President Trump, Jim Jordan Fire Warning Shots Over Mistreatment of American Companies by EU

February 24, 2025

Last week, we asked the Trump Administration to challenge the EU’s new antitrust chief Teresa Ribera, demanding that she reveal how she intends to enforce Europe’s new Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. On Friday, President Trump signed a memorandum warning Europe that the United States would “scrutinize” EU measures “that dictate how American companies interact with consumers in the European Union.”

President Trump in his memorandum declared that he will not allow “foreign governments to appropriate America’s tax base for their own benefit.” He said that “foreign governments will invite responsive actions from the Administration if they take steps to coerce U.S. businesses to hand over their intellectual property.”

The president’s memo was followed by a letter fired off on Sunday by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and Scott Fitzgerald, chairman of the subcommittee on the administrative state, warning Ribera that Congress may view European enforcement as a way to “target American companies.”

Chairman Jordan’s zeroed in on one provision of the Digital Markets Act that we have been highlighting – fines of up to 10 percent of U.S. companies’ global revenues for each violation. Not a fine on profits – but revenues. And not a fine on revenues in Europe – but around the world.

Why, we asked, should Europe be able to assess fines on Apple, Amazon, Meta, or Google for how they do business in Latin America, Asia, Australasia, and North America? And a second infraction of Europe’s bureaucratic rules can impose a 20 percent fine – threatening American innovation.

Jordan wrote: “These, along with other provisions of the DMA, stifle innovation, disincentivize research and development, and hand vast amounts of highly valuable proprietary data to companies and adversarial nations.”

Europe has gone from milking American companies to bleeding them dry.

Chairman Jordan points out that this strategy will not create a European tech sector. Thanks to Brussels, young innovators in Europe – as former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi points out – are leaving Europe for the States because overregulation makes it impossible for them to succeed. The only beneficiary of this policy will be one adversarial nation that intends to bury us all – China.

We can be grateful that President Trump is finally standing up to Europe’s draconian persecution of American companies, instead of those – like former FTC Chairman Lina Khan – who egged it on.