Free Republic

The European Commission is issuing burner phones to officials traveling to the United States amid fears of espionage in Trump’s America. It’s the kind of security measure typically saved for trips to China or the Ukraine, where the fear of IT surveillance is high. But three European Commissioners will test out burner phones and basic laptops at International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in Washington next week, sources told the Financial Times. The move from the European Commission, the primary executive arm of the European Union, marks a new era of American-European relations, which have all but dissipated since...

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that he believed Vice President JD Vance was correct in his criticisms of European speech laws during a recent speech. Maher said, “JD Vance…the other week, made a speech, in Munich. A lot of people were shocked by it. I thought half of it was pretty shocking because it was about this election that they just had in Germany where there is a party on the ballot that is very Nazi-friendly.” He continued, “But the first part of the speech was about free speech, that I didn’t think he...

The European Union will pause its first countermeasures against U.S. tariffs after President Donald Trump temporarily lowered the hefty duties he had just imposed on dozens of countries, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said on Thursday. The bloc was due to launch counter-tariffs on about 21 billion euros ($23.25 billion) of U.S. imports from next Tuesday in response to Trump’s 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium. It is still assessing how to respond to U.S. car tariffs and the broader 10% levies still in place. “We want to give negotiations a chance,” von der Leyen said on X....

It took the prospect of a second Trump presidency for Brussels to suddenly discover the virtues of free trade. Ursula von der Leyen now dangles a “zero-for-zero” tariff deal—years too late and painfully transparent. Yes, really. Perhaps, just perhaps, Europe should have made that offer a long time ago—before the first tariffs, before the steel and aluminum disputes, before their hypocritical WTO filings. Without question, before they spent years lecturing U.S. administrations on the supposed virtues of multilateral trade regimes they had rigged to their advantage. American taxpayers have subsidized European peace, prosperity, and strategic irrelevance for eight decades. From...

Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson 🚨BREAKING: President Trump announces MASSIVE tariffs are coming VERY shortly on pharmaceuticals. THIS is what I voted for: "We're gonna tariff our pharmaceuticals ... we're going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals." From Aaron Rupar 8:00 PM · Apr 8, 2025

The European Commission recently presented measures to strengthen the competitiveness of the wine sector and that includes the promotion of alcohol-free wine. Health concerns, a crackdown on drink-driving, changing habits among the younger generation, all of these factors are thought to be reasons why per capita alcohol consumption in Europe fell by 20% between 2000 and 2019, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Faced with flagging demand, some winemakers are betting on alcohol-free wine and opting for innovation to diversify sales. Near the city of Charleroi, Associated Beverage Solutions has been producing alcohol-free wine since 2018 using vacuum distillation,...

8 Apr 2025 U.S. President Donald Trump shot down the European Union’s offer of a zero-tariff trade relationship on some goods, demanding that the bloc do more to rectify the significant trading imbalance, such as purchasing more American-produced energy. With markets putting pressure on politicians worldwide, leading Eurocrats came out on Monday, attempting to appease Washington with concessions. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that Brussels had relayed an offer of “zero-for-zero” tariffs on industrial goods, while trade envoy Maroš Šefčovič suggested a “boost in strategic areas” like semiconductors and minerals. 8 Apr 2025 U.S. President Donald Trump...

Financial experts are seeing a spike in affluent working Americans looking to resettle in Europe. They say it's time for Europe to prepare for their arrival. Russian-American *Julia had wanted to leave the United States for a couple of years, but the start of President Donald Trump’s second term forced her to start taking the idea seriously. "I noticed people who are immigrants [like me], they were a lot more worried after the election happened," she told Euronews Next. "We saw the warning signs right away". The anesthesiologist worked on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis in New York City...

WASHINGTON — The European Union has floated a “zero-for-zero” tariff resolution with the Trump administration after 20% import levies were imposed by Washington last week. “We have offered zero-for-zero tariffs for industrial goods as we have successfully done with many other trading partners,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Monday. “Because Europe is always ready for a good deal. So we keep it on the table,” she said at a press conference alongside Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

Trade ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Monday neared agreement on a list of US goods to target in response to the recent US decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium. But a second round designed to reply to the blanket 20% tariff on other imports from the bloc, and a flat rate of 25% on cars, remains under debate. The first round of countermeasures, which are expected to be adopted on Wednesday, is likely to include US products such as bourbon whiskey, though this inclusion remains moot, particularly after threats from US President Donald Trump to impose 200% tariffs...

