(Editor’s note: Cheryl Boyd also contributed to this post about Americans fleeing Trump.)
The advertising executive. The high school teacher. The college professor. The finance guy. The executive at the tech company. The career State Department official and others. American friends, strangers and referrals are texting, DMing and emailing us, asking our advice about moving to Europe, particularly the Netherlands, to escape Donald Trump.
When Trump was elected in 2016, we predicted a wave of people leaving the United States, mostly for Europe. It didn’t happen mainly because he never got the chance to inflict uncontrolled chaos. Trump made the mistake of surrounding himself with principaled people such as Gen. Mark Milley, Gen. James Maddis and Mark Espers, all of whom ignored his unconstitutional and illegal orders. In 2018, Democrats took majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives to keep a lid on the insanity.
This time is different. And it’s really scary only weeks into Trump 2.0, as he brings together a motley assortment of angry, reactionary extremists, nutcases and wackos, conmen and conspiracy theorists. Trump has appointed the majority of Supreme Court justices and Republicans control both houses of the Congress. There are no guardrails.
The first five weeks of Trump’s administration have produced complete chaos as he fired thousands of government workers and declared himself king. He’s cutting programs such as Medicaid and Medicare his base depends on to survive. He wrecked crucial international security alliances and tried to publicly humiliate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who pushed back like a boss.
Trump isn’t even the defacto president … that’s Elon Musk. Musk may be the richest person in America, but he largely got that way from government largess. The South African’s role as unelected assistant president and overseer of the non-governmental “Dept. of Government Effiency” already is a flashpoint. His fit with MAGA is imperfect at best … an atheist who made the biggest part of his fortune off electric cars, an anathema to Trump’s evangelical Christian MAGA base who believe real patriots drive huge pickups with gas burning V8s. Oh, and who gives his kids (with at least five different women) traditional America First names such as X and Techno Mechanicus.
In short, America is fast becoming a nation of the gullible ruled by nihilists, opportunists and far-right ideologues with grandiose ambitions of remaking America in their own images, intoxicated like arsonists driven by some primative urge to burn down the house and inflict pain on the people who elected them.
Exodus
Shockingly, a lot of Americans are not down with the Trump madness. This is the first time in my life we actually see more Americans leaving than foreigners arriving. On 8 February, German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported that the Max Planck Society – one of the world’s top scientific research institutions – is experiencing an increase in applications from American scientists. Remember, the world’s greatest theoretical physicists – Einstein, Teller and Fermi – all arrived in America as refugees fleeing fascism.
But hey, we’re telling you what you already know. Here’s what you don’t know.
For most people, running away to Europe on a whim is not a realistic option.
It takes years of planning and a fundamental understanding of how visas work. For example, though they didn’t leave because of Trump, our friend Pip Pullen and his wife Carrie Day Wilson, spent years plotting their move to Paris. But that’s not what we’re seeing. The Facebook expat communities are turning into message boards, cluttered with questions from people with completely unrealistic views of the world.
This is my personal favorite… from Expats in the Netherlands:
Also different from 2016 is there is a note of desperation in the messages from our friends and relatives.
“If we sold everything we own we might be able to raise enough money to sustain ourselves,” wrote one friend. “We have assets. We have properties, l’ve been hearing about retirement visas?”
There are people who have it figured out. I had a long conversation with a guy whose mother was Dutch and who has a basic command of the language. Let’s call him “Joe.” Joe is doing all the right things – research into citizenship by descent, job opportunities and housing. And that last one is the toughest hurdle because there just ain’t any.
Here’s what I do know from our own experiences:
• Immigrating is really, really stressful.
Most Americans who come to live in Europe do so as students or as executives at American companies doing business here. To do it freelance, or as we did as Do It Yourself Expats, requires some previous experience living overseas. We lived in Germany and Turkey for a total of eight years as Department of Defense employees, and that made all the difference. We knew what to expect when we moved to the Netherlands in 2016. If you’ve lived overseas and enjoyed it, you’re miles ahead of those who haven’t.
That’s not to say it can’t be done. We’re proof it can. But you have to research long and hard the country to which you want to move and all the steps to get there.
• Doing this right requires assets.
If you’re young and single, you can fake it, couch surf and work at Starbucks. If you have a family and a career, you have to do a lot of research, and that doesn’t include asking a bunch of strangers on Facebook expat communities about legal, financial, career and immigration issues. You need professionals. If you can’t afford to get professional advice, you shouldn’t be thinking about moving to Europe, particularly the Netherlands. Everything is expensive here. Even high net worth people are going to start worrying about their burn rate. I know we did.
• Leaving everything and everyone behind is traumatic … and not for everyone.
We’ve gotten several emails from people we know who are seriously not the right personality types to pick up and move to a different country. What I mean by that is, they’re not flexible. They’re not ready to change everything and start over, which is what expatriation requires. New foods. New languages. New cultures and rules. New friends. That’s not gonna work for the introvert who’s had the same job for 20 years. Hung out with the same friends. Lived in the same neighborhood and vacationed in Destin every single year.
Bottom line: If you’re going to move to Europe, you have to have an adventurous personality cause it ain’t easy. Is it worth it? Yeah, we think so.
• Skills and career experience isn’t necessarily transferable.
In fact, most of the time they aren’t. The exceptions are engineering, physics and computer science degrees and experience. If you have experience working for a big American tech company such as Apple or Nvidia, you’ll be in demand … though salaries are lower here. Same with accounting, professional services/management consulting and other financial careers. If you’re a doctor or medical worker, you’ll have to get certified in the Netherlands. And if you’re an attorney, you’ll have to find a position with a company that does business in the US and needs American legal advice.
• Don’t get comfortable.
Everyone thinks we’re prescient … that we saw Trump coming in 2016 and moved to Europe. Alas, we are not prescient. We moved to the Netherlands because we sold a media company, and we’d enjoyed living in Europe back in the day. But we don’t assume we’re going to get to stay just because we’re here and avoiding the Trump madness. The far-right is emerging dominant across Europe and we might – in the great Jewish tradition – have to move on.
I’m not trying to discourage you. I’m trying to smarten you up. Because if you’re wondering why so many Jews didn’t flee Germany after Hitler took over, the reason is, it’s difficult and expensive.
Mark my words – Trump 2.0 will end badly as has everything he’s ever touched from $Trump cryptocurrency to Trump Airlines to Trump University to his multiple casino bankruptcies. Oh, and his first term as president, which saw an attack on the U.S. Capital as part of a coup. This time around, there are more unethical and unhinged people around him throwing elbows, so the interncine strife will be worse than anything America’s ever experienced since the Civil War.
If it gets as bad as I fear, will Europe keep saying “yes” to American refugees while blocking people from Africa, the Middle East and Asia?
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Read more here about moving to the Netherlands.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
