Trump Administration officials are contemptible in the eyes of the New York Times Berlin bureau chief Jim Tankersley. For two years running, he has dumped on the speeches of the American representatives at the annual Munich Security Conference.
In 2025, he framed Vice President J.D. Vance as a quasi-Nazi and insufficiently respectful to his European colleagues. On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was mocked for being respectful in an ignorant fashion.
Sounding strangely triumphant, Tankersley implied that it’s too late to save European culture from the cultural diversity of migrants from Islamic nations, indirectly suggesting the very arguments he smeared Vance for making were actually right – that Europe’s centuries-old culture is at risk from excessive migration – but that it’s too late to reverse this actually historically recent trend.
There is an Afghan grocery store on the blocks outside the main train station in Munich. Halal food counters are sprinkled amid the cathedral spires and beer halls. Nearly one of every three residents you meet in town is not German.
It’s a decent approximation of what many European cities, and European people, look like today. And a different Europe from the one the Trump administration says it wants to be friends with.
Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, tried to soothe a year of friction between the United States and its trans-Atlantic allies on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference. His speech there reiterated America’s commitment to Europe but wrapped it in historical and cultural ties that seemingly exclude large sections of the current European population.
As if a trend that began in earnest in 2015 with migrants from war-torn Syria is both inevitable and welcome, despite the ruinous government spending necessary to support the migrants, many of them military-age men from Islamic cultures that don’t respect women. But the New York Times isn't wild about Western civilization.
After a decade-long influx of migrants from the Middle East and elsewhere, the share of Muslims across Europe has ticked up, to about 6 percent in 2020, according to Pew. The Jewish population has declined slightly and remains below 1 percent.
In his speech, Mr. Rubio called widespread immigration a crisis for the continent and urged Europeans to change course, though the flow of immigrants to Germany and other European countries has slowed in recent years.
But crucially, those migrants have not been repatriated, which means the actual numbers have not gone down. Tankersley doesn’t wonder why, say Germany’s anti-immigrant party Alternative for Germany, (AfD) is now so popular, despite naked government attempts to repress it.
Countries across Europe have struggled with questions of migration, culture and heritage in recent years. But many European leaders reject Mr. Rubio’s assertion — echoing President Trump and Vice President JD Vance — that mass migration “threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture and the future of our people.”
Given the intolerant left-wing professional culture in Europe (notoriously admired by CBS’s 60 Minutes), is it any surprise that critics of migrants might be muted?
Tankersley pointedly met with a left-wing German politician, born in Moscow to Iraqi parents fleeing Saddam Hussein, to fault Rubio’s view of Europe.
“The challenges that we’re facing don’t know borders, like the climate crisis, like hunger, poverty, social injustice, like more authoritarians than democracies in the world right now,” [Ms. Alabali Radovan] said. “We have to face them together.”
Tankersley had previously slammed J.D. Vance’s speech at the 2025 conference from the opposite angle, eviscerating Vance for daring to lecture Europe -- a Europe which no longer exists anyway, apparently. Vance’s speech noted Europe has become more authoritarian, dangerous, and elitist. Tankersley responded with contempt, ignoring Vance’s call for respect for freedom of expression in Europe while painting him as a quasi-Nazi supporter:
Eighty years after American soldiers liberated Dachau, top German officials this weekend all-but accused Mr. Vance -- and by extension, President Trump -- of boosting a political party that many Germans consider to be dangerously descended from Nazism.
That would be the previously mentioned AfD.
