🇪🇺Donald Trumps extortion racket comes back for Von der Leyen
Ursula von der Leyen gave Trump $1.35 trillion in trade and energy concessions to avoid a tariff war. Now he wants more, and threatens 35% tariffs if we don’t pay up.
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You could almost set your watch by it.
Just days ago I warned that Donald Trump would pocket Europe’s $1.35 trillion in trade and energy concessions and then demand more, and like most of our competitors and enemies, he would view our weakness as an opportunity to abuse.
🇪🇺Europe Must Stop Paying Tribute to Washington
The EU’s $1.35 trillion trade and energy concessions to Donald Trump cement Europe’s junior‑partner status. Unless leaders endure short‑term pain, they will sacrifice long‑term power and sovereignty.
One week after Europe handed Trump $1.35 trillion in one-way concessions, he did exactly what I said he would: he demanded more and is now threatening our Union with a new 35% tariff threat if we don’t cough up the $600 billion investment commitment he says we owe him.
As much as I love running around playing Political Gandalf, I can’t even take credit for this predictable foreign policy rerun. Yet, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a significant chunk of the Brussels bubble are all acting like it’s a surprise.
Let’s review. On July 27, Ursula von der Leyen stood in Scotland and announced what she described as a stabilising, necessary trade deal with Trump. She portrayed it as a win for “predictability” and “stability”.
Of course, the reality was a forced surrender: the EU agreed to 15% flat tariffs on most of our exports, $750 billion in American energy purchases, and a promise of $600 billion in investment into US infrastructure with absolutely no equivalent commitments from the American side.
This wasn’t a partnership. It was a tribute. And now, having pocketed our submission, Trump wants more.
When CNBC asked Trump what would happen if the EU didn’t deliver the investment in full, he gave the perfect Trump answer: “Well, then they pay tariffs of 35%.”
“They brought down their tariffs. So they paid $600 billion. And because of that, I reduced their tariffs from 30% down to 15%, … and a couple of countries came: ‘How come [the] EU is paying less than us?’ And I said, well, because they gave me $600 billion. And that's a gift; that's not like, you know, a loan, by the way.”
There it is. The warning, the blackmail, the transactional leverage, and the total lack of surprise. As I wrote a week ago: “There is every reason to expect he will do the same with the EU.”
Because he always does, and Donald Trump isn’t going to change magically. He never saw it as a deal; it was simply an extortion racket.
Trump isn’t even pretending this was a fair negotiation, describing the $600 billion as a “gift” that he can “do anything [he] wants with it”.
“They gave us $600 billion that we can invest in anything we want. I can do anything I want with it … And the purpose was, they've been, you know, ripping us for so many years that it's time that they pay up, and they have to pay up. We couldn't afford to have the deficits.”
This is not diplomatic language. It is mafia language. And Europe just handed over the briefcase.
According to Trump, the tariff reduction from 30% to 15% is a favour in exchange for a tribute from Ursula von der Leyen, and in giving in to this dynamic, our Commission President has exposed us to the Trumpian extortion racket:
Give me the money, and do as I tell you, or I will raise the price again and hurt you. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Today. Now.
Yet Ursula von der Leyen still stood up last week and framed it all as a diplomatic success. One can only wonder if she’s still clinging to that talking point now that the knife is already back at our throat.
Brussels’ response? Silence.
The Commission’s only line of defence so far is to insist that the $600 billion in investments and $750 billion in energy purchases were always just projections or a repackaging of existing agreements, based on the “very clear intentions” of private companies. Not obligations. Not legally binding.
Washington very clearly disagrees.
The White House claims it’s a done deal, and Trump is using that interpretation to threaten further escalation and force yet another humiliating capitulation. He’s now acting as if any failure to hit those targets is a breach of contract, and the most worrying part? The EU gave him every excuse to make that claim.
And on top of the energy and investment targets, the US is aggressively defending the point that Europe made an ironclad deal to buy “significant amounts of US military equipment”, a claim Brussels is attempting to reject, but one Trump will no doubt weaponise the moment it suits him.
Because let’s face it, why would an imperial America want to maintain the 35% share that the EU makes up in US arms exports? Do we really think that Donald Trump wants a strategically autonomous and independent European Union producing its own weapons and equipment?
Don’t be daft.
This is the deal von der Leyen signed: not a text of clarity, only ambiguity that allows the other side to move the goalposts at will and make Ursula von der Leyen look like a colossal and incompetent fool on the level of Angela Merkel.
And they just did.
We were told this would happen, and French President Emmanuel Macron hit the nail on the head when he said that “To be free, you have to be feared. We have not been feared enough.”
Prime Minister François Bayrou was even more blunt with his immediate reaction to the deal: “It is a dark day when an alliance of free peoples, gathered to affirm their values and defend their interests, resolves to submission.”
