September 25, 2018, the UN General Assembly. Trump is at the podium telling Germany, to its face, that it will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it doesn’t change course, and the camera cuts to the German delegation... laughing. Actual laughter, on camera, at the warning.
Eight years later, this afternoon, the same man sat behind the Resolute desk and said he knows Europe better than the people who run it, and that two things are killing it: immigration first, energy second. And I can already hear the reaction from Brussels, because sure, this is also the guy who knows more about windmills than the windmill people and more about chemistry than the chemists, and he’s the best at chemistry, you know? the most beautiful chemistry you’ve ever seen (gestures with open palms)
Which is exactly why I knew I agreed with Trump, but for the sake of keeping things tidy, I wanted to prove that the Orange Man was right, using nobody’s numbers but Europe’s own: Eurostat, the Commission’s own competitiveness autopsy, the German statistics office, the ECB. The interesting question was never whether Trump is rude (he usually is, anyway); it’s why he is more than just ‘directionally’ right on the exact topics that make unsuspecting bystanders laugh.
And you don’t even need the gas price to settle this one, although we’ll get there more than once. But the number that stops Europeans’ laughter landed in 2008, and it goes like this:
