Trump Boots Ursula von der Leyen: Historic Rejection of the EU’s Soviet-Style Empire

On August 18, 2025, at the White House in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump made headlines during a high-level summit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and eight European heads of state — including France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Friedrich Merz, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the UK’s Keir Starmer, Finland’s Alexander Stubb, and the Netherlands’ Mark Rutte. The meeting was convened to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine and the wider future of U.S.–Europe cooperation.

In the middle of this gathering, Trump delivered a striking and symbolic gesture: he ejected Ursula von der Leyen — President of the European Commission and the EU’s top executive — from the room. His reasoning was blunt: “We only want to talk to leaders.”

To grasp the weight of that exchange, one must understand the nature of the European Union itself. The best analogue is the Soviet Union.

The Soviets had a parliament, the Supreme Soviet, headed by a chairman. But the chairman’s job was to rubber-stamp the dictates of the Politburo, whose General Secretary wielded the true executive power. While the Soviet state’s structures shifted over time, the pattern was clear: a theatrical body was presented as “representative,” while real power was concentrated in the hands of an unelected elite.

The EU works in much the same way. Those fiery, liberty-minded speeches occasionally delivered in the European Parliament may inspire, but in truth they are theatre. The real power rests with the unelected European Commission, led today by Ursula von der Leyen.

And here is the democratic deficit: citizens of Europe do not vote for von der Leyen, nor for the members of the Commission, even though this body creates and enforces the very policies governing the continent.

Soviet dissident and freedom fighter Vladimir Bukovsky warned years ago that the EU was modeled on the USSR. He even argued that, like the Soviets, the EU must continually expand its territory to survive.

Against that backdrop, Trump’s rejection of von der Leyen on August 18 was more than a breach of protocol. It was a powerful rejection of the EU’s claim to be a legitimate democratic authority. His words — “We only want to talk to leaders” — make plain that the Trump administration sees the EU for what it is: an undemocratic bureaucracy designed to strip sovereignty from the peoples of Europe and to enforce a system that increasingly resembles communist or communist-adjacent oppression.

In this brief video, he explains several ways in which the EU mirrors the USSR, including the necessity that it must constantly take new territory to survive.

As commentator Eugyppius has put it:

“Von der Leyen represents ‘over 400 million people’ in the same way that rude clerks at the Registry of Motor Vehicles represent local drivers. There is no singular European people or unified national interest she can speak for. She has no meaningful budget, she commands no army and she has no political legitimacy. Von der Leyen last won an election in 2003 for the state parliament of Niedersachsen; her entire career since then has been the product of backroom deals, party hierarchies, and Angela Merkel’s patronage.”

Just this week, RAIR highlighted a speech by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán warning about the EU’s threat to free peoples. In light of Trump’s dismissal of von der Leyen, Orbán’s warning takes on new urgency.

Far from being a minor dust-up, the August 18 White House incident is another demonstration of Trump’s sophistication in foreign affairs — and his clear recognition that the EU is not a union of peoples, but a bureaucratic empire hostile to liberty.

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