'Danish Viking blood is boiling.' Danes boycott US goods with fervor as others in Europe do so too

Ivan Hansen, a retired Danish police officer, loaded up his basket at the supermarket, carefully checking each product to avoid buying anything made in the United States. No more Coca-Cola, no more California Zinfandel wine or almonds.

The 67-year-old said it's the only way he knows to protest U.S. President Donald Trump's policies. He's furious about Trump's threat to seize the Danish territory of Greenland, but it's not just that. There are also the threats to take control of the Panama Canal and Gaza. And Trump's relationship with Elon Musk, who has far-right ties and made what many interpreted as a straight-armed Nazi salute.

On his recent shopping trip, Hansen returned home with dates from Iran. It shocked him to realize that he now perceives the United States as a greater threat than Iran.

“Trump really looks like a bully who tries in every way to intimidate, threaten others to get his way," he told The Associated Press. “I will fight against that kind of thing.”

Hansen is just one supporter of a growing movement across Europe and Canada to boycott U.S. products. People are joining Facebook groups where they exchange ideas about how to avoid U.S. products and find alternatives. Feelings are especially strong across the Nordic region — and very possibly strongest in Denmark given Trump's threats to seize Greenland.

Google trends showed a spike in searches for the term “Boycott USA,” and “Boycott America,” as Trump announced new tariffs, with the top regions including Denmark, Canada and France. At the same time, a global backslash is also building against Tesla as the brand becomes tied to Trump, with plunging sales in Europe and Canada. In Germany, police were investigating after four Teslas were set on fire Friday.

Elsebeth Pedersen, who lives in Faaborg on the Danish island of Funen, just bought a car and made a point of not even looking at U.S.-made options.

“Before Elon Musk started to act like a maniac a Tesla could have been an option. And maybe a Ford,” she said.

French entrepreneur Romain Roy said his solar panel firm has bought a new Tesla fleet each year since 2021 but canceled its order for another 15 to take a stand against Musk's and Trump’s policies.

Describing the United States as “a country closing in on itself,” he cited Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and Musk’s arm gestures. He said he was instead buying European models, even though it would cost an additional 150,000 euros ($164,000).

“Individual consumers, society, our countries, Europe must react,” he told broadcaster Sud Radio.

Responding to consumer demand, Denmark’s largest supermarket chain, the Salling Group, created a star-shaped label this month to mark European-made goods sold in its stores. CEO Anders Hagh said it's not a boycott, but a response to consumers demanding a way to easily avoid American products.

“Our stores will continue to have brands on the shelves from all over the world, and it will always be up to customers to choose. The new label is only an additional service for customers who want to buy goods with European labels,” he said in a LinkedIn post.

For Bo Albertus, "when Trump went on television and said he would by political force or military force take a piece of the Danish kingdom, it was just too much for me.”

The 57-year-old said he felt powerless and had to do something. He has given up Pepsi, Colgate toothpaste, Heinz ketchup and California wine, and replaced them with European products.

He is now an administrator of the Danish Facebook page “Boykot varer fra USA” (Boycott goods from the U.S.), which has swelled to over 80,000 members.

“Drink more champagne,” one user posted after Trump threatened 200% tariffs on EU wine and Champagne.

Albertus, a school principal, told the AP he really misses the strong taste of Colgate. But he's been pleasantly surprised at finding a cola replacement that is half the price of Pepsi.

Trump's policies have “brought the Danish Viking blood boiling,” said Jens Olsen, an electrician and carpenter. He is now considering replacing $10,000 worth of U.S.-made DeWalt power tools even though it will cost him a lot.

He has already found European replacements for an American popcorn brand and California-made Lagunitas IPA beer, which he calls “the best in the world.”

“I’ve visited the brewery several times, but now I don’t buy it anymore,” he said. He has mixed feelings because he is a dual Danish-U.S. citizen, and has spent a lot of time in the United States. But he can't contain his anger.

“I’m 66 years old and I have never seen the Danes so upset before,” he said.

Michael Ramgil Stæhr has canceled a fall trip to the U.S. and is among many choosing to buy Danish instead of American-made, though he cannot pinpoint the exact moment he made the decision.

“Maybe it was when (Trump) announced to the world press that he intended to ‘take’ Greenland and the Panama Canal, and if necessary by military force. That and the gangster-like behavior towards the Ukrainian president in the White House,” the 53-year-old Copenhagen resident said.

