gotchanewsdaily.com 
“It is an odd choice if you’re trying to build bridges with the Trump administration,” said Dalibor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute. And Mandelson’s past censures of Trump have already drawn the ire of his loyalists, with top campaign adviser Chris LaCivita dubbing him “an absolute moron” on social media.
But perhaps Mandelson will be forgiven. Though famously thin-skinned, Trump can be quite pragmatic when he wants and has overlooked past criticism before — his pick of JD Vance as running mate is a notable incidence of his magnanimity.
But Rohac doesn’t think the problems end there: The new envoy also has a pro-EU stance that won’t sit well with the MAGA world — and his position on China won’t ingratiate him either. “It is absurd to imagine putting a country of such weight in the naughty corner,” Mandelson wrote in 2018, criticizing Trump for being too hostile toward Beijing. “His idea of a progressive trade policy is one that forces everyone else to give the US more favorable treatment rather than a trading system from which everyone gains,” he continued.
Given this take, “[Mandelson] just doesn’t come across, generally speaking, as somebody who can be expected to be effective with the Trump team. I’m not quite sure he’s the best person to ensure that the special relationship the Brits aspire to will thrive,” Rohac said. He is “not a man of the future.”
The underlying worry here is that Mandelson will see Trump’s second term as similar to his first — as something to be weathered before everything reverts back to the multilateral way it was before MAGA emerged. He “will fall back to the clichés of the past, to old ways of thinking and an understanding of transatlantic relations that is outdated. That just won’t get him very far with the Trump team,” Rohac said.
But Mandelson won’t be the only European official or envoy approaching Trump 2.0 as something to be managed and survived rather, than as a revolution in U.S. politics that will have major long-lasting ramifications.
