The EU is looking to the Prime Minister of the Netherlands as a new continental leader. Donald Trump’s war is made for television. Rob Jetten’s Europe is not. That is the point.
The office of Rob Jetten.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
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The office of the Dutch prime minister in The Hague is austere. No flags arranged for the camera. No gilt. The desk is functional. In the afternoon, when Rob Jetten sat down with the FT for his first major interview since taking office, the light in the room had the flat quality of a Northern European winter refusing to end. Jetten, thirty-eight, wore a suit that did not ask to be noticed. He spoke with the careful cadence of a man accustomed to coalition arithmetic — counting votes before committing to a clause. Nothing in the room said television.
Six thousand kilometres west, at roughly the same hour, another leader was producing content. Donald Trump — who once considered film school, whose vocation was found not in real estate but in hosting The Apprentice, and who has treated the American presidency as an exercise in programming — was managing a war in Iran that he had begun evaluating, in his own words, as though he were watching a television show. “How do you like the performance?” he asked a reporter of the bombing campaign. “I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better.”
This is not a difference of style. It is a fracture line running through the whole Western order, and you can see daylight through it. On one side, politics as spectacle — judged by ratings, managed through narrative arcs. On the other hand, politics as procedure — judged by outcomes, grounded out through consensus. That the spectacle side is currently dropping ordnance on a sovereign nation while the procedural side is trying to work out how to price carbon without destroying southern Italian industry should tell you how wide the crack has got.
The columnist Simon Kuper put it best: Trump’s second term amounts to a genre shift. The first term was high-stakes reality television — firings, provocations, the brief and incandescent tenure of Anthony Scaramucci. The star carried the show. But reality television is a dying format, and the older Trump is a diminished performer in it. He rambles. He has lost shock value. The surviving cast are sycophants, every last one. By Christmas 2025, the show was struggling.
Trump did what any desperate showrunner would do: he jumped genres. The reality series gave way to an action-adventure series. Each mini-series — the invasion of Minneapolis, the capture of Nicolás Maduro — was designed to be short and snappy. “I watched it, literally, like I was watching a television show,” Trump said of the Maduro operation. The war in Iran, initiated from what Kuper calls “an original idea by Benjamin Netanyahu,” was supposed to be the blockbuster. Three weeks in, with the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed and American allies refusing to join what the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, has called “not Europe’s war,” the production has exceeded its allotted run-time. The real-life death toll — the WHO has identified thirteen Iranian health infrastructure sites struck — is treated as a continuity error, not a plot point.
And perhaps not coincidentally, the war’s opening bombardment on 1 March overshadowed the release of FBI interview memoranda in which a woman told federal agents that Trump had sexually assaulted her when she was approximately thirteen years old. The Department of Justice had initially withheld these documents from the public Epstein files database, releasing them only after NPR and CNN identified the omission. Trump denies all wrongdoing. A White House spokesperson described the accusations as “completely baseless.” Draw your own conclusions about the timing. Critics have taken to calling the conflict “Operation Epstein Distraction” — a joke that, like much about this presidency, is funnier than it has any right to be and far less funny than it should be.
What does any of this look like from the flat light of The Hague?
Jetten — the Netherlands’ youngest ever prime minister, its first openly gay leader, and the first from the progressive liberal Democrats 66 party to hold the office — took power on 23 February 2026, heading a minority coalition with the centre-right VVD and the Christian Democratic Appeal. Together, they hold sixty-six of the Tweede Kamer’s 150 seats: the first Dutch minority government since 1939. Every bill will mean cobbling together ad hoc majorities from an opposition that has already signalled its price. Governance by negotiation, by committee, by the slow accretion of compromise. The opposite of television.
Jetten knows this is a strength. “For two years we’ve spent a lot of time complaining about what’s going on in the US,” he said. “But instead of complaining and being shocked and surprised by every other tweet, maybe just do a better job and make sure that we deliver better policies for our citizens.” The sentence sounds like nothing. Read it again. What he is actually proposing is competence as the answer to spectacle. Forget the counter-programming. Just govern. He is also, quietly, suggesting what the Brussels consensus has spent years avoiding: that twenty-seven members cannot afford to let two of them run the clock. If Hungary and Slovakia do not want the EU to function, build the coalitions that do and leave them to explain the consequences at home. Move on. Assemble the willing. Let Hungary and Slovakia catch up or fall behind.
Whether Jetten can deliver is another matter entirely. His coalition’s parliamentary arithmetic is sobering. The housing crisis is structural. Defence spending must rise sharply. The energy crisis triggered by the Iran war is giving him, as he put it, “flashbacks” to 2022, when he was climate minister during the scramble to reduce dependence on Russian gas. He has praised his predecessor Dick Schoof’s decision to join the “Coalition of the Willing” in support of Ukraine, and pledged that Dutch armed forces should play a role in supporting any peace deal. He wants to revive the Franco-German axis by offering the Netherlands as intermediary — a role The Hague played for decades before the Wilders era eroded it.
The programme is secondary. Jetten’s significance is temperamental. Western politics has tipped so far into performance — Trump evaluating a war the way he would a pilot episode, even his would-be successors measured by video completion rates (a metric New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has mastered in ways that make Trump’s rambling State of the Union addresses look prehistoric) — that Jetten looks almost radical for being boring. The committee room instead of the green room. The tedious, necessary work of making carbon trading systems function without destroying the economies they are meant to save, of building houses that people can afford to live in, of negotiating with Giorgia Meloni without overthrowing the European Union.
“We’re a rules-based continent,” Jetten said, “but sometimes the rules can be a little bit more effective and efficient.” That sentence will not trend. Nor should it. It belongs to the world of governance, where things get built slowly and broken easily, and the repairs cost more than anyone budgeted for. Where the lights are flat, and the desk is functional, and nobody is watching.
In Washington, the producer is running out of material. The Iran war has dragged on longer than intended. American polling shows no rally-round-the-flag effect. Trump keeps hinting that the next show could be Cuba, or Greenland again, or something new entirely. He has years of episodes to fill. Somewhere in the machine, a storyline is in development. Nobody knows the genre yet. But the cameras are always rolling, and in Trumpian television, the real-life death toll is never the story. The story is the story. And the story, for now, is ratings.
What Jetten may be missing, from his austere desk in The Hague, is this: Trump’s action series can do more damage than any reality show ever could. And when the bombs are real, and the Strait is closed, and the dead are being counted in wards without electricity, you cannot shout cut. Nobody will listen.
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