Anxious allies
The Michigan-born adviser was not always a Trump supporter. During the Republican primaries in 2016, Grenell tweeted that the candidate was “dangerous“, apparently in reference to Trump describing Nato as “obsolete”.
Even liberals recognise Grenell’s historic significance as the first openly gay person to hold a cabinet-level position in the US government, during his short spell as acting director of National Intelligence. He is also a cancer survivor, having suffered from Non-Hodgkin lymphoma – an experience which he says made him “more willing to take risks”.
By 2020, he had shifted. He was willing to defend Trump’s baseless claims that the last US election was fixed. Publicly, he has fully adopted Trump’s worldview, espousing it through Fox News appearances.
Grenell has already signalled his ideological opposition to the UK’s Labour government, through his reaction to Britain’s anti-immigration riots in August.
Sir Keir Starmer blamed the disorder on “far-right thugs”. Yet in a radio interview, Grenell seemed to defend the political motivations of those involved, while suggesting the Prime Minister was a member of the “far left”.
“I’m not sure that we have to call it ‘far right’,” he told LBC. “It’s just people who break the law… The far left is mischaracterising a lot of protests and going to the next step of cancelling people’s right to speak out, and that’s what I’ve seen too much from UK politicians.”
The former British diplomat says the Foreign Office may be concerned following these “very disobliging and intrusive” comments.
He admits that sometimes leaders with contrasting ideologies can be strong allies, like Tony Blair and George W Bush – but notes that Grenell’s riot remarks are not a one-off, in terms of criticising allies.
“He has a track record of being pretty obnoxious when he was in Germany, interfering and commenting in unhelpful ways.”
Indeed, Grenell caused a diplomatic storm in Berlin in 2018 when as America’s German Ambassador he waded into domestic politics during an interview with Breitbart. “I absolutely want to empower other conservatives throughout Europe,” he told the alt-right website, criticising “the failed policies of the left”.
The comments led the German foreign ministry to request a “clarification” from the US, while the former European Parliament president Martin Schulz accused Grenell of “behaving not like a diplomat, but like a far-right colonial officer“.
The Bundestag member Dr Nils Schmid, whose centre-left SPD party was in coalition government at the time, says Grenell “managed to antagonise” Berlin very quickly.
In person, Grenell was “articulate, friendly and polite”, Schmid tells i. But on political affairs, his style was a “one-way form of lecturing,” which tended to be “rather offensive and detrimental for his cause”. The approach was “aggressive and combative, for sure”.
“When entering the US Embassy to meet him, you didn’t feel at home with a friend. It was more like entering the Russian embassy,” Schmid recalls.
“Trump was the first American president in history to see the EU and European integration in general as an enemy. That’s why he supported Brexit. So we can assume that in a second term, Trump and his advisers would try to divide the EU, to play European governments against each other, to align with illiberal regimes like the one in Hungary. That would also be supported by Grenell.”
