Mocking Donald Trump — Brussels’ new sport

Residents of the ‘Brussels bubble’ have been subject to — and actively participated in — and exponential rise in the mocking of Donald Trump over the past two weeks.

Making Americans the butt of Brussels jokes is hardly new (George W. Bush, anyone?) and a strain of anti-Americanism has always been present in Europe’s body politic.

What’s different this time is how far the mocking has spread. Now, pretty much every Brussels conversation turns to Trump.

FleishmanHillard released a video of a staff member mimicking Trump as a way to promote an upcoming event: “It’s gonna be yuge, it’s gonna be great.” Young creatives have made a series of videos under the theme ‘Who Wants to be Second?’ — a satirical look at what Europeans can do in the wake of Trump’s ‘America First’ approach.

Green MEPs brag about how good Trump will be for mobilizing their support base. Any idea or comment not obviously liberal in nature risks getting a “Trump” prefix attached to it. If one expresses concern at a trade deal, that’s now ‘Trumponomics.” If you’re unimpressed with European security policies, beware the label “Trump-lite.”

It’s going to be a long four or eight years.

Advantage Europe: MEPs put Donald Trump on back foot

A group of party leaders in the European Parliament has created a playbook that can be copied by anyone hoping to frustrate the ideas of U.S. President Donald Trump. And they might not even realize it.

By telling Ted Malloch, reportedly President Trump’s favorite to be U.S. ambassador to the EU, that he’s not welcome in Brussels, the leaders of three of the biggest political parties in the European Parliament are disrupting Trump’s emerging competitive advantage in global politics.

Trump the aggressive disruptor has more power than Trump the overstretched reactor. In this situation Trump is now the reactor.

Proposed EU ambassadors are the human version of the CETA trade deal: they have to be approved by all 28 EU governments and the European Commission. Any one of them can block a nomination.

Malloch may not be Trump’s intended ambassador. In that case the Trump administration is on notice.

If Malloch is the nominee, the administration must now either use time and energy fighting the battle, and possibly lose, or preemptively cave in and give the EU a more palatable ambassador. Watch this space.

MEP’s assistant trolls Romanian Social Democrat

Controversial plans in Romania to decriminalize some corruption cases, which led to mass street protests this week, have found their way into the hallways of the European Parliament.

Romanian MEP Viorica Dăncilă, a member of the ruling Social Democrats, last week emailed her 750 colleagues to explain why concerns about the new laws were unfounded. “We believe it is helpful to know the actual facts in order to correctly interpret the current situation,” said Dăncilă.

Not everyone was convinced.

“You have inspired me to perform a public service myself by making some corrections to your description of the status quo, as I felt that your briefing can be quite misleading,” said Ileana Grigorescu, an assistant to U.K. Conservative MEP Andrew Lewer, in an email to the entire Parliament.

She proceeded to dissect Dăncilă’s document, pointing out where she felt the MEP had given an incorrect interpretation of the facts.

For example, where Dăncilă described the government as having “launched a public debate” on the new laws, Grigorescu pointed out that the debate “is just an email address where you can write your opinion.”

Her intervention triggered uproar in Romania, with a reporter from a local TV station, regarded as close to the Social Democrats, contacting Grigorescu to ask why she was so poorly informed about the reforms. Grigorescu hung up the phone.

The station then ran the story as “breaking news,” accusing her of tampering with official documents.

Asked why she decided to criticize the MEP’s document, Grigorescu told POLITICO: “Protesting in Romania is the new social gathering. Every few months we’re out into the streets, or so it has been for the last few years.”

“I didn’t expect it to have such an impact,” she said. “Lucky me for having a platform to reply and be read on.”

François Fillon’s endless nightmare

POLITICO’s Nicholas Vinocur and Pierre Briançon analyze the flailing conservative French presidential candidacy of François Fillon, and re-assess Emmanuel Macron’s chances in this French language edition of In The Loop.

Günther Oettinger — De facto European Commission vice president

It’s now Day 95 with no confirmation of whether Günther Oettinger is to be promoted to Commission vice president, it’s apparent this is not all bad news for the man himself. Oettinger currently doesn’t report to any of the Commission’s vice presidents, unlike his direct colleagues.

