‘Frankly, it’s just rude.’ How Trump’s European envoys play to an audience of one 

America’s ambassadors in Europe are targeting just one person with their charm offensive: President Donald Trump.

Everyone else — including key U.S. allies — can expect little charm and plenty of offense. 

The American president’s friends, fellow real estate developers and political donors who have been awarded EU ambassadorships during Trump’s second term are ruffling feathers in their host capitals. 

Their coarser style of diplomacy — America’s answer to China’s wolf warriors, who also relished defying convention and skewering their hosts — is not a bug in the system. It is the new system. 

For Trump’s envoys, “the target audience is always one person. One person only,” said Eric Rubin, the former head of the American Foreign Service Association who served as ambassador to Bulgaria during Trump’s first term. The feelings of their hosts are incidental to the key tasks: courting Trump’s attention and approval — and shifting the center of European politics sharply toward the right. 

The two most conspicuous envoys riling European governments are Charles Kushner in Paris and Tom Rose in Warsaw.

When Charles Kushner decried French antisemitism in a letter to President Emmanuel Macron, he didn’t send it to the Élysée Palace but wrote it in the Wall Street Journal. | Julien De Rosa/AFP via Getty Images

Rose tagged Trump twice in a post announcing he was severing ties to the speaker of Poland’s parliament, Włodzimierz Czarzasty, over “outrageous and unprovoked insults.” Czarzasty had said that Trump did not deserve to win a Nobel Peace Prize. 

When Kushner, the ambassador to Paris who is father-in-law to Trump’s eldest daughter, decried French antisemitism in a letter to President Emmanuel Macron, he didn’t send it to the Élysée Palace, nor to Le Monde. He wrote it in the Wall Street Journal.  

Last week the relationship soured further after the U.S. embassy in Paris offered pointed political commentary during the aftermath of the killing of a far-right activist. Kushner further angered the French by ignoring a summons to the foreign ministry, before a “frank and amicable” phone call smoothed things over, according to the U.S. mission in Paris on Monday.  

U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Bill White, who describes the president as a friend, set three Trump-friendly priorities for embassy staff for 2026, according to two people with knowledge of the internal dynamics at the mission. Like others in this article, they were granted anonymity to protect their jobs or relationships. 

Fully in line with Trump’s emphasis in his State of the Union address on commemorating the 1776 declaration of independence, White insisted on big parties to to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. He also hosted a February screening for a film about first lady Melania Trump and has prioritized media appearances that will keep him on the president’s radar.

Similarly keen to keep a high profile on the channels Trump favors, NATO Ambassador Matthew Whitaker, widely viewed as one of Trump’s least abrasive ambassadors in Europe, prefers to appear on Fox News and Newsmax above other media.

Visitors to the residence of the U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg Stacey Feinberg, who was a close friend of the slain rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, will find red MAGA hats adorning the furniture, according to photos shared with POLITICO.  

Multiple U.S. embassies in Europe and the State Department either declined to comment for this article or did not respond.

Undiplomatic corps

U.S. diplomats stepping on European toes is nothing new. During Trump’s first term ambassadors Richard Grenell in Berlin and Gordon Sondland in Brussels kicked hard against diplomatic norms. While Joe Biden’s man in Hungary David Pressman repeatedly criticized the government of Viktor Orbán. Nor is it unusual for the U.S. to hand plum European posts to big donors and other political appointees, rather than career diplomats.

But State Department officials, former and current, complain these latest breaches of diplomatic behavior go a step further and undermine American interests and relationships nurtured for over two centuries. 

“If you refuse to go to a meeting when summoned so you can work on improving the relationship, why are you even there? It’s childish, it’s embarrassing, and it drops any pretense you’re there to help your country,” one U.S. diplomat said.  

“I mean, frankly, it’s rude,” a former senior State Department official added. 

In the past, policy decisions and public statements would be carefully calibrated and run through multiple departments via the National Security Council and the huge State Department bureaucracy.  

That process has largely been replaced by freelancing ambassadors communicating with a small group of political appointees in the White House, said Rubin.  

“This is the first time in certainly our history, but probably in modern history, where a big power is attempting to conduct diplomacy without diplomats and without experts and without analysts,” he said. 

The marching orders for every flashpoint involving U.S. ambassadors can be found in the lines of the National Security Strategy, published in December. It set American diplomats the task of “cultivating resistance” to the path set by Europe’s current set of leaders and celebrated the rise of “patriotic” far right parties, seen as aligned with Trump’s MAGA movement. 

It takes two to have a diplomatic fight, however, and not all European countries have taken the bait. 

U.S. ambassador to the U.K. Warren Stephens has “key themes he is keen to speak on” including energy and free speech, according to one U.S. official, and is “not afraid to speak his mind.” He voiced many of those during a dinner speech while standing within arms reach of British Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy in November. These interventions have raised eyebrows inside the British establishment, but so far the U.K. government has soaked up the punches. 

In Greece too, Kimberly Guilfoyle the former fiancée of Trump’s son Donald Jr., has charmed and bemused in equal measure. Despite goading the Greeks over the sale of the port of Piraeus to China, her relations with her hosts in Athens are, in her telling, exceptionally rosy.  

“We see each other probably three or four times a week,” she said of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis during an event last week.

The same went for multiple government ministers, she added.

“They always take the call. It doesn’t matter if it’s the weekend, they will come over if we meet at my house, they show up.” 

Esther Webber contributed reporting from London, Nektaria Stamouli from Athens and Victor Jack from Brussels.