One of the more rabid Trump critics at the Atlantic came up with a new branding for the president, Vice President JD Vance, and similarly constituted Americans earlier this month: “the brutal American.”
Rather than ignore or laugh off the liberal’s latest attempt at relevancy, the MAGAverse embraced the epithet. It appears that some of the very qualities that most enrage Anne Applebaum and her European comrades are those that distinguish Americans from lesser nationalities.
Anne Applebaum is a historian turned sensationalist at the Atlantic with something of a credibility issue.
The 60-year-old writer smeared as propagandists early proponents of the pandemic lab-leak theory; criticized skeptics of the experimental COVID-19 vaccines; downplayed the revelations on the Hunter Biden laptop and framed the damning emails as a potential “psyop”; argued that to prevent nuclear war with Russia, the U.S. needs to send more and greater weapons to Ukraine; and spent a great deal of time in recent years screeching about imagined parallels between Trump and various 20th-century dictators. She continues, however, to confidently spill ink for the liberal publication.
Applebaum noted in a March 5 piece that her liberal publication decided to push again over the weekend that while hobnobbing around Europe — where she also is a citizen of Poland — she was immersed in foreign nationals’ displeasure with the American president over his Feb. 28 meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand-new stereotype for America: not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American,” wrote Applebaum, a former member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former board member of the National Endowment for Democracy.
Applebaum suggested that her fellows on the continent no longer can cling to positive postwar stereotypes of Americans. Instead, they are now processing this alternative — the “rude” and “cruel” type of American who would dare halt transfers of military equipment to Ukraine, castigate a man for risking nuclear holocaust, hint at ending sanctions on Russia, impose tariffs on allies, and “get” Greenland.
‘The American is the European who Europe was too tame for their spirit.’
“These are the actions not of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but of the bad guys,” wrote Applebaum. “If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are Mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too.”
After portraying Zelenskyy as the victim of deluded hosts, Applebaum suggested that Trump’s assertions that failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama “founded ISIS” and that “the Google search engine is suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton” were somehow evidence of a Russian worldview.
Having tried her best once again to paint Trump as a ruthless Russophile, Applebaum concluded, “Europeans know, everyone knows, that if Trump and Vance can talk that way to the president of Ukraine, then they might eventually talk that way to their country’s leader next.”
While there was nothing novel about her complaints about Zelenskyy’s treatment in the Oval Office, Trump supporters and others outside Applebaum’s target demographic seized upon the term “brutal American” online, adopting it as a positive epithet.
BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre wrote, “Why bother coming up with good branding when your enemies will do it for you?”
The Heritage Foundation tweeted Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware with the caption, “Brutal Americans.”
William Wolfe, the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership, shared an image captioned, “Brutal American,” that shows Theodore Roosevelt in his cavalry uniform waving an American flag along with a banner stating, “Europe take notice. Keep off American soil.”
Various other commenters shared images of American soldiers from various conflicts engaging in conduct that Atlantic staff writers and continentals might find objectionable, albeit indirectly liberating.
The account Aristophanes noted, “I’m almost convinced that we somehow secretly purchased legacy media and they are just subverting themselves on purpose.”
One user on X wrote, “‘The brutal American.’ Stop making us sound cool.”
@Instantundit tweeted, “B***h please. This is a country that crossed a river at night to kill foreign invaders in their beds on Christmas. And we’ll do it again.”
“The American is the European who Europe was too tame for their spirit. And the European needs for the American to remain that way,” said Andrew Beck, vice president of communications at the Claremont Institute.
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