Shattered Trust

The Steady State | by Greg Rushford

The Golden Age of America begins right now,” promised President Donald Trump in his Inaugural Address on January 20 2025. “From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world.” The “crisis of trust” in American leadership that our “corrupt” elites had created was over.

On December 5, a triumphant Trump declared victory: “America is strong and respected again,” he asserted. No U.S. president, ever, he added, “has achieved so dramatic a turnaround in so short a time.”

America’s traditional security allies of 80 years in Europe beg to differ. It’s true, they say, that Trump has achieved a historic national security turnaround, and oh-so-quickly. The problem, they say, is that the factual record shows that Trump has shattered, not restored, the world’s trust in America’s essential decency.

Consider a few of those facts.

Trump has used terms like “stupid” and “horrible” to describe elected leaders of European democracies. He has railed against Europe’s accepting too many “garbage” people, especially those from African countries that have been flooding Europe with “criminal” migrants from their “shithole” countries --- a term Trump coined during his first term in office, when he was honing his diplomatic skills.

Trump says he hates what’s been done to Paris, London, cities he says he once “loved.” European democratic leaders recognize America’s xenophobic and racist Great Replacement Theory when they see it.

The leaders of European democracies were shocked on February 14, when Vice President J.D. Vance announced at the Munich Security Conference that European elected leaders, not Russia and China, posed their greatest security threats. Meanwhile, Vance and Trump have been working with extreme right-wing politicians across the continent, who aim to wrest power from mainstream leaders.

Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly expressed respect for the European leaders he admires: Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orban, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan --- and, next door, Vladimir Putin.

The Russian president, who launched a bloody war of aggression against neighboring Ukraine, is a pariah in Europe. He has also been waging hybrid warfare to undermine European democracies --- inundating the continent with disinformation.

Trump’s “America First” loyalists are not interested. On December 23, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he would deny U.S. visas for several prominent Europeans, including the London-based head of the Global Disinformation Index, which has been a thorn in Putin’s side.

Talk about irony: Rubio’s State Department has shut down its offices that had been fighting foreign disinformation spread by Russia and others. Rubio’s top aide in that regard, Darren Beattie, came to State from his Revolver News, an online purveyor of conspiracy theories.

Europeans remember when American presidents stood against aggressors from the Kremlin --- instead of hatching (behind their backs) “peace” plans for Ukraine that align with Putin’s preferences.

Speaking of shattered trust, Trump has certainly made a name for himself in Denmark, long a trusted U.S. security ally.

America’s first female diplomat with the rank of ambassador, Eugenie Moore Anderson, was dispatched to Copenhagen by President Harry Truman in 1949. Ambassador Anderson is remembered especially for her seminal work in creating U.S.-Danish mutual security interests. She played a key role in negotiating the very important contributions to NATO’s defense involving the Danish autonomous island of Greenland.

For decades, Denmark and the U.S. have also enjoyed important bilateral intelligence-sharing arrangements (aimed at the usual suspect: Russia). Now, Trump’s contributions to NATO solidarity and trust on intelligence matters have been to undermine them.

All this year, Trump has been threatening to wrest control of Greenland from Denmark. His most recent move came this month, when Trump tapped Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry to be a new special envoy to take Greenland away from Denmark. Landry said he was honored “to make Greenland part of the US.” Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Rasmussen, spoke for his nation when he said he was “deeply outraged.”

The Danish Defence Intelligence Service’s (DDIS) published its 2025 Intelligence Risk Assessment pulled no punches. The DDIS noted that America, along with traditional espionage threats from Russia and China, now poses a security concern to Denmark. “The use of power by the United States, China and Russia, in different ways, has deepened distrust between states --- even among traditional partners and allies,” the Danish intelligence service documented.

There is so much more to be said.

On Dec. 18, the well-connected London-based Royal United Services Institute published the most recent of a string of analyses of America’s deteriorating security posture. The analysis, written by Ed Arnold and Darya Dolzikova, noted Trump’s “disdain” for NATO and that US leadership dating to 1945 is “no longer assured,” or trusted.

Their bottom line: “While European actors rightly have little faith in Russia sticking with agreements, they also harbor doubts about the US standing by international agreements.”

Greg Rushford is a former senior congressional aide who conducted oversight over US diplomacy, defense, and intelligence, and a former journalist. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions

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