WASHINGTON/CASTEL GANDOLFO: US President Donald Trump deepened his rift with Europe in an interview with Politico published on Tuesday, calling the continent “weak” and decaying” over immigration and Ukraine.

Trump doubled down on his extraordinary recent criticisms of a region that Washington has long counted as a key ally, recycling far-right tropes about civilizational decline in Europe.

“Most European nations, they’re, they’re decaying. They’re decaying,” Trump told Politico in the interview, conducted on Monday.

The 79-year-old billionaire, whose political rise to power was built on inflammatory language about migration, echoed far-right talking points as he said that Europe’s policies were a “disaster.” “They’re coming in from all parts of the world,” Trump said. “But they want to be politically correct, and they don’t want to send them back to where they came from.” Trump’s broadside comes days after his administration’s new national security strategy sparked alarm by calling for the cultivation of “resistance” in the EU against liberal migration policies.

Zelensky prepares revised plan to end Ukraine war

Asked if European countries would not remain US allies if they failed to embrace his administration’s policies on the issue, Trump replied that “it depends.” “I think they’re weak, but they also want to be so politically correct,” Trump said.

He listed countries including Britain, France, Germany, Poland, and Sweden that he said were being “destroyed” by migration, and launched a new attack on the “horrible, vicious, disgusting” Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor.

‘A weak Europe’

Trump also brushed off the fact that the Kremlin had hailed the new US national security strategy as being in line with its own views.

“I think he (Putin) would like to see a weak Europe, and to be honest with you, he’s getting that. That has nothing to do with me,” he said.

Trump also criticized Europe’s role in resolving the war between Russia and Ukraine, saying: “They talk, but they don’t produce. And the war just keeps going on and on.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday prepared to send the United States revised proposals to end the war started by Russia’s February 2022 invasion, as he met with Pope Leo XIV in Italy.

Zelensky on Monday held talks with European leaders in London and Brussels as US President Donald Trump keeps up pressure on Kyiv for a settlement.

Trump has accused Zelensky of not even reading his administration’s proposals. An initial version was judged by Ukraine’s allies to be overly favourable to Russia.

Zelensky said that Washington’s earlier 28-point plan had been reduced to 20 points after US-Ukraine talks over the weekend.

Ukrainian and European officials “are going to work on these 20 points”, Zelensky told an online press conference on Monday.

“We do not like everything that our partners came back with. Although this issue is not so much with the Americans as with the Russians.

Published in Dawn, December 10th, 2025