Atlantic Writer Calls MAGA the 'Brutal Americans.' The Internet Wore It as a Badge of Honor.

Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote a piece titled "The Rise of the Brutal American, This Is How the Bad Guys Act," describing how her European contacts reacted to the February 2025 Oval Office clash between President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Applebaum, who holds dual U.S. and Polish citizenship and has written extensively defending the post-World War II liberal international order, said the exchange created "a brand-new stereotype for America: not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American." She went further, comparing Trump and Vance to "Mafia dons" rather than the "white-hatted cowboy" she says Ronald Reagan represented.

According to Breitbart, the label didn't land the way Applebaum intended. Instead of shame, MAGA supporters treated "Brutal American" as a compliment. Blaze columnist Auron MacIntyre posted, "Why bother coming up with good branding when your enemies will do it for you?" Others online shared images of Clint Eastwood, war veterans, and American pioneers under the hashtag, effectively turning an insult into a meme.

One user, cited by Breitbart, pointed out the obvious historical irony: American troops liberated Europe from fascism twice in the 20th century, then watched much of the continent build extensive welfare states and, in this framing, drift away from the harder edges of Western defense commitments. Trump and Vance have made this argument explicitly and repeatedly in public remarks about NATO burden-sharing.

The defense spending fight is real, and Europe is moving

Behind the online skirmish is a genuine policy dispute that predates Trump's second term. UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting told Sky News on July 26 that he believes "when this period of history is written, Europe will thank President Trump for shaking us out of our complacency and forcing us to stand on our own two feet," according to the Epoch Times. Streeting was careful to note this frustration with European defense spending isn't unique to Trump or the GOP, calling it "a long-standing grain of U.S. frustration with Europe under Democratic and Republican presidents."

The UK has pledged to hit 3.5% of GDP on defense spending by 2035, in line with a new NATO target. UK Defence Secretary John Healey has publicly acknowledged tension within Whitehall over how to fund adequate defense investment amid broader fiscal pressures facing Prime Minister Keir Starmer's government. This represents a legitimate governing challenge playing out in London.

Where the real accountability question sits

The more substantive story involves The Guardian's reporting on U.S. State Department grants. According to the Guardian, the department intends to direct $12 million to conservative organizations in the UK, including $7 million to a group called 878, co-founded by former Conservative minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose net worth The Guardian estimates at more than £100 million.

This deserves scrutiny on its own terms, separate from the culture-war noise. If American taxpayer money, freed up after the closure of USAID, is now funding ideologically aligned think tanks in Europe with vague mission language about "civilizational self-confidence," that warrants an honest accounting from the State Department regardless of political affiliation. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz reportedly warned the Trump administration against interfering in German elections following disclosure of the grants, according to the Guardian.

USAID drew genuine bipartisan criticism over the years for wasteful and poorly tracked spending, and Trump's move to shut it down in February 2025 was framed as eliminating waste, not just political score-settling. Redirecting funds toward ideologically sympathetic foreign groups, if that's what's happening, isn't obviously "America first" either. It's American money going overseas either way. A former U.S. official told the Guardian that normal funding processes are being bypassed to route money toward Trump-aligned causes, an allegation that has not been independently verified through State Department disclosures and deserves a direct on-record response from the department.

The third-party wrinkle

Separately, Victor Davis Hanson, writing for the Daily Signal, took aim at Tucker Carlson for reportedly convening a group of "apostate MAGA conservatives" to discuss a possible third-party run in 2028. Hanson's argument, grounded in the historical record of Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 Bull Moose run and Ross Perot's 1992 and 1996 campaigns, is that third parties in modern American politics don't win. They only siphon votes from the major party closest to them ideologically, arguably handing Woodrow Wilson the presidency in 1912 and helping Bill Clinton win with under 50% of the vote twice.

None of these threads are resolved.