Donald Trump Jr. used a business discussion in Banja Luka, in the northwestern part of Bosnia, to attack European Union policies and argue that the bloc’s political direction is driving investment away. Speaking during the Tuesday visit, Trump Jr. said the “biggest players” in banking and finance and in “tech and AI across the board” believe “Europe is a disaster,” adding that “the disaster that they feel also needs to be fixed.”
Trump Jr. also said the way to “fix” Europe, in his view, was for the EU to stop hindering itself. “The only way it gets fixed, though, in my opinion is if they (Europe) get out of of their own way,” he said, according to video recordings provided by RTRS, the official television of Bosnia’s Serb-run entities.
In the same discussion, Trump Jr. tied his criticism to expectations of deeper political division inside the EU. He predicted a “major fracture” between the bloc’s eastern and western member states and said he saw “creating major fractures” between countries in eastern Europe that “still believe in common sense” and a Western Europe that is “clearly missing in the political discourse these days,” according to the RTRS-provided recordings.
Banja Luka, where he spoke, is a key city in Republika Srpska, the Serb-run portion of Bosnia. The visit was widely interpreted locally as aligning with and reinforcing Bosnia’s Serb separatist political leadership, despite the U.S. Embassy’s clarification that Trump Jr. had come without an official diplomatic mandate.
The press office of the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo said in an email to The Associated Press that Trump Jr. came “in a private capacity.” Even so, the visit was seen by many in Bosnia as a boost for leaders backing separatist politics, a position associated with Republika Srpska’s political establishment.
The Associated Press reported that Milorad Dodik, a Bosnian Serb politician and former Republika Srpska president and ally of Viktor Orbán, used social media to frame the visits by Trump Jr. and by other senior U.S. officials as part of a broader shift. Dodik said the two visits “signal an important shift of the U.S. administration under the leadership of President Trump and the care for this part of Europe regarding the position of Christians,” according to his post on X.
Trump Jr.’s trip also overlapped with a separate visit by U.S. Vice President JD Vance to Hungary to support Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s reelection bid before a highly contested vote next weekend. The AP reported that Vance’s Hungary trip was part of the same moment of increased U.S. engagement with Europe’s nationalist politics.
The criticism Trump Jr. directed at the EU came against a backdrop of longstanding U.S. complaints about trade and regulation affecting the technology sector, an AP said had intensified during the Iran war. Bosnia, meanwhile, is a candidate for EU membership, and the EU says the bloc is Bosnia’s biggest trading partner, investor, and provider of financial aid.
Separately, the United States’ sanctions policy toward Dodik has changed since the Biden administration. The AP said the Biden administration imposed sanctions in 2022 on Dodik and individuals and companies linked to him because of separatist policies that stoked fears of renewed instability, and that those sanctions were lifted by the Trump administration last year.