Trump Cultivates a Kindred Spirit From a Continent He Often Antagonizes

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/us/politics/trump-kurz.html

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On a day when a fresh snowfall blanketed the White House, there was something apt about President Trump cozying up by a fireplace with a leader of a picturesque Alpine country.

But Mr. Trump’s Oval Office meeting on Wednesday with the leader, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of Austria, had less to do with sleigh rides and hot chocolate than with their shared appeal to nationalism and determination to crack down on immigration.

Mr. Kurz vaulted to power in Austria in late 2017 with an anti-immigration message that challenged Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, after her country took in thousands of refugees who streamed across southern Europe from Syria and other war-torn Middle Eastern nations.

At 32, Mr. Kurz is the youngest leader of a government in the world. He is serving in a coalition with Austria’s far-right Freedom Party — a turn of events that alarms liberals in Europe but has made him extremely attractive to Mr. Trump and his aides.

He is a “rock star,” said Richard A. Grenell, the United States ambassador to Germany, who invited Mr. Kurz to lunch in Berlin. He is “one of the rising stars in the sovereignty movement,” said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, who has tried to build a front of populist leaders across Europe.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Kurz a one-on-one meeting and an expanded session with his senior aides — the kind of attention that leaders of smaller countries almost never get, save for the prime minister of Ireland around St. Patrick’s Day.

As Mr. Trump and Mr. Kurz sat in front of the fireplace, the president mostly marveled at Mr. Kurz’s age — the chancellor is five years younger than Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

“He’s a very young leader, I have to tell you,” Mr. Trump said, turning to his guest. “You are a young guy; that’s pretty good.”

Leaning forward in his chair, Mr. Kurz interjected, “But the problem with the age is getting better from day to day.”

“Someday you won’t be saying that,” the president said, in what for him was a grandfatherly tone.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Kurz later discussed trade tensions between the United States and Europe, as the White House nears a decision to impose tariffs on German automobiles. Austria is a producer of car parts, and Mr. Kurz has proposed himself as an intermediary between Mr. Trump and Ms. Merkel, whose relationship — never warm — has hardened.

“The conversation was tough,” said Martin Engelberg, a senior aide to Mr. Kurz, who noted that Mr. Trump also pressed his guest on Austria’s reliance on natural gas from Russia. Mr. Engelberg said the two leaders did not discuss immigration, and he rejected the suggestion that cultivating Mr. Kurz was a way for Mr. Trump to divide the European Union. “The chancellor is absolutely a committed European,” he said.

As the leader of a country with fewer than nine million people, however, Mr. Kurz can do little to head off a trans-Atlantic trade war. Mr. Trump’s decision to meet with him was mostly about what Mr. Kurz symbolizes in a Europe with which the president has had an increasingly antagonistic relationship.

“For better or for worse, he is the chancellor of a German-speaking country that is in a coalition with the hard right,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, an expert on Europe at the Brookings Institution. “They might see Kurz as a normalizer of the right.”

Shortly after he arrived in Germany, Mr. Grenell enraged his hosts by telling Breitbart News that he wanted to encourage a new generation of conservative leaders in Europe — an obvious dig at Ms. Merkel. He singled out Mr. Kurz, a native of Vienna who rose up in the center-right People’s Party before seizing on the issue of Muslim immigration to carve out a sharper identity and appeal to nativist sentiments.

“He was swept up in the wake of the migration crisis,” said Eugen Freund, a member of the European Parliament from Austria. “If there hadn’t been a migrant crisis, there wouldn’t have been a Sebastian Kurz.”

Mr. Freund, a former broadcaster who is a Social Democrat, said there were important differences between Mr. Kurz and Mr. Trump, aside from their age. The president is freewheeling and blunt; the chancellor chooses his words carefully. The president vilifies the news media; the chancellor has cultivated journalists in Austria, earning positive coverage.

“He is more like Bill Clinton than Trump,” Mr. Freund said.

Mr. Kurz is not the first young European leader to beguile Mr. Trump. He befriended President Emmanuel Macron of France before their relationship soured on trade and climate change, among other issues. Nor is Mr. Kurz the only nationalist to get the president’s attention.

Mr. Trump has cultivated other European populists, including Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy. And the United States recently held a summit meeting on the Middle East in Warsaw — a reward for Poland’s right-wing government, which has sought close ties to Mr. Trump.

But experts said there was little evidence that these efforts have helped the United States achieve tangible policy goals, and they have only deepened the rift with allies like Germany and France.

“That policy of embrace has failed utterly,” Ms. Stelzenmüller said. “The Warsaw summit showed in brutal clarity the internal contradictions of U.S. policy towards the right in Europe. It showed that this policy undercuts American interests and credibility.”