The two vice presidents he could report to — Jyrki Katainen on budget and Frans Timmermans on human resources — have received no instructions on how to handle Oettinger’s policy files.

“He’s a free agent,” reports a Berlaymont source. “Can you imagine [President Jean-Claude Juncker chief of staff] Martin Selmayr allowing Cecilia Malmström or someone else to be a ‘middle man’ between him and Oettinger on senior appointments? It would never happen,” the source concluded.

Read more today’s Brussels Playbook here.

Today at Commission, CAP and a Davos confession

It was a technical midday presser on Thursday, focused on reforming the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy.

The CAP is back

Agriculture commissioner Phil Hogan launched a public consultation on the reform (POLITICO Pro’s Agriculture and Food team published all the details on Thursday morning).

At the presser Hogan agreed that existing EU agriculture policy “is far too complex,” especially for small farmers, and said his proposals would provide “a better package” for farmers and rural development policies. Hogan did not hesitate to hint at shortcomings in the CAP including its bureaucracy, often exacerbated by countries requiring extra paperwork before farming subsidies reach their intended recipients.

Corruption and human rights

The Commission confirmed Jean-Claude Juncker will meet the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev. Apparently Juncker will not hesitate to discuss human rights issues. We’ll keep an eye on that.

Meanwhile, Margaritis Schinas, the Commission’s chief spokesman, again said the Commission’s anticorruption policy for Romania and Bulgaria will continue until reforms are “enshrined” in national law.

However, Transparency International released a letter Thursday from Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans saying it will stop naming and shaming EU countries facing corruption issues.

The Commission declined to comment on the letter, but Carl Dolan from Transparency International said: “The message coming from the European Commission is clear: fighting corruption is no longer a political priority and graft is only a serious problem in a minority of member states.”

Too many commissioners in Davos …

Apparently Juncker told colleagues that too many of them went to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Schinas would officially say only “it is not secret Jean-Claude Juncker is not a great fan” of the gathering.

Playbook kept a close eye on the Commission delegation in Davos and did not see any of them in ski wear.

Because of the Valletta summit, there’s no midday Friday.

Gibraltar: Rock in a hard Brexit place

The tiny British overseas territory of Gibraltar, physically attached to Spain and emotionally attached to the European Union, is facing up to what its Chief Minister Fabian Picardo calls the “existential threat” of Brexit.

“Gibraltar has lived in what many people would characterize as a hard Brexit for many years,” Picardo told Playbook. “Although we’ve had access to the single market of services and access to freedom of capital, freedom of movement has often been curtailed by Spain,” he said. “We’ve lived through what other parts of the U.K. like Northern Ireland are now describing as a potential hard Brexit.”

Ninety-six percent of Gibraltarians voted to Remain in the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum, but talk in Spain of Gibraltar getting closer to Madrid to keep access to the single market is purely speculative. Picardo calls this talk “fantasies Spanish politicians want to weave.” The landslide Remain vote on the Rock is outgunned by the vote by 99 percent to remain under British sovereignty in the earlier 2002 vote, Picardo added.

Picardo had been keen to warn of the dangers of a hard exit from London, but post-referendum analysis showed that 90 percent of Gibraltar’s EU-related economic activity actually takes place in the UK. The biggest challenge for Gibraltar then is retaining access to the UK home market, not the EU single market. Picardo says that unlike some of the U.K.’s other overseas territories, Gibraltar has been assured by London it will remain part of the UK market. 

Plastic fantastic — Dutch on brink of ridding oceans of plastic

Boyan Slat is your dose of good news this morning. The Dutch 22 year-old’s project is to rid the world’s oceans of plastic waste. After three years work and millions of dollars in crowd-funding, his Ocean Clean-Up initiative has a working prototype and a growing band of supporters.

The problem: Bad human habits and the world’s ocean currents have conspired to suck a large percentage of the world’s ocean waste into part of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California. Scientists and campaigners knew the problem was bad but before Ocean Cleanup, they hadn’t been able to measure it in detail, and their best ideas to fix it would have taken 79,000 years to implement, Slat says. Using 30 vessels and the first ever aerial survey of the waste, Slat says his team collected more information in one month than in the previous 40 years. The problem was also much worse than originally estimated.

