On Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily, Dr. Ted Malloch, an economics professor who advised the Trump 2016 campaign, described President Donald Trump’s recent trip overseas as a “grand tour” of the world in just ten days.
“It was an incredible undertaking,” he told SiriusXM host Alex Marlow. “A fabulous opportunity, to be optimistic about it. And he did brilliantly. I’ll long remember the sword dancing in Saudi Arabia, and, of course, the agreements that were reached there that could help to turn the tide on Islamic terrorism and unite the Sunni world on our side.”
“He had a very profitable time in Israel,” Malloch continued. “I don’t think that surprised anyone. I do believe that transactionally, he believes he’s up to the huge responsibility of trying to bring some peace and accord in that part of the world.”
He described President Trump’s interaction with European leaders as “interesting, if not controversial, because he basically read them the riot act and told them that they have to pay, in the future, for their own security – something they’ve been remiss to do and certainly have put off, if not for years, then for decades.”
“His time in Brussels was probably the most awkward,” Malloch said. “I wish I could have been at the lunch with him and Ministers Tusk and Juncker, where I’m sure they had a conversation about European integration – or hope for European disintegration.”
“It was an unbelievable tour in terms of ambition. It was also a chance to get away from Washington and all the constant fever that surrounds Trump in the swirl of news, or fake news, that tries to castigate him – or, as the Europeans say, hopefully impeach him soon,” he said.
“I thought it was interesting that while he was in Europe, our former President Barack Obama also appeared on stage with Chancellor Merkel in a kind of lovefest in Berlin with about 100,000 people, talking about how great Europe is, how European values are so critical, and basically denouncing – directly or indirectly – everything that Trump stands for,” he added.
Marlow asked if European leaders have fully accepted and processed the reality of Trump’s election yet.
“I suspect it’s a lot like the far left in the United States – and the EU is composed largely of socialists and people on the left wing who are in power; they’ve decided to deny Trump his presidency, to make it as difficult as possible for him to accomplish anything and to hate him both in public and to laugh about him in private,” Malloch replied.
“They try to destroy anything and anyone attached to him and wish that he would just go away. In fact, I think they’ve begun talking about who will be president next,” he added. “They’re trying to deny him his presidency.”
“It is significant that Mrs. Merkel, who actually runs most of the show in Europe, this last few days has come out and basically said, ‘We need to take Europe and put it on this future integrationist course and basically cancel all of our relations with the United States and go down our own road,’” he observed, saying she reached this conclusion “only a few days after meeting Donald Trump.”
He said Merkel’s remarks were unprecedented for “a country and a region that has had strong collective security and trans-Atlantic relations for decades and decades.”
“The thing I keep reminding Europeans is that for 70 years, the Americans – first through the German Marshall Plan and then through every other auspice – has basically bailed them out, won their wars, paid their bills, and defended them,” Malloch contended. “And for it, we either get a yawn, a shrug of the shoulders, or more recently, a great deal of resentment.”
“I think that this relationship between continental Europe – and again, make a big difference between the UK post-Brexit and the rest of Europe – is actually something to watch on the radar screen,” he advised.
“The very fortunate thing, as you well know, in Italy and elsewhere is that in each of the European countries, there is probably between a 25 and 35 or 40 percent element of the people, the actual population, who are populist, nationalist, and pro-Trump in their orientation,” Malloch observed. “These political forces have not yet, with the exception of Great Britain, have not yet come into political power.”
Malloch said he was not surprised to see himself coming under increased criticism in the press.
“I’ve been a Trump surrogate during the campaign and certainly post-election. There are very few people in Europe, Americans of our stripe, my stripe, who could go on with any kind of articulate voice, defend Trump, actually explain what’s happening in America.”
“I have a big target on my back,” he said. “Anyone who is associated with Trump, frankly, is someone that they try to attack. Because I was at least tipped early on to possibly take a position in the Trump administration, that became more and more evident, in particular, because I have highly critical views of the European Union as a bloated, centralized, globalist bureaucracy which should be named for what it is. I think Trump feels the same way. That caused consternation.”
“In fact, one of the headlines – two of the headlines in European newspapers were that I am the person that Europeans should fear most. Well, I take that with a degree of honor,” Malloch said.
“The second, the chairman of the European Parliament and some of the political forces there wrote a letter to the European Council president saying that if I were ever appointed, I should be made persona non grata, that I would not be welcome in Brussels because I would damage their political union. Well, it’s a great deal of faith in what I’m able to accomplish, but what they’re really afraid of is the Donald Trump presidency,” he said.
Malloch assessed the populist-nationalist movement in Europe as a “growing and swelling percentage of the population in almost all the European countries.”
“I jokingly or half-jokingly say if you put any two letters in front of the word ‘exit,’ you have the possibility of a European country leaving the European Union. It’s that strong a political force,” he said.
“In the Netherlands, of course, Geert Wilders’ party came in second but did extraordinarily well in that recent election for a new government in the Netherlands,” he noted. “Le Pen did not get to the 40 percent level, but she reached 35 percent, which is unprecedented in France. There’s a strong political party behind her.”
In Italy, where Malloch recently addressed the parliament, he saw “a constellation of center-right forces that seem to be coming together – you never quite know with Italian politics – in order to defeat the socialist Left-leaning Democrat party of Renzi.”
“The forces in Europe, I think, are more and more clearly either aligned to go more toward the European direction, integrating all of European activity in Brussels, having a Western European army – and on the other side, it may be half the population saying, ‘No, thanks, we’ve had enough. We don’t want any more of that. We either want to leave the Euro as a currency, or we want to leave the European Union, or at best, we want to take our countries back,’” he said.
“In my speech in Italy, I had a couple of great lines from Machiavelli,” he recalled. “I quoted them from the Rocky movie and told them that Italian pride does not mean just running up the art museum steps in Philadelphia. It got quite a large ovation.”
“This swelling of European national pride, I think, is something that is real. It’s growing, and hopefully we’ll see its political manifestation over the next number of years,” Malloch concluded.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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