In his highly quoted speech to the Munich Security Conference, Vice President J.D. Vance singled out a country unfamiliar to many Americans: Romania. Mr. Vance condemned what he described as Europe’s crackdown on free speech and mentioned Romania’s election annulment. In December, “Romania straight up canceled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors,” he said. “The argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections, but I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. If your democracy can be destroyed with a few...

On Monday, European Union leader Ursula von der Leyen has said that the European Union is ready to offer "zero-for-zero" tariffs in trade negotiations with the United States for industrial goods. "We stand ready to negotiate with the United States. Indeed, we have offered zero-for-zero tariffs for industrial goods, as we have successfully done with many other trading partners, because Europe is always ready for a good deal," von der Leyen said on Monday. This comes as the 27-nation bloc has been in talks to get the US to lower tariffs against the EU. The countries are facing a 25...

France’s trade minister said the European Union’s response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs could be “extremely aggressive” amid increasingly heated rhetoric from Paris. Speaking ahead of crunch talks in Luxembourg, French Minister of Foreign Trade Laurent Saint-Martin said that Brussels must consider all options in the trade dispute with the United States. “We must not exclude any option, on goods, on (American) services and open the European toolbox, which is very complete, which can also be extremely aggressive in return,” the minister said per Le Figaro.

BRUSSELS, April 6 (Reuters) - European Union countries will seek to present a united front in the coming days against U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs, likely approving a first set of targeted countermeasures on up to $28 billion of U.S. imports from dental floss to diamonds. Such a move would mean the EU joining China and Canada in imposing retaliatory tariffs on the United States in an early escalation of what some fear will become a global trade war, making goods more expensive for billions of consumers and pushing economies around the world into recession.

The response from the EU is exactly what we would expect to see from the end of the 80-year-old Marshal Plan.EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyden has three big concerns with the new trade/tariff reset. I strongly suggest everyone to read the EU concerns slowly to fully absorb decades of hypocrisy now surfacing:#1 The EU will not be able to compete for U.S. market share with 20% general tariffs and 25% auto tariffs.#2 The EU must deploy countermeasures against the risk of losing industrial capacity and manufacturing to the United States.And #3 The EU must defend itself against China...

PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen warned fellow EU countries that joint defence is still realistic, but urged continued military cooperation with the US The Danish government will support a series of small steps to reinforce the EU's joint foreign and security policy this autumn, when member nations begin the dirty work of negotiating a new constitutional treaty for the European partnership. Denmark will neither contribute to majority-rule resolutions on defence, nor move to withdraw the military defence of Europe from the NATO alliance with the US, Rasmussen said Monday at an EU conference at Copenhagen's Industriens Hus. The prime minister warned...

Vance warned that shutting down speech destroys democracy. European leaders have apparently taken his statement as an instruction manual. It’s been a banner week for authoritarians in Europe, and it’s only Wednesday. On Monday, a French court banned Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing National Rally party and the frontrunner in the 2027 presidential election, from seeking public office for the next five years. The same day, The Telegraph reported that a toddler had been booted from a U.K. preschool for being insufficiently supportive of LGBT politics. Over the weekend, a British couple revealed they had been arrested...

The French authorities insist that the conviction of Marine Le Pen, which disqualifies the leader of the National Rally (RN) from standing for election as president of France, is not political. No, they say, it simply reflects the neutral ‘rule of law’ and the ‘independence of the judicial system.’ Really? Strange then, that supposedly ‘independent’ judges and officials across Europe and America have all reached remarkably similar verdicts against right-wing politicians. It looks less like judicial independence and the old-fashioned rule of law than a globalist establishment plot to use the courts as a political weapon against the rising national...

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent indicated on March 26 that the possibility of allowing Russian banks to rejoin the SWIFT international payment messaging system could be on the table, as negotiations continue regarding an end to the war in Ukraine. However, he emphasised that the White House would require backing from Europe to reintegrate Russia into the system. “There would be a long discussion about many things in terms of the proper way to bring Russia back into the international system,” Bessent told Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum. “But I think this is premature to discuss the terms of a...

The withdrawal of all Russian forces from Ukraine would be one of the main conditions to lift or amend EU sanctions, a European Commission spokesperson said on Wednesday. European Union countries renewed the bloc’s two sanctions frameworks on Russia for another six months at the end of January and earlier this month. Any changes to sanctions require unanimity among its 27 member states. “The end of the Russian unprovoked and unjustified aggression in Ukraine and unconditional withdrawal of all Russian military forces from the entire territory of Ukraine would be one of the main preconditions to amend or lift sanctions,”...