And former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin called it “Europe’s Declaration of Dependence”, warning us that it was “illusory to believe Donald Trump will stop his demands faced with a Europe whose sovereignty he despises” when he had already won “an unequal treaty in which one side pays tariffs of 15 % but the other pays none. How can that not be called a tribute?”
It turns out none of this was rhetorical flourish, but a very clear understanding of a political scenario from some of the most senior and lucid politicians in Europe right now.
It was the only accurate assessment of what Trump would do next, and it didn’t even take any time to prove it. Trump and his team wasted no time reframing the EU’s pledges as binding payments and threatened punishment for failing to deliver within seven days.
Why? Because he knows Europe will fold.
Capitulation as a strategy and a structural failure of courage
This is the consequence of trying to avoid short-term pain at the expense of long-term leverage. Ursula von der Leyen didn’t save or protect Europe from disaster by cutting this deal; she delayed the reckoning by a few news cycles and handed Trump the gun that he’s come back and shoot us with.
Even before this latest threat, the deal was indefensible. The EU’s $1.35 trillion in so-called “commitments” were never matched by any equivalent American promise. European exporters are now stuck with a 15% tariff burden, higher than the UK’s and lower than Japan’s, while US exporters face almost nothing.
Worse still, this all happened with no guarantee that the targets would be recognised as fulfilled. It was always going to be Trump’s interpretation that mattered, and this was always a fatal flaw.
Europe thought it had signed a relief deal. Trump saw a down payment. And now he’s collecting.
This isn’t just about Trump or von der Leyen. It is about Europe’s consistent inability to act as a strategic power and to do anything. We have the market weight. We have the industrial base. We have the intellect. We have the ability.
But. We. Do. Not. Use. It. Because. We. Are. Paralysed. By. Division.
France wants strength but also tariff exemptions for its exports, Germany wants to protect its car industry above all else, and smaller states don’t want any trouble at all. The result is a bloc of 27 leaders, each playing defence, hoping someone else will absorb the cost of confrontation.
As former French Ambassador Gérard Araud said last week, the majority of European Member States don’t want to be strategically autonomous; they don’t want to be independent; they want to be a part of a transatlantic community that makes them feel warm and safe.
This mindset is not just strategic. It is dangerous. It is geopolitically suicidal.
It invites the very kind of treatment we’re seeing now. The United States does not deal softly with weakness. It exploits it as any power does.
If this week’s 35% tariff warning doesn’t wake us up, the next one will be even worse because this is not the end of the saga. Trump has seen that threats produce concessions. He now has every incentive to keep the pressure on. And future presidents, Republican or Democrat, will remember this playbook.
The moment the EU fails to meet one of the artificial benchmarks that the US claims were promised, another penalty will be introduced. Trump himself has laid the groundwork:
“They’ve been, you know, ripping us for so many years that it’s time that they pay up, and they have to pay up.”
He has no intention of seeing this as a finished agreement. To him, it is a subscription service, one Europe has now agreed to fund indefinitely.
What now?
The worst part is that it’s not too late for Europe to change course, but we almost certainly won’t.
Because to do so requires political courage and would require absorbing short-term pain, enduring a trade war if necessary, and uniting behind a single strategic posture. It would mean abandoning the logic of “stability at all costs” and embracing the logic of sovereignty. It would require digging in, tucking in our collective chin, and punching back as the bully hits us.
It would mean calling Trump’s bluff.
The EU should state clearly that these investment and energy figures are projections, not obligations. It should reaffirm that trade must be reciprocal and that unilateral tariff threats violate the spirit of any partnership. If Trump proceeds with his 35% threat, we should be ready to take out the trade bazooka we prepared last winter and retaliate with aggressive measures.
Because if we are not, then excuse my French, but we’re getting screwed over by our leaders here.
Europe is being humiliated, and we’re doing it to ourselves.
This is not diplomacy; this is tribute dressed up as trade, and until Ursula von der Leyen and we as the European Union understand that, we will continue to lose, inch by inch, billion by billion.
Let us be clear: Europe has the tools to be a superpower, but no one takes seriously a superpower that acts like a supplicant. We can’t even pretend that Trump’s new 35% tariff threat is a surprise when it’s the logical consequence of our last seven days of policy.
I warned this would happen, and yet here we are again, doing what we always do.
So, I ask again, as I did last week:
What the hell are we doing?
How many more times do we have to be shaken down before our leaders understand that stability without leverage is surrender? That we must dig in and fight for what is in our best interest?
How long until we take all of this seriously?
Trump isn’t the problem. Europe’s refusal to act like a power is. Until we change that, this cycle of tribute, submission and humiliation will continue, and the next American president, whoever they are, will know just how little it takes to make us fold.
I warned this would happen. They did it anyway.
And the next demand is already on its way.
Think I’m wrong? Think we’re already too deep in the tribute trap to fight back?
Hit reply, or better yet, forward this to someone who still thinks this was a "win" for Europe.
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