Letter from Denmark about Donald Trump

The worst US President ever

Europeans are horrified about what Trump’s America has become in just one year. I recently published two Substack articles about it and provide here a substantial update including recent events. I apologise for the repetitions, but Trump, with his extreme narcissism, pronounced racism, love for dictators and white supremacy, and disrespect for the law, people, and nations, is so dangerous that an update was already needed.

This is how Trump sees himself, according to White House staff:

And this is how the rest of the world sees him:

In Europe, even extreme right-wing parties – MEGA, Make Europe Great Again – have turned against Trump. Danish tourist trips to the USA have dropped by 50%, and it is also telling that Trump’s closest ally in Europe is the semi-fascist Victor Orbán of Hungary who continues buying oil from Russia, which fuels its war with Ukraine. Trump praises him while the rest of us despise him. Both men are pariahs and have made their countries kleptocracies.

Greenland is an autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and in Greenlandic, MAGA means Make America Go Away. Trump’s repeated threats to attack a close and loyal NATO ally with his military is a sign of his fascistoid character and his grandiosity complex, which have united the whole world against America.

When Trump suddenly declared he would send a hospital ship to Greenland, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen stated that she was “happy to live in a country where there is free and equal access to health for all. Where it’s not insurances and wealth that determine whether you get proper treatment.” And when Greenland said no thanks, Govenor Jeff Landry, Trump’s special envoy to Greenland exclaimed: “Shame on Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen!” A few days later, Landry said in an interview that “The Greenlandic people can expect that I will be very aggressive in ensuring that we provide healthcare to remote locations in Greenland.” In Trump’s surreal universe, a so-called gift people don’t want to receive is pursued aggressively.

Trump is obsessed with getting his face and name on everything. When a long, blue banner was unrolled over the Department of Justice, Democrats called him Kim Jong Un and noted the irony that a twice-impeached, convicted felon was hanging his own picture there:

Here are some other examples: President Donald J Trump International Airport, President Donald J Trump Boulevard, Trump Kennedy Center (it is close to blasphemy to mention Trump alongside the murdered President John F. Kennedy), Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace (an irony for a man that attempted a coup d’état), and Trump Class warships.

Trump has encouraged Americans to pray for an hour each week; some government agencies have opened their meetings with prayer or hosted regular faith services; and Bible verses and Christian imagery now appear on official government social media accounts.

Perhaps Trump will introduce an obligatory Trump Bible to be used in schools and will ban all education about Darwin’s evolution theory while threatening legal action or to remove funds as he always does when people try to resist his tyranny.

Trump’s daily whims and habitual lying are highly embarrassing for the United States and nauseating to watch. There are hilarious parodies and Trump is a parody himself. It is tragic that the American voters elected him for a second term after they had seen what kind of person he is. He is unpredictable, impulsive, insulting, vindictive, and vulgar, and he constantly bullies people and whole nations.

What is a dictator?

Trump is a habitual law breaker who doesn’t respect international law; only his own morality and mind can stop him. Similarly, Benito Mussolini said: “I follow my instincts, and I am never wrong,” shortly before he invaded Ethiopia in 1935, which became a disaster for Italy.

Europeans know what a dictator is. In my lifetime, I have seen how destructive dictators have been in Portugal, Spain, Romania, Greece, the Soviet Union, and Russia, and before that we had Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. It is deeply concerning that half of the US population praise Trump and apparently fail to see the obvious similarities to Hitler.

Hitler failed his coup d’état in November 1923, became imprisoned and wrote Mein Kampf while in jail. He was later hailed by the masses (“Heil Hitler”) as the strongman Germany needed and they accepted the murders in the street by his Brownshirts, the Sturmabteilung (SA), as a necessity on the way to make Germany great again. Hitler wanted to expand Germany to the east, which Trump also tries by declaring that he wants Greenland.

During his 2024 campaign, Trump promised his voters that they would not need to vote again four years later. This was what Hitler did after having been democratically elected. It seems that Trump privately admires Hitler. He has denied he ever read Mein Kampf, but he has acknowledged owning a copy of it.

