Trump sees Dutch protest farmers as fighters in right-wing populist fight against ‘climate tyranny’

With Donald Trump’s expression of support during a rally in Florida on Sunday, the Dutch peasant protest has been definitively included in the right-wing populist international, the loose global alliance of ‘freedom movements’ with anti-democratic tendencies from the United States to Russia. The leaders of the farmers’ protest have gratefully accepted the support.

“It’s terrible what’s happening there,” Trump said at a conservative student rally in Tampa, Florida, on Sunday. He said that Dutch farmers are no longer allowed to work their land, use fertilizers and get rid of (half of) their livestock. The first two points are nonsense, the third may be a result of the nitrogen requirements.

However, Trump mainly used the protest to agitate against climate policy. But although nitrogen is an important factor for (local) nature and environmental policy, it has no greenhouse effect. He said that “the farmers are standing up to their government’s climate tyranny.” And: ‘In our movement we stand united against the climate fanatics.’

So-called freedom struggle

In doing so, the former American president showed what ‘his movement’ is really all about: fueling a so-called freedom struggle against so-called tyrannical governments that want to take measures in the public interest. It does not matter that these governments are democratically elected.

His disrespect for democratically elected governments was already apparent after his re-election defeat in 2020. He tried with all his might to prevent Joe Biden from entering the White House, which culminated in the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A parliamentary inquiry since then has already shown that Trump stalwarts orchestrated the uprising, even wanting to join in.

Trump’s support for the rebellious farmers fits a pattern. On Saturday, three thousand demonstrating farmers and their sympathizers were addressed from a screen on Dam Square in Amsterdam by Michael Flynn. “Your problems are our problems,” he said. He called on Americans to place Dutch flags on social media as their expression of support.

Flynn is a former general who would become Trump’s national security adviser but was fired after a month for lying about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador in Washington. He was convicted for that, but Trump pardoned him.

Fox News

The Dutch farmers’ protest can count on great interest from international right-wing bloggers and media, who often give it their own twist. Marine Le Pen, leader of the French right-wing populists, also said in a tweet on Saturday that he supported the farmers. On Fox News, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a lawyer who once went into FvD circles, wearing a peasant scarf, told Tucker Carlson that the Dutch government ‘steals the land from the farmers’, while the text appeared below the screen that ‘Western elites try to control agriculture under the guise of fighting climate change’.

The peasant protest has thus become part of the great ‘freedom struggle’, which also includes the resistance against immigrants, against ‘woke’, against abortion, and against the ‘globalist elites’. The fact that this right-wing movement is very international and is supported by high earners like Trump and Carlson is largely ignored.

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