How the EU dashed to Trump’s Scottish hideaway-and got the deal it craved

There was something deeply ironic in the EU’s top brass having to fly to Britain to seal the bloc’s biggest deal since Brexit — but that’s what Donald Trump wanted and that's what Donald Trump got.

For European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen it was a much-needed personal triumph, having endured a bruising start to her second term at the helm of the bloc’s executive, attracting criticism from across the political spectrum and losing a high-profile EU court ruling. After the contours of a EU-U.S. trade agreement finally emerged between officials over the past few days, it was she who dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s with Trump during an hour-long discussion on Sunday evening.

To do that, she’d had to dash to his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, where he is enjoying the peace and quiet and a summer break from world affairs. Even so, von der Leyen still had to wait until the American president had spent most of the day walking the greens and then, in front of the hastily assembled press pack, fulminating against the horrors of windmills.

Still, they got there in the end. As they walked into the meeting at 5:40 p.m. U.K. time, the pair were still rating the chances of success at no better than 50-50. When they finally talked business, fears of a last-minute hitch, which senior officials seemed genuinely worried about throughout Sunday, soon dissolved.

Trump, never one to shy away from hyperbole, and who in recent months has signed similar agreements with the U.K. and Japan, immediately described the EU deal as “the biggest one of them all.”

It locks in U.S. tariffs of 15 percent on most imports from the EU. Von der Leyen and Co. had succeeded in fending off Trump’s threat to raise tariffs on most EU goods to 30 percent on Aug. 1. The agreement is likely to boost the European economy, which is still lagging behind much of the rest of the world and is struggling to pick up after the Covid pandemic.

“It was heavy lifting we had to do,” von der Leyen said before racing to catch her flight back to Brussels. “But now we made it.”

Two-week standoff
“The golf was beautiful,” Trump told reporters. “Even though I own it, it’s probably the best course in the world. And I look over the horizon and I see nine windmills at the end of the 18th. I say, isn’t that a shame?”

Trump said the EU will agree to purchase $750 billion of energy. It will also agree to invest $600 billion more than planned in the U.S.