Trump admires the wrong people. The day before Russia attacked Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Trump said that Putin is “very savvy,” “smart” and made a “genius” move by declaring two regions of eastern Ukraine as independent - “Oh, that’s wonderful” - and moving Russian armed forces, “the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen” to the area.

Trump said in a post on Lies Social, sorry he calls it Truth Social, that Zelensky - who was democratically elected - is a dictator and has done a terrible job, and he also said that only 4% in Ukraine supported Zelensky when the true rate was over 50%.

Trump admired former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro who is serving a 27-year prison sentence for plotting a coup d’état after he lost the election. Evidently, Trump should also have received a long prison sentence after his failed coup d’état on January 6, 2021, when he had lost the election. But he has a remarkable capacity for avoiding the long arm of the law. It is very concerning that Trump is in good control of the US Supreme Court, which has helped him again and again without explaining why, making his lawless behaviour possible, as a US professor of law noted, even to the degree of violating the Constitution.

Following his embarrassing, erratic and blistering hour-long speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, Trump indicated that he isn’t opposed to being described as a dictator: “sometimes, you need a dictator.” He also said that Canada owes its continued existence to the United States and shared an altered image of a map of the United States that included Canada, Greenland, Venezuela and Cuba as part of its territory.

In his 1940 satirical masterpiece “The Great Dictator,“ Charlie Chaplin features as Adenoid Hynkel (Adolf Hitler) and plays with a globe, which is a large, inflatable balloon symbolising his ego, childish arrogance, and desire to rule the world. However, the globe is too light and floats out of his control, before eventually bursting.

Like Hitler, Trump is also a racist. He conducted a years-long campaign to brand former President Barack Obama an illegitimate occupant of the White House; questioned his citizenship and birth certificate; and tweeted: “When I was 18, people called me Donald Trump. When he was 18 @BarackObama was Barry Soweto.”

In February, Trump shared a video depicting the Obama couple as apes in the jungle. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the clip, saying “please stop the fake outrage,” and Trump refused to apologise saying “I didn’t make a mistake.” Of course not. Great leaders never make mistakes, right? Trump said about immigrants that they are poisoning the blood of the USA. Hitler and Goebbels talked about Jews in the same way and made it illegal for Jews to marry Aryans in 1935.

Much else of what Trump has said is almost verbatim what Hitler and Mussolini said, e.g. “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.” Calling people “vermin” was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanise people and encourage their followers to engage in violence. Like Mussolini, Trump also said: “I am going to drain the swamp and clean up the country.”

The murder in 2020 of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin started the “Black Lives Matter” movement but Trump tweeted about the protests: “Please just deploy the military and take control of these animals who are ruining our cities!” He also said that if any cops wanted to mishandle the people in the back of their cars – as he encouraged them to do in a speech to police officers in 2017 – he would look the other way.

Even previous Danish Prime Minister and NATO Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a staunch admirer of the United States, has had enough of Trump. Like all Greenlanders and Danes, Rasmussen had watched with anger and disbelief the threats against our sovereignty that come from the White House

Rasmussen joined the US in its wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and no other country in the coalition, except Georgia, lost more soldiers than Denmark compared to country size. Trump enraged his allies when he said about the NATO troops: “We’ve never needed them ... they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this or that … they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.”

Trump has an entourage of sycophant yes-men and yes-women, and last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that US troops in Afghanistan would joke that the ISAF acronym on the shoulder patches of their allies – International Security Assistance Force – actually stood for “I Saw Americans Fighting.”

Like all dictators, Trump is a mastermind in turning everything upside down. He made half the US population believe in his monstrous lies about election fraud. He knew he had lost the election to Biden, which he told people in his closed circle. But when asked in 2023, if he had any regrets about the attack on Capitol and democracy he orchestrated, which the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies considered an act of domestic terrorism, Trump voiced no remorse.

The Justice Department currently compiles a list of “domestic terrorists” but I don’t think Trump is on it. The law is for other people; not for him.

In November 2021, 54% of the Republicans said the anger that led to the attack on Capitol was either fully or partially justified. Two-thirds of the Republicans believed in Trump’s gigantic lie about election fraud back then, and in 2024, one-third of all Americans still believed in this lie. There was no election fraud but Trump tried to make one himself four days before the mob attack. He pressured Georgia’s top election official to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in the state.