The proposed solution: An array of plastic barriers — each possibly two kilometers or more in length (“like a big curtain in the sea” Slat said), to trap plastic (including most micro plastic pieces down to less than one centimeter in size) where the currents cause it to gravitate. No nets are used, which Slat said is key to avoiding harm to fish and other aquatic life. So far €25 million from mainly private funding has been raised to develop the barriers.

What’s the business model? Expand the project with funding from companies (including those that produce and sell plastics) keen to bolster their green credentials. Slat wants to sell all the plastic that is removed from the ocean as “material with a story.” In other words: recycle it and build it into products for upmarket consumers, to allow funding of additional clean-up efforts. “We want to go all the way up the value chain,” he said, showing Playbook his sunglasses, made of frames built from reclaimed fishing nets, to prove the concept.

What’s the catch? So far there is no U.N. rule preventing the clean-up from taking place. But there are unanswered questions about what happens when the plastic is brought onshore: is it classified as waste, as an import to be taxed, or something else?

The next step: Another trial of the latest barrier prototype in the Netherlands in April.

— This post was updated to reflect a higher amount of funding already raised.

Trump’s climate change adviser on energy stimulus

Before addressing the Blue-Green Summit in Brussels Wednesday, Myron Ebell spent five months creating the roadmap for U.S. President Donald Trump’s climate policy.

Playbook sat down with Ebell, a climate skeptic who ran the Environmental Protection Agency working group on Trump’s transition team, to discuss what to expect from the U.S. on climate policy over the next few years. For background, read about Ebell’s categorical rejection of climate change modeling and what he calls the “climate industrial complex.”

The first step is killing climate activists’ dreams with a cash drought. There’s not going to be much “greenwashing” in this administration. Ebell said Congress won’t stump up the billions the United States was slated to hand over to a global Green Climate Fund, conceived under the U.N. COP system that birthed the Paris climate deal. Ebell advised Trump to not only kill the idea completely, but to recall a $500 million down-payment made to the fund by the Obama administration in its final weeks.

The second step is significant personnel change in the federal public service to facilitate the implementation of 42 specific promises Ebell said Trump made during the campaign. There’s no need for global climate policy staff because there’s no need for global climate policy, for example. Ebell said the Environmental Protection Agency’s “15,000 career civil servants are there to expand their scope,” rather than deliver Trump policy.

The third step is to become the ‘world’s dominant energy producer.’ How? Via “an energy stimulus program rather than a fiscal stimulus program.” Specifically, by abolishing restrictions on power plants, making it easier to lease federal lands, approving more pipelines and boosting liquified natural gas exports.

At this point climate, energy and geopolitics are thoroughly mixed together. LNG exports, Ebell said, “could really undermine Russia’s ability to try and coerce Europe. And make it much harder for OPEC and the Middle East to manipulate oil prices … If you reduce the size of Russian energy exporters, that’s all they have. If I were Russia I would be very worried about this. If I were Saudi Arabia I would be very worried about this because it could change the balance of power in the world.”

No walls please, we’re Trump climate skeptics: When Playbook mused that cities threatened by rising sea water could consider building sea walls, Ebell recalled: “The Dutch built sea walls with pre-modern technology … so I don’t think it actually costs that much.” Without irony he added, “I don’t think we want to actually build walls everywhere.”

In Ebell’s view, Florida is sinking due to long-lasting geological effects from the last Ice Age. “Florida is going to be underwater anyway,” he said. No word for what that means for Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s winter palace.

TTIP is dead? Long live EU-Mexico trade deal

WHAT THEY SAID: “Now is the time to build bridges, not walls. EU & Mexico agree to accelerate trade talks.”

WHAT THEY MEANT: Any speedy action Washington can take, Brussels and Mexico City can take faster.

Seb Dance trolls Nigel Farage in Parliament chamber

Seb Dance, a UK Labour MEP from London, got Twitter talking Wednesday afternoon with this creative positioning in the Parliament’s plenary session.

Bill Etheridge a UKIP MEP has filed a complaint to Parliament President Antonio Tajani, according to an email seen by Playbook.