Morality doesn’t matter much in Trump’s new world, Romanian president says

BRUSSELS — European leaders like Romania’s Nicușor Dan spent most of 2025 trying to work out how to live with Donald Trump. Or — even worse — without him.

Since the great disruptor of international norms returned to the White House in January, he has made clear just how little he really cares for Europe — some of his key lieutenants are plainly hostile. 

The U.S. president slashed financial and military aid to Ukraine, hit the European Union with tariffs, and attacked its leaders as “weak.” His administration is now on a mission to intervene in Europe’s democracy to back “patriotic” parties and shift politics toward MAGA’s anti-migrant goals. 

For leaders such as Romania’s moderate president, the dilemma is always how far to accept Trump’s priorities — because Europe still needs America — and how strongly to resist his hostility to centrist European values. Does a true alliance even still exist across the Atlantic?

“The world [has] changed,” Dan said in an interview from his top-floor Brussels hotel suite. “We shifted from a — in some sense — moral way of doing things to a very pragmatic and economical way of doing things.”

EU leaders understand this, he said, and now focus their attention on developing practical strategies for handling the new reality of Trump’s world. Centrists will need to factor in a concerted drive from Americans to back their populist opponents on the right as the United States seeks to change Europe’s direction.

Administration officials such as Vice President JD Vance condemned last year’s canceled election in Romania and the new White House National Security Strategy suggests the U.S. will seek to bend European politics to its anti-migrant MAGA agenda.

For Dan, it is “OK” for U.S. politicians to express their opinions. But it would be a “problem” if the U.S. tried to “influence” politics “undemocratically” — for example, by paying media inside European countries “like the Russians are doing.”

Weak Europeans

Relations with America are critical for a country like Romania, which, unusually, remained open to the West during four decades of communist rule. On the EU’s eastern edge, bordering Ukraine, Romania is home to a major NATO base — soon to be Europe’s biggest — as well as an American ballistic missile defense site. But the Trump administration has announced the withdrawal of 800 American troops from Romania, triggering concern in Bucharest.

As winter sun streamed in through the window, Dan argued that Europe and the U.S. are natural allies because they share more values than other regions of the world. He thought “a proper partnership” will be possible — “in the medium [term] future.” But for now, “we are in some sense of a transition period in which we have to understand better each other.”

Dan’s frank assessment reveals the extent of the damage that has been done to the transatlantic alliance this year. Trump has injected jeopardy into all aspects of the Western alliance — even restoring relations with Russian ruler Vladimir Putin. 

At times, Europeans have been at a loss over how to respond. 

Does Dan believe Trump had a point when he told POLITICO this month that European leaders were “weak”? 

“Yes,” Dan said, there is “some” truth in Trump’s assessment. Europe can be too slow to make decisions. For example, it took months of argument and a fraught summit in Brussels last week that ended at 3 a.m. to agree on a way to fund Ukraine. But — crucially — even a fractious EU did eventually take “the important decision,” he said.

That decision to borrow €90 billion in joint EU debt for a loan for cash-strapped Kyiv will keep Ukraine in the fight against Putin for the next two years. 

Waiting for peace

According to EU leaders who support the plan (Hungary, Slovakia and Czechia won’t take part), it makes a peace deal more likely because it sends a signal to Putin that Ukraine won’t just collapse if he waits long enough.

But Dan believes the end of the war remains some way off, despite Trump’s push for a ceasefire. 

“I am more pessimistic than optimistic on short term,” he said. Putin’s side does not appear to want peace: “They think a peace in two, three months from now will be better for them than peace now. So they will fight more — because they have some small progress on the field.” 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at last week’s European Council summit that he wanted Trump to put more pressure on Putin to agree to a ceasefire. Does Dan agree? “Of course. We are supporting Ukraine.”

But Trump’s “extremely powerful” recent sanctions on Russian oil firms Rosneft and Lukoil are already helping, Dan said. He also welcomed Trump’s commitment to peace, and America’s new openness to providing security guarantees to bolster a final deal. 

