How Donald Trump made jokes a weapon of diplomacy?

With flattery, cajoling and carefully crafted arguments, European leaders have spent much of the past 12 months trying to win Donald Trump’s respect.

When they woke up this morning, they found those efforts thrown back in their face, as the US President has gone from threatening the continent to pure ridicule.

In the space of an hour, they published screenshots of groan-inducing text messages from French President Emmanuel Macron and NATO chief Mark Rutte. He accused UK leader Keir Starmer of “great stupidity” and posted an AI-generated image of himself planting a US flag over Greenland.

Nathalie Tosi, director of Rome’s Institute for International Affairs, said Trump was deliberately deploying ridicule as a weapon.

“It’s about dedication,” she said. “You make people submit through force, ridicule and humiliation.”

The flood of insults has heightened a sense of shock and anger in European capitals already reeling from the influence of a president who has tried to humiliate and weaken Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s aggression, imposed punitive tariffs on the EU as part of his global trade war and tried to undermine the continent’s elected governments by supporting far-right populists.

The transatlantic crisis has deepened in recent weeks as Trump doubled down on his pledge to annex Greenland — and threatened to impose tariffs on eight European countries after sending troops for military exercises on the Arctic island.

Emily Haber, Germany’s former ambassador to Washington, said Trump was breaking “almost every norm of traditional diplomacy.” “This has reached a new high, especially in the context of Greenland,” he said.

Trump’s use of ridicule, even against countries that are considered close allies of the US, is hardly a new phenomenon.

During his first campaign for election and first term in office, he disliked then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, calling her policies “crazy”, saying she was “ruining” Germany and that the public was “turning against” her.

He called then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “very dishonest and weak” during the 2018 summit of G7 leaders, and criticized Britain’s Theresa May for her “very unfortunate” handling of Brexit.

He has reiterated his disdain since returning to the White House in January 2025. Trump referred to Spain as a member of the BRICS group of emerging markets, a comment considered a deliberate insult by some in Madrid. He mocked global leaders for “kissing my ass” in his efforts to secure a trade deal with the US before the tariff changes are implemented.

But Trump has stepped up aggression as he ramps up his campaign to regain Greenland, which he linked Monday to his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize. “I no longer feel an obligation to think about peace as a whole,” he said. “The world is not safe until we have complete and total control over Greenland,” he said.

Last week he criticized Denmark for its efforts to protect the area, claiming they needed “two dog sleds” to defend the island.

In a fresh statement posted on his platform Truth Social in the early hours of Tuesday morning in Europe, he shared a doctored photo in which Starmer, Macron, Rutte and other European leaders were looking intently at the US president as he sat with a map showing Canada and Venezuela as part of US territory.

Another depicts him, Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio conquering Greenland.

Trump described a plan to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius and lease a major military base to the US as “a hugely stupid action for no reason” – even though Trump’s government had already given the plan its blessing.

Hours earlier, when asked about Macron’s reluctance to include France in a US-led “peace board” to monitor Gaza, Trump said no one wanted the French president “because he’s going to be out of office very soon”. The US president also threatened Macron, a strong supporter, with tariffs: “What I will do is if they feel hostile I will put a 200 percent tariff on their wine and Champagne.”

Other top US officials have enjoyed joining the barracking, with Treasury Secretary Scott Besant mocking the Europeans and their “dreaded European working group” over how to respond to Trump’s threat of tariffs on Greenland.

Former British Ambassador to Washington Sir Peter Westmacott said that the US President was engaged in gangsterism. “President Macron’s response was specifically language dismantling the mafia,” he said.

Meanwhile, Europe’s opponents have made no attempt to hide their glee. Senior Russian official Kirill Dmitriev shared one of Trump’s fake images on Tuesday and described Europe’s “coalition of the willing” over Ukraine as a “coalition of the punished.”

Opinion is divided on how best to respond to the attack.

France, already one of the EU’s most optimistic countries in dealing with Trump, has opted for tit-for-tat.

Using an account set up by the Ministry of External Affairs to use memes and satire against Russia and China, it mocked Besant’s claim that it was better for the US to act now on Greenland because it would be “dragged into it” if the island was attacked by Russia.

It says, “If some day a fire breaks out, firefighters will intervene – so it would be better to burn the house down now.”

But others warned that this was the wrong approach.

Haber, a former German diplomat, said Europe should respond with “muscle power, courage and not public outrage or even ridicule”. Instead, he said, the continent’s leaders “must take action and be less public about it. That’s the only way to achieve an off-ramp.”

Tosi, of the Institute for International Affairs, said that ignoring insults is generally the best response – whether dealing with a playground bully or the US president.

But he said it was also important for Europe to build muscle. She said: “If you start practicing your kung fu, at some point, you end up punching him in the face.”

Additional reporting by Sarah White in Paris, Barney Jopson in Madrid, Raphael Minder in Warsaw and Richard Milne in Oslo