Trump and his gathering of European footstools

There they all were, Europe’s finest, collected together in the Oval Office like school prefects arrayed in front of the headmaster to receive their report cards.

Or perhaps more pertinently, they resembled the trembling heads of Rome’s vassal states who had hurriedly dropped everything to pay tribute to Nero, fearful of his caprice and penchant for all things unpredictable.

Indeed, not since the heady days of the late Roman Empire has a US president made it more clear in word and action where real power resides. Europe, for Trump, has been able to present itself as a force to be reckoned with by utilising the umbrella of US hegemony and its military might within the context of NATO — and he’s right.

The result is that all of them — the leaders of Germany, France, Italy, and the UK — Trump knows are midgets masquerading as giants. As for the EU’s von der Leyen, she is the leader’ of a ‘pretendy state’, with her every word a pose and her every gesture a ruse. Here is a woman chomping at the bit to fight Russia in the name of a European ideal that has long been a corpse yet to be buried. That she is eager to do so with the armies of other people’s countries is where absurdity resides.

Drilling even deeper, Germany’s Chancellor Merz has about him the distinct whiff of an SS concentration…