It is clear that Dan hopes Putin doesn’t get the whole of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, but he doesn’t want to tie Zelenskyy’s hands. “Any kind of peace in which the aggressor is rewarded in some sense is not good for Europe and for the future security of the world,” Dan said. “But the decision for the peace is just on the Ukrainian shoulders. They suffer so much, so we cannot blame them for any decision they will do.”

Romania plays a critical role as an operational hub for transferring supplies to neighboring Ukraine. With its Black Sea port of Constanța, the country will be vital to future peacekeeping operations. Ukrainian soldiers are training in Romania and it is already working with Bulgaria and Turkey to demine the Black Sea, Dan said. 

Meanwhile, Russian drones have breached Romanian airspace more than a dozen times since the start of the full-scale war, and a village on the border with Ukraine had to be evacuated recently when drones set fire to a tanker ship containing gas. Dan played down the threat. 

“We had some drones. We are sure they have not intentionally [been] sent on our territory,” he said. “We try to say to our people that they are not at all in danger.” Still, Romania is boosting its military spending to deter Russia all the same.

Corruption and a crisis of faith

Dan, 56, won the presidency in May this year at a tense moment for the country of 19 million people.

The moderate former mayor of Bucharest defeated his populist, Ukraine-skeptic opponent against the odds. The vote was a rerun, after the first attempt to hold a presidential election was canceled last December over allegations of massive Russian interference and unlawful activity in support of the far-right front-runner Călin Georgescu. Legal cases are underway, including charges against Georgescu and others over an alleged coup plot.

But for many Romanians, the cancelation of the 2024 election merely reinforced their cynicism toward the entire democratic system in their country. They wanted change and almost half the electorate backed the far right to deliver it. 

Corruption today remains a major problem in Romania and Dan made it his mission to restore voters’ faith. In his first six months, however, he prioritized painful and unpopular public-sector spending cuts to bring the budget deficit — which was the EU’s biggest — under control. “On the big problems of society, starting with corruption, we didn’t do much,” Dan confessed.

That, he said, will change. A recent TV documentary about alleged corruption in the judiciary provoked street demonstrations and a protest letter signed by hundreds of judges.

Dan is due to meet them this week and will then work on legislative reforms focused on making sure the best magistrates are promoted on merit rather than because of who they know. “People at the top are working for small networks of interests, instead of the public good,” Dan said.

He was also clear that the state has not yet done enough to explain to voters why the election last year was canceled. More detail will come in a report expected in the next two months, he said.

Russian meddling

One thing that is now obvious is that Russia’s attack on Romanian democracy, including through a vast TikTok influence campaign, was not isolated. Dan said his country has been a target for Moscow for a decade, and other European leaders tell him they now suffer the same disinformation campaigns, as well as sabotage. Nobody has an answer to the torrent of fake news online, he said.

“I just have talks with leaders for countries that are more advanced than us and I think nobody has a complete answer,” he said. “If you have that kind of information and that information arrived to half a million people, even if you’re coming the next day saying that it was false, you have lost already.”

The far-right populist Alliance for the Union of Romanians party is ahead in the polls on about 40 percent, mirroring the pattern elsewhere in Europe. Dan, who beat AUR leader George Simion in May, believes his own team must get closer to the people to defeat populism. And he wishes that national politicians around Europe would stop blaming all their unpopular policies on Brussels because that merely fuels populist causes.

Dan said he has learned that EU politics is in fact a democratic process, in which different member countries bring their own ideas forward. “With my six months’ experience, I can say that it’s quite a debate,” he said. “There is not a bureaucratic master that’s arranging things. It’s a democracy. It’s a pity that the people do not feel that directly.”

But what about those marathon EU summits that keep everyone working well beyond midnight? “The topics are well chosen,” Dan said. “But I think the debates are a little bit too long.”