Trump has claimed that others were responsible for the attack, including Antifa – a peaceful anti-fascist movement - and Black Lives Matter, and that it was a “staged riot” orchestrated by the government. Thus speaks a true dictator. Perhaps he learned this from Putin.

Dictators rewrite history and Joseph Stalin would have been proud of Trump. He suppresses free speech to such as extent that he sued the New York Times in January for publishing an opinion poll that was unfavourable to him. I suspect he is the world champion in frivolous lawsuits. You cannot sue the truth, can you?

On the 5-year anniversary of the mob attack on Capitol, which led to at least 140 police officers being injured and left many with persistent and debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder, the White House rolled out a new website hailing the mob as “peaceful protesters” who were provoked by law enforcement and Former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (who fled to save her life during the attack!).

The website recasts the rioters as the victims and depicts Trump as a hero for granting sweeping pardons for the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the deadly attack, omits the portions of Trump’s address where he twice said his supporters should “fight like hell,” claims that supporters who died outside the Capitol of natural causes – a heart attack and a stroke – were “killed,” and baselessly accuses the US Capitol Police of “deliberately escalating tensions.” It says officers’ “provocative tactics,” like firing tear gas into the crowd, “turned a peaceful demonstration into chaos,” even though there is extensive video footage showing rioters attacking police first.

The website claims that “zero law enforcement officers lost their lives,” but one officer died from strokes one day after being assaulted while defending the Capitol, and four other officers died of suicide in the months after the assault. FOUR!

The website labels all pardon recipients as “patriotic Americans,” even though some were members of far-right militias, were people convicted of beating police, were alleged Nazi sympathisers, or brought deadly weapons to the Capitol.

Trump has a propaganda machine like that in Russia and his total disrespect for other people and nations is shared by his close Republican allies. If they didn’t, he would fire them if he could. As an example, at the München Security Conference earlier this month, Senator Lindsey Graham stirred anger by saying “Who give a s*** who owns Greenland? I don’t.”

It is tragic that the US President, Vice President and their associates behave like the Clanton family did in the Tombstone area in Arizona 150 years ago, terrorising people and stealing their cattle because they had more gunmen than their victims had, and with no Wyatt Earp to stop it. It seems to me that the best way to become a really big crook and escape justice is to become President of the Unites States, which gives you immunity for your crimes.

Trump announced that Greenland is now an American “protectorate.” This is how the mob operates in New York City, seizing territories to enrich themselves. Trump wrote to the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, that since he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize, he didn’t feel an obligation to think purely of peace, repeating that he wanted to have “Complete and Total Control of Greenland.” Like a little boy who screams to get an ice cream, Trump uses capital letters when there is something he wants.

Vice President JD Vance said that Trump “doesn’t care about what the Europeans scream at us, he cares about putting the interests of America’s citizens first.” This is how Hitler argued when he invaded other countries. The Aryan supremacy. That’s why I call the White House the Wild House:

In München, Lindsey Graham looked Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen directly in the eyes and disdainfully called her ”little lady” while he underlined that Trump was the President of the United States and therefore the most powerful man in the world. People in the room found the comment extremely degrading and sexist and Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin left the meeting in protest.

Meeting participants described Graham’s behaviour as ”totally outside range” and several discussed if he had become insane. Not at all. This is the norm under Trump. I have watched one of his cabinet meetings, which started with people around the table praising highly and unduly The Great Leader, as if we were in North Korea.

Karoline Leavitt also constantly praises Trump and she denied that he had sent a revealing birthday card to Epstein and that his signature was on it, even though this was obvious. The card says: “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey... Happy birthday - and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump has created a person cult where he punishes everyone who doesn’t constantly stimulate his endless vanity. A hilarious satire in Saturday Night Live had an award for the best kiss of Trump’s ass. Contenders could be Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary; Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff; JD Vance who, before he became Vice President, thought that “Trump might be a cynical asshole like Nixon;” Pam Bondi, United States Attorney General, who won’t release unredacted Epstein files that can tell us what Trump’s relation was to Epstein’s sex trafficked girls; Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino who praised Trump’s paramilitary ICE troops that executed Pretti in Minneapolis and spoke on TV about an individual who “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement;” or Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, who said on TV that “Fearing for his life and the life of his fellow officers around him, an agent fired defensive shots.”

