Vice President JD Vance’s blistering speech condemning Europe over its approach to free speech last week angered many of the European leaders in the audience.
But to the German owner of Politico and Business Insider, Vance delivered an “inspiring message” by lecturing leaders about how their approach to free speech was a greater threat than Russia and China.
Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner told the Financial Times Vance simply wanted Europe to define its values as the Trump administration began to work with its leaders. For European lawmakers to misconstrue his speech at the Munich Security Conference suggests they “intentionally misunderstood” his message.
“Honestly, I think it’s an inspiring message,” he told the Times. “You don’t have to take everything literally, but you should try to take it seriously. And [the fact] that most of the Europeans just reacted . . . in a kind of whiny tone—I think that is unsmart, it’s unstrategic and it’s even dangerous because we need a transatlantic security alliance and we need a transatlantic trade relationship.”
Döpfner, who has been criticized for his soft rhetoric toward Trump and attacks on Muslims in private, also dismissed the administration’s barrage of attacks on government subscriptions to Politico as a “misunderstanding” that he hoped would be cleared up soon.
Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have tried to characterize the subscriptions to Politico‘s subscription model as a form of government subsidization. The Trump administration has since ordered all government subscriptions to newspapers to be canceled.
“For me, it’s almost funny, after two and a half decades being portrayed in Germany as the centre of the rightwing conspiracy, I’m now portrayed in America as the center of a leftwing conspiracy,” Döpfner said. “Honestly, that’s exactly the position where an independent publisher should be.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Döpfner said he would explore buying The Wall Street Journal should fellow billionaire Rupert Murdoch put it up for sale amid his blistering family-fracturing drama. But he didn’t have high hopes.
“The likelihood that we would really buy it, that we would get it, is close to zero,” he admitted, but he called the Journal “two super brands in the world that I’m very passionate about.”
The other: The Financial Times, which he failed to buy in 2015.
