US President Donald Trump has named Thomas Rose as ambassador to Poland.
Rose is a political commentator and entrepreneur who has on numerous occasions criticised the present Polish government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social on February 6: “Thomas is a highly respected businessman and commentator, who had a successful radio show on Sirius XM for almost a decade, and served as the Publisher and CEO of The Jerusalem Post.
“He will make sure our interests are represented in Poland, and always put America First.”
Rose responded in a post on X: “I am deeply honoured and profoundly humbled to be asked by our history-making POTUS to serve as Ambassador to Poland,” describing himself as “a not-so-secret agent of MAGA [Make America Great Again] Judeo-Christian Conspiracy”.
He is no stranger to Poland where in December 2024, he met the Conservative (PiS) aligned Polish President Andrzej Duda, whom he called “the greatest friend America has in the European Union”.
During Trump’s first term, the US President enjoyed close relations with Duda and Polish media has reported the two may meet in March. Trump may also attend Warsaw’s central and eastern European summit hosted by Duda in late April.
Rose said he believed Poland was facing a choice between a close alliance with the USA or the European Union.
On January 20, the day Trump was sworn in, he told Polish Conservative broadcaster wPolsce24 that at its coming presidential election in May, Poland had to decide if it “wants to move closer to the centre of power in the EU, or whether to remain a proud, sovereign country that fulfils its alliance obligations”.
Rose has in the past taken to X to criticize Tusk and his government for its position on issues such as the take-over of public media and its policies toward Israeli prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In January, Rose commented on the possibility that Poland could detain Netanyahu under an ICC warrant if he attended the ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
“Donald Tusk, be careful,” wrote Rose on X. “Threatening to arrest the Prime Minister of the Jewish State at Auschwitz, of all places, is not unnoticed by the USA. Poland deserves better!”
Later he congratulated Duda for successfully pressing Tusk to overturn that decision by writing on X that the Polish President had “prevented a rift in US-Polish relations”.
Rose has worked as a journalist, including a spell as the editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post from 1997 to 2005 and has previously served as a senior advisor to Mike Pence when the latter was vice-president during Trump’s first term.
He has also served in Indiana’s state government, worked as a journalist for Japanese television in the 1980s and authored the non-fiction book Big Miracle, which became a Hollywood film in 2012.
Of late, Rose has hosted a Conservative Bauer and Rose talk show on the SiriusXM satellite radio network and recently criticised the US Agency for International Development (USAID) as “the largest Democrat money-laundering operation in history”.
News of his nomination was welcomed by senior figures from the opposition PiS. Waldemar Buda, a former PiS government minister, declared Rose “a friend of Poland”. Former PiS party spokesperson Beata Mazurek warned that “Tusk’s regime will have a big problem” once the new ambassador is in place.
Grzegorz Schetyna, a senator with Tusk’s Civic Coalition and a former foreign minister, told commercial television Polsat News on February 7 that he hoped for a “new beginning” in Poland-US relations. He said he believed the new ambassador “will be pleasantly surprised at what he finds in Poland”.
Tusk’s party was close to the previous US ambassador Mark Brzeziński appointed under ex-US president Joes Biden. He spoke at a political event organised by the Civic Coalition during Poland’s parliamentary elections campaign in August 2023.
Brzeziński was reported by Polish media to have lobbied the State Department to back Tusk’s decision to put Polish commercial broadcaster TVN, which US company Discovery wanted to offload, on a list of strategic companies whose sale could be blocked by the government.