In front of the vast, imperious American embassy in Brussels runs the city’s main artery, the dual carriageway, multi-lane Avenue de la Loi. And opposite the embassy I found a group of 25 Americans holding up home-made banners denouncing their president and shouting lustily across the traffic. They may have been just visible from the embassy windows, had there been anyone there, which there probably wasn’t as it was Saturday and the place was closed.
Quixotic their enterprise may have been, but they were not downhearted. They were able to express their contempt and loathing for their country’s president, who was in Europe that day attending the funeral of the pope and giving Volodymyr Zelensky 15 minutes of his time.
They were able to tell as many Europeans as would listen: “Not in my name”. And they were buoyed by the number of car drivers who noticed them and tooted in support – a surprisingly high proportion, given how fast the traffic was going.
Most of them had cringed as they watched the video of property developer and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff sitting in the Elysée Palace and likening it to Trump’s club at Mar-a-Lago. When I turned up with my notebook, they wanted me to know how ashamed they felt. “I have a T-shirt at home that says: ‘Are we great yet? I’m just embarrassed’,” Mark Burton from California told me.
Burton has moved his home and his business to Brussels, horrified by the idea that someone like Trump could even be in the running for president. He has an unusual explanation for the rise of Trump. “It’s the American original sin, the sin of slavery,” he said. “The prejudice that made slavery possible lives on, and Trump gave permission for it to be expressed again.” Could I quote him? “Sure, they can take a picture of me right now. We’re not going back.”
Carolyn, from Colorado, has lived in Belgium for 30 years, but has never sought Belgian citizenship – until now. “All Trump’s policies are driven by cruelty,” she said.
Texan Karen Hayes danced, sang and waved her banner, which read “Honk against fascism”. She paused for a few seconds to talk to me, and offered a more conventional, and perhaps more convincing, reason for the rise of Trump.
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“People are living on the edge,” she said. “There’s no legal protection for them, they can be fired any time. They are not political; they are just trying to get by. And Trump offers them someone to blame – it’s the feminists, it’s the immigrants.”
Exactly so, added dual-national Robin De Wouters, half Belgian, half American, who lives and works in Belgium. Trump focuses on the cost of living, he said, but ignores the fact that wages do not go up.
De Wouters is chair of the 2,000-strong Belgian branch of Democrats Abroad, which organised what it called the “Hands Off” demonstration, though it usually confines itself to getting the vote out at election time. Like several of the demonstrators I spoke to, he would feel nervous about going back to the US. “Trump has no respect for the rule of law which the US was built on,” he said, citing deportations to El Salvador. “His only purpose is to enrich himself and his cronies.”
His colleague in Democrats Abroad, Tony Maciejowski, now retired, came to Belgium from the US 10 years ago to take up a job with the European Commission. “Trump is ill-educated, with no morals and no sense of history,” he said.
The people on the demonstration were mostly middle-aged professional men and women, and most of them had probably never been on one before. Three of them had brought their dogs with them: a beagle wore a coat bearing the slogan “Dogs against Doge”.
Francis Beckett is an English author, journalist, biographer, and contemporary historian
