Unpopular view: The EU trade deal is much better for Europe than what’s being reported by pundits who don’t know what they’re talking about. While leaders in Berlin and Paris play angry for the cameras, von der Leyen takes the political heat — because Brussels knows the real game is played in footnotes. Trump’s trade team is a one-pager crew. The EU expects to eat them alive in the bureaucratic details. Now that the deal is off Trump’s desk, Brussels is gearing up to sneak everything from quotas to exemptions into the final version. This is the arena where the EU dominates — and they know it.

The issue for the US is that when they negotiate with hundreds of counterparts at once, the counterparts will win the battle for details in all of the deals, as the US trade team does not stand a chance of being as well-prepared for the bureaucratic battle as their counterparts, who only have a single deal to focus on.