Mendaciously, Noem and Miller both described Pretti as “an assassin [who] tried to murder federal agents” and called him a domestic terrorist but he was the one who was murdered. In civilised nations, those who hold the power do not draw conclusions about issues that could incriminate themselves but wait for the evidence to be examined independently.

In Minneapolis, ICE also murdered another American protester who was not threatening the federal immigration agents. It is typical of fascist dictatorship states that their leaders kill their own people and lie about it by calling them terrorists. Most importantly perhaps, Trump has repeatedly threatened to use the US military against Americans.

Trump’s useful idiots in the Wild House are surprisingly ignorant and, like himself, not ashamed of firing nonsense without having looked up the sources first. Stephen Miller questioned if Denmark had any right to Greenland although his own country had at least twice signed agreements acknowledging this.

Danish TV news has started to report on Trump’s oddities in a humouristic fashion. My wife and I exploded with laughter when, after Trump’s State of the Union speech on 24 February, the speaker said that “Trump received a lot of praise, not least from himself … During his speech, Trump listed his successes, both the documented and the undocumented ones.” When he was not praised by the Democrats, Trump said: “You should be ashamed of yourself … the only way you can get elected is to cheat.”

What can we expect in the rest of 2026?

What will happen at the midyear election in November? A US columnist wrote in January that European leaders are convinced that Trump will try to rig the 2026 midterm elections in November and probably even the subsequent national election.

Some Democrats are fearing that Trump will scare voters in blue states from leaving home fearing for their safety because of his paramilitaries. Trump’s longtime ally and former top adviser Steve Bannon has declared that “as we take control of the cities, there will be ICE officers near the polling places.” Moreover, Trump has threatened to use the Insurrection Act of 1807, which gives the US president increased authority to deploy the military and the National Guard.

Will Trump declare martial law and attempt another coup d’état if he loses the election? Why shouldn’t he? Will we see riots, unrest, and civil war?

In Denmark, a politician who lies repeatedly about everything is unheard of, and if this should ever happen, that person would have a very short-lived career. The United States has a president who lies many times every day but people are so used to it that they just shrug their shoulders. They shouldn’t. America badly needs a moral rehaul where speaking the truth becomes the norm and where big liars are seen on par with hardened criminals.

Already in February 2024, a year before Trump started his second term, a survey of 154 scholars ranked him as the worst president in US history. Trump rather slavishly work to fulfil the goals in Project 2025, which details how he and his allies can dismantle and disrupt the US government and replace the rule of law with right-wing ideals using “a new army of aligned, trained and weaponised conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.”

Trump’s primitive but effective tactics have been aptly described in the film about him, “The Apprentice:”

Rule number 1: Attack, attack, attack.

Rule number 2: Admit nothing, deny everything.

Rule number 3: No matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat.

Trump has not copied Putin’s methods of killing his opponents by serving tea with radioactive polonium, smearing Novichok on door handles or in underwear, using poison from a South American frog, or simply shooting them outside their home.

But who knows what comes next. Not even Trump knows because he is unpredictable, contradictive, and constantly outside range.

During the cold war in the 1960s, with many hawks in the US administration, we Europeans feared that America rather than the Soviet Union might start a nuclear war. With Trump as president, we see once again America as the greatest threat to world peace.

Trump was impeached in 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and again in 2021 for his failed coup d’état. The Republicans in the US Senate saved him from conviction but it is time for them to abandon their party loyalties and ensure that Trump gets removed from office as quickly as possible.

Trump is very dangerous. I expect the midterm election to end in a bloodbath. Time will tell if I am right. But we already know that the United States is now a fascist kleptocracy. History has shown that leaders who assure us that the situation is so grave that we must give up our freedom and ethical principles to gain security against an external or internal danger – in this case illegal immigrants - usually end up giving us neither freedom nor security, but absolute power to themselves.