The Cost of Humoring Trump Comes Due

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, January 21, 2026

 

The last time Republicans asked themselves aloud, “What’s the downside for humoring him?” they didn’t get the answer they wanted. That baleful experience notwithstanding, the humoring hasn’t stopped, and the consequences keep mounting.

 

The 30-year U.S. Treasury bond experienced its worst one-day selloff since July this week. That drop is primarily attributable to the president’s decision to announce punitive tariffs on the European nations that object to his call for Greenland to be ceded to the United States. Accordingly, “Mortgage rates are reversing course after falling last week to their lowest level since September 2022.” Indeed, Trump himself acknowledged the downsides to his campaign that American investors have already experienced in a Wednesday speech at Davos. “Our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland,” Trump confessed (he meant Greenland). “So, Iceland’s already cost us a lot of money.”

 

The leaders of NATO member states are sounding ominous notes over their treatment at the hands of the alliance’s prima inter pares. Belgium’s prime minister said the ultimatum Donald Trump has put to the continent puts to them the choice between being “a happy vassal” or a “miserable slave.” French President Emmanuel Macron declared that, today, “the only rule that seems to matter is the rule of the strongest.” Canada’s Mark Carney agreed. “The old order is not coming back,” he declared. “When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.”

 

Ottawa’s deal with communist China, in defiance of the U.S. trade representative, to lower respective trade barriers and increase mutual commercial dependency signals that Carney is serious about “recalibrating” his country’s orientation. Perhaps other NATO members will follow his lead.

 

Even the president’s more parochial political objectives are imperiled by his flight of fancy in the Arctic Circle.

 

At the outset of Trump’s second term, the MAGA movement became possessed by a grand vision of global populist dominance. The president’s aides, allies, and appointees were dispatched internationally — particularly to Europe — where they promoted populist right-wing political parties and the firebrands vying to lead them. “With the triumph of Donald Trump and the rise of the European Right, the Age of the Patriots of Western Civilization has begun,” the organizers of a CPAC conference in Hungary declared last spring.

 

It was a strained alliance from the start. Even the president’s right-leaning European comrades were discomfited by the administration’s casual contempt for the continent, as betrayed by the infamous Signal chat scandal. The aggressive tariff schedule Trump initially envisioned for Europe put his populist allies in the difficult position of defending the president’s instincts even when they hurt European consumers and producers. And the Trump team’s bottomless well of patience with Vladimir Putin turned off potential partners like France’s Marine Le Pen and Italy’s Georgia Meloni.

 

But it’s the president’s demand for territorial concessions from Denmark that seems to have most seriously exacerbated the emergent schism between the American populist right and its European imitators.

 

The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov summarizes the reaction on the continent to the president’s irredentism: “Trump’s America seems to have lost its mind.” The “tone” of Europe’s objections to their harassment has “hardened in recent days,” he wrote. Even Europe’s “far-right and nationalist parties courted by the Trump administration” have “called for retaliation.”

 

Jordan Bardella, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, told the European Parliament on Tuesday: “Facing Trump’s blackmail, we either react with all the necessary firmness, or we disappear behind the logic of empire.”

 

. . .

 

In the U.K., key Brexit architect and longtime Trump supporter Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform Party that is currently leading the polls, described Trump’s threat of using economic, let alone physical, force against allies as “a very hostile act” and as “the biggest fracture in our relationship, between our two countries” since the Suez Canal crisis in 1956.

 

As I’ve written, the Trump administration is beholden to a contradictory outlook on foreign affairs. Its members fixate on American national prestige and respect, and they aggressively police perceived slights against either. At the same time, they’re contemptuous of any suggestion that other nations might similarly privilege those intangible commodities. Other countries have nationalists, too. Trump’s repeated insults to their honor and sovereignty were never going to ingratiate him among the citizens of allied nations, even within their nationalist and generally Trump-friendly opposition parties.

 

The implosion of the nascent MAGA international may be the least weighty of the consequences that have already followed the president’s actions. The concomitant downsides for U.S. grand strategy in Europe may soon render this petty consideration modest in retrospect. But the president’s domestic allies remain unmoved.

 

Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) scorned those who contend that Trump is “destroying the old order.” “Good,” he declared. “It didn’t work.” Even if you believe that — and there is little in Graham’s record on foreign affairs to suggest he did when political imperatives didn’t compel him to — catalyzing a new world order while diminishing our own influence over its evolutionary trajectory sacrifices American interests and imperils its objectives abroad.

 

When the president is making a mistake, “humoring him” doesn’t lead to a course correction. He doubles down. His supporters make his McGuffin their own. He becomes ever more reckless in his pursuit. And, eventually, the consequences of Trump’s misadventure fall on the Republican Party.

 

You’d think the lesson would have been learned by now. The last time we went through this, the challenge Trump’s behavior presented to the constitutional order was serious. But the Constitution is durable and tested. It held. This time, the challenge is to the central pillar buttressing the postwar geopolitical order. That has been challenged before from the outside, but it has never experienced the trial from within that it is currently enduring. Hopefully, in our spasm of national negligence and ingratitude, we won’t discover that it is more fragile than we imagined.