Trump dominates the airwaves with a new idea to buy Greenland or take over Canada or whatever – anything that keeps him in the news regardless of how daft or pathetic it makes him look. 

Yet so many, for good and not so good reasons, are turning a blind eye to his demented recipe for sheer anarchy. 

It’s a pity and a shame that so few like Rosie O’Donnell are prepared to call him out.