Brendan Boyle

WASHINGTON, DC – A top Democrat in Washington says Donald Trump is making the US appear “erratic and untrustworthy” and risks driving allies away.

In an exclusive interview with The i Paper, Pennsylvania Representative Brendan Boyle warned that Nato is facing perhaps the biggest crisis in its 80-year history.

“I am alarmed, in a way much greater than I was at the same period eight years ago,” said Boyle, the lead Democrat for the US congressional delegation to Nato as well as the ranking member on the House Budget Committee.

He said he believed that “what Donald Trump and his administration are doing is helping resuscitate the Chinese-European relationship and the Chinese-Canadian relationship … It seems to me that what the administration is doing rather than isolating China, it is making China look like the more stable entity and the US more erratic and untrustworthy”. The result, he feared, is that “this administration is driving our European and Canadian allies right into the lap of Xi Jinping“.

The Philadelphia Congressman warned that Trump’s stated desire to annex Greenland and increasingly hostile rhetoric about Nato could have “permanent ramifications”.

He said when talking to European counterparts, he could no longer dismiss Trump as “an aberration” or the result of “a bizarre quirk of our antiquated electoral college system … We really can’t say that anymore”. After all, when Trump won in 2016, he received nearly three million fewer votes than the Democratic nominee, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Eight years later, Trump won the popular vote over Kamala Harris, in spite of his widely criticised effort to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, and took office with a Republican Party that he has moulded in his image with only a smattering of dissenters.

Boyle, whose father was an Irish immigrant who worked as a caretaker and mother was a school crossing guard, ruefully noted the damage inflicted in Europe by Trump’s disdainful remarks about Nato and the contributions that US allies have made. “The result was that there are a lot of people … who have concluded that this is the United States, and that this is certainly how at least half of the country views them,” he said.

For now, he said that Congress still has a solid majority that supports Nato. Boyle, who is one of the lead sponsors of a bill to prohibit the US President from using armed force against a Nato ally, noted that he is joined in that effort by a Republican, Nebraska Representative Don Bacon.

Boyle said there was a group of “traditional Reagan/Bush foreign policy Republicans”, those who still hold the traditional views and policies of the Republican Party before Trump’s emergence, who disagree with the incumbent’s threatening stance “but are always very careful about what they say publicly”.

However, the 49-year-old acknowledged that “the trend line, though, does not look good”.

“When Trump was president the first time, I would say the House Republican caucus was solid majority in the Reagan/Bush mould with a small minority of Maga Trump types. Now eight years later, that ratio is exactly flipped.”

The six-term Congressman did make clear his view that there were no deep underlying ideological commitments among those congressional Republicans who support Trump’s effort to annex Greenland. “There is a group who, if Trump gets up one morning and makes something else the fixation, they will just blindly follow along. And I think it’s more than that, rather than an actual group of Republicans who have this deep desire to really control Greenland.”

In the meantime, Boyle said that he had made clear to European colleagues that despite the outsized attention given to Trump, Congress was still “a co-equal branch of government” and even this year has passed “a lot of funding for traditional Nato priorities” despite the President’s rhetoric. He pointed to the annual defence authorisation bill that Congress is required to pass every year, which included statutory provisions to constrain the Trump administration moving US personnel out of Europe, new funding for Ukraine and efforts to strengthen ties between the US and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Boyle did see one silver lining Trump’s hostility towards European allies, in that it could undermine similar right-wing nationalist movements overseas.

He noted that “Donald Trump’s bellicose and insulting rhetoric toward Canada, his trade policies toward Canada and relentlessly talking about making Canada the 51st state, that is what enabled a liberal comeback in Canada … Trump so badly hurt the right of centre party in Canada that it actually led to a backlash that brought about [Prime Minister] Mark Carney and Liberals back in government”.

“I am hopeful,” he added. “I’m not going to totally sleep comfortably at night, but I am hopeful that Trump ends up actually hurting those sort of right-wing populist movements and that Maga ends up being what inspires those folks and ends up being their undoing when it comes election time in those countries.”