At the European Commission headquarters, the “Trump task force” is hard at work drawing up contingency plans for a US-EU trade war and Washington cancelling aid for Ukraine.

Officially, they are preparing for all scenarios, including a Kamala Harris victory.

But, after crisis meetings with ambassadors from the 27 member states, no one in Brussels is losing sleep over a Democrat victory.

“If it is Harris, we don’t think a lot will change. If it is Donald Trump, then we will get a cold shower,” an EU official told the Telegraph.

“A Trump victory is going to be a very brutal shock for Europe,” said Anthony Gardner, who was Barack Obama’s ambassador to the US from 2014 to 2017.

Heather Grabbe, a senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels, said: “Nobody is ready for Trump because he’s so unpredictable.”

Lord Darroch, the UK ambassador to the US from 2016 to 2019, when Trump first entered the White House, said: “He really doesn’t like the EU; he once said publicly that ‘the EU is worse than China’.

“There is a real risk, I think, that if Trump is elected and introduces the tariffs he is promising, we’ll see counter-tariffs from the EU and China, escalation, and a trade war,” Lord Darroch, who is also a former British ambassador to the EU, added.