doThis time they made a conscious decision. In 2016, when he was first entrusted with the White House, American voters did not know what a Donald Trump presidency would be like and attempted to take a leap into the unknown. In 2024, the situation is different: Republican voters not only know their candidate perfectly, even for his less glorious behaviors, but he is even more radical than eight years ago. Donald Trump’s electorate knows where this president will take them and they want more.
This is an observation that should be examined with eyes wide open. The path that Donald Trump will take his country, strengthened for this second term by the success of his party in the Senate, fundamentally differs from that charted by the United States since the end of World War II. It is the end of an American cycle, that of an open superpower committed to the world, which wishes to establish itself as a democratic model – the famous “shining city on the hill” promoted by President Ronald Reagan. The model had already been undermined in the last two decades. The return of Donald Trump drives a nail into his coffin.
The world according to Donald Trump is a world that he sees through the exclusive prism of American national interests. A world of power struggles and trade wars, which despises multilateralism. A world where transactional diplomacy replaces value-based alliances. A world, finally, in which the president of the United States reserves his harshest words for his allies, but forgives autocrats, considered partners rather than adversaries.
Risk of fracture of Europe
Europeans rightly have bad memories of Trump’s first term. The second will be even more dangerous, in a context in which war is raging on its continent, waged by a Russian power that ignores all its international obligations and shows increasing aggressiveness. If, as he threatened during the campaign, Donald Trump suspends military aid to Ukraine and negotiates with Vladimir Putin a peace favorable to the invader, the consequences of such a result will go far beyond the fate of Ukraine: they will affect the entire security of the continent.
The risk of division, even fracture, of Europe in the face of such a prospect is real. This danger is existential for the European Union; Its leaders must realize this and prepare to confront it, without waiting for Donald Trump to take office; It’s time for them to do it.
Donald Trump’s victory at the end of a campaign of unprecedented populist, misogynistic and racist vitriol also bodes poorly for women, immigrants and democracy in general. 47my The president of the United States inherits a system that he began to implement when he was 45 years oldmya system in which the sacrosanct “checks and balances”These safeguards that are supposed to preserve American democratic institutions are already weakened and where the Supreme Court has been won over. He managed to trivialize the assault on the Capitol by the rioters he had encouraged on January 6, 2021. The image of a chief executive of the first world power who describes his opponents as“enemies from within”considers some of them worthy of execution, vilifies the dissident media and threatens to send the army to hunt down illegal immigrants in democratic cities can only encourage all the illiberal leaders on the planet, including Europe.
Donald Trump’s voters chose him with complete responsibility, as did the leaders of the business and high-tech world who supported him, following in the footsteps of Elon Musk, the iconoclastic boss who became an eminence grise. The rest of the world will suffer.