“The man is deadly dangerous and is already costing lives” in the developing world and Ukraine, added Stæhr, who works helping disabled war veterans, many of whom got injured serving alongside U.S. troops in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. He himself served in Bosnia.

Edouard Roussez, a farmer from northern France, launched an online group, “Boycott USA, Buy French and European!” that in just two weeks has attracted over 20,000 members on Facebook.

Roussez believes a boycott of U.S. companies is a good way to express opposition to Trump’s policies, especially “the commercial and ideological war” he believes Trump is waging against Europe.

“First of all, these are the companies that financed Donald Trump’s campaign,” he said on state-owned LCP television channel. “I’m thinking of Airbnb, I’m thinking of Uber, I’m thinking of Tesla of course.”

The irony of it all? The group is on Facebook. Roussez said only the American online social media platform gave him the reach he needed. But he's working to migrate the group to other platforms with no U.S. funding or capital.

As for any impact on U.S. export profits or policymaking, that's unlikely, said Olof Johansson Stenman, a professor of economics at the University of Gothenburg.

The boycott could have a psychological effect on Americans who see the scale of anger, but “some may also say, ‘We don’t like these Europeans anyway,’” Stenman said.

Simon Madsen, 54, who lives in the Danish city of Horsens with his wife and 13-year-old twins, says the family has given up Pringles, Oreos and Pepsi Max. Not so hard, really.

But now they're discussing doing without Netflix, and that is a step too far for the kids.

He also wonders whether he should keep buying Danish-made Anthon Berg chocolate marzipan bars, which are made with American almonds.

It's important, he said, for people to use the power of the purse to pressure companies to change.

“It’s the only weapon we’ve got,” he said.

AP writers Stefanie Dazio in Berlin, John Leicester and Samuel Petrequin in Paris, and Laurie Kellman in London contributed.

BBQ products with and without the star mark in Bilka in Randers, Denmark, making it easier for customers to buy European goods, Monday, March 17, 2025. (Bo Amstrup/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)

Fruit with and without the star-mark in Bilka in Randers, Denmark, making it easier for customers to buy European goods, Monday, March 17, 2025. (Bo Amstrup/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)

A burnt-out Tesla car stands in the Steglitz district of Berlin, Friday, March 14, 2025, as four Teslas are suspected to have been set on fire in Berlin last night. (Christophe Gateau/dpa via AP)

A burnt-out Tesla car stands in the Steglitz district of Berlin, Friday, March 14, 2025, as four Teslas are suspected to have been set on fire in Berlin last night. (Christophe Gateau/dpa via AP)

A star-labeled price tag for snacks in Bilka in Randers, Denmark, making it easier for customers to buy European goods, Monday, March 17, 2025. (Bo Amstrup/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)

Dried fruit with the star labeling in Bilka in Randers, Denmark, making it easier for customers to buy European goods, Monday, March 17, 2025. (Bo Amstrup/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)

A sign in Bilka supermarket in Randers, Denmark, reads: ''Now it's star-clear whether the label is European. The choice is yours, but we've made it easier for you to shop European: Look for the star on the price tag to see if the label is owned by a company in Europe. And don't worry, we still have plenty of labels from the rest of the world.'', Monday, March 17, 2025. (Bo Amstrup/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)

Spirits with and without the star mark in Bilka in Randers, Denmark, making it easier for customers to buy European goods, Monday, March 17, 2025. (Bo Amstrup/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)

A key adviser warned President John F. Kennedy after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 that the agency behind it, the CIA, had grown too powerful. He proposed giving the State Department control of “all clandestine activities” and breaking up the CIA.

The page of Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s memo outlining the proposal was among the newly public material in documents related to Kennedy's assassination released this week by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. So, too was Schlesinger's statement that 47% of the political officers in U.S. embassies were controlled by the CIA.

Some readers of the previously withheld material in Schlesinger's 15-page memo view it as evidence of both mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA and a reason the CIA at least would not make Kennedy's security a high priority ahead of his assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. That gave fresh attention Thursday to a decades-old theory about who killed JFK — that the CIA had a hand in it.

