LONDON (AP) — The European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator says U.S. President Donald Trump poses a serious threat to the EU because he is working with right wing groups on the continent to engineer the bloc’s disintegration.
Guy Verhofstadt said Monday the EU has “fewer friends than ever in the United States today.”
He said Trump and his advisers had joined with European right wing movements in “undermining the EU.” Trump himself had spoken “very favorably of the fact that other countries will want to break away” from the 28-member bloc after Britain.
Verhofstadt says Trump is one of three threats facing the EU, along with radicalized political Islam and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin, he says, is trying to undermine the EU with cyber-attacks and financing anti-European right wing political parties, including the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and France’s National Front.