The end of an American world

This time, they made an informed decision. In 2016, when they first entrusted him with the White House, American voters didn’t know what a Donald Trump presidency would be like and were taking a leap into the unknown. In 2024, the situation is different: Not only do Republican voters know their candidate inside out, right down to his least glorious behavior, he’s even more radical than he was eight years ago. Trump’s electorate knows where this president is going to take them, and wants more.

It’s a reality that needs to be examined with eyes wide open. The path on which Trump, strengthened for his second term by his party’s success in the Senate, will take his country diverges fundamentally from the one charted by the United States since the end of the Second World War. It marks the end of an American era, that of an open superpower committed to the world, eager to set itself up as a democratic model. It’s the famous “shining city on a hill,” extolled by President Ronald Reagan. The model had been challenged over the past two decades. Now, Trump’s return is putting a nail in its coffin.

Trump views the world solely through the prism of American national interests. It’s a world of power struggles and trade wars, which scorns multilateralism. A world where transactional diplomacy replaces value-based alliances. A world, ultimately, where the US president reserves his harshest words for his allies but spares the autocrats, who are seen as partners rather than adversaries.

Europe at risk of fracturing

Europeans rightly have bad memories of the first Trump term. The second will be even more perilous, with war raging on their continent, initiated by a Russian power that flouts all its international obligations and is increasingly aggressive. If, as he threatened during the campaign, Trump ceases military aid to Ukraine and negotiates peace with Vladimir Putin in favor of the invader, the consequences of such an outcome will go far beyond the fate of Ukraine alone. They will affect the continent’s security as a whole.

There is a real risk that Europe will be divided or even fractured by such a prospect. This threat is existential for the European Union, and its leaders need to be aware of it and prepared to