Some Kennedy scholars, historians and writers said they haven't yet seen anything in the 63,000 pages of material released under an order from President Donald Trump that undercuts the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old Marine and onetime defector to the Soviet Union, was a lone gunman. But they also say they understand why doubters gravitate toward the theory.

“You have this young, charismatic president with so much potential for the future, and on the other side of the scale, you have this 24-year-old waif, Oswald, and it doesn't balance. You want to put something weightier on the Oswald side,” said Gerald Posner, whose book, “Case Closed,” details the evidence that Oswald was a lone gunman.

Critics of the Oswald-acted-alone conclusion had predicted that previously unreleased material would bolster their positions. One of them, Jefferson Morley, the editor of the JFK Facts blog, said Thursday that newly public material is important to “the JFK case.” Morley is vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination.

Morley said that even with the release of 63,000 pages this week, there is still more unreleased material, including 2,400 files that the FBI said it discovered after Trump issued his order in January and material held by the Kennedy family.

Kennedy was killed on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer broadcast live on television.

“It was the first big event that led to a series of events involving conspiracy theories that have left Americans believing, almost permanently, that their government lies to them so often they shouldn’t pay close attention,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century"

Morley said Schlesinger's memo provides the “origin story” of mutual mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA.

Kennedy had inherited the Bay of Pigs plan from his predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower, and had been in office less than three months when the operation launched in April 1961 as a covert invasion to topple Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Schlesinger's memo was dated June 30, 1961, a little more than two months later.

Schlesinger told Kennedy that all covert operations should be cleared with the U.S. State Department instead of allowing the CIA to largely present proposed operations almost as accomplished tasks. He also said in some places, such as Austria and Chile, far more than half the embassies' political officers were CIA-controlled.

Ronald Neumann, former US ambassador to Afghanistan, Algeria and Bahrain, said most American diplomats now are “non-CIA,” and in most places, ambassadors do not automatically defer to the CIA.

“CIA station chiefs also have an important function for ambassadors, because the station chief is usually the senior intelligence officer at a post," Neumann said, adding that ambassadors see a CIA station chiefs as providing valuable information.

But he noted: “If you get into the areas where we were involved in covert operations in supporting wars, you’re going to have a different picture. You’re going to have a picture which will differ from a normal embassy and normal operations.”

Schlesinger's memo ends with a previously redacted page that spells out a proposal to give control of covert activities to the State Department and to split the CIA into two agencies reporting to separate undersecretaries of state. Morley sees it as a response to Kennedy's anger over the Bay of Pigs and something Kennedy was seriously contemplating.

The plan never came to fruition.

Sabato said that Kennedy simply “needed the CIA” in the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies like Cuba, and a huge reorganization would have hindered intelligence operations. He also said the president and his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, wanted to oust Castro before JFK ran for reelection in 1964.

“Let’s remember that a good percentage of the covert operations were aimed at Fidel Castro in Cuba,” Sabato said.

Timothy Naftali, an adjunct professor at Columbia University who is writing a book about JFK’s presidency, discounts the idea of tensions between the president and the CIA lasting until Kennedy's death. For one thing, he said, the president used covert operations “avidly.”

“I find that the more details we get on that period, the more it appears likely that the Kennedy brothers were in control of the intelligence community,” Naftali said. “You can you can see his imprint. You can see that there is a system by which he is directing the intelligence community. It's not always direct, but he’s directing it.”

Associated Press writer David Collins in Hartford Connecticut, contributed to this report.

FILE - Secret servicemen standing on running boards follow the presidential limousine carrying President John F. Kennedy, right, rear seat, and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, left, as well as Texas Gov. John Connally and his wife, Nellie, in Dallas, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963. (AP Photo/Jim Altgens, File)

FILE - In this Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, the limousine carrying mortally wounded President John F. Kennedy races toward the hospital seconds after he was shot in Dallas. (AP Photo/Justin Newman, File)

FILE - Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Harvard University historian and President John F. Kennedy's former personal assistant, holds a brief lecture as his book "A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House" was presented to Italian public on Jan. 24, 1966 in Rome. Sitting at left is Italian journalist and author Luigi Barzini Jr. who introduced Schlesinger to the audience. (AP Photo/Gianni Foggia, File)

FILE - This Nov. 22, 1963 file photo shows President John F. Kennedy riding in motorcade with first lady Jacqueline Kenndy in Dallas, Texas. (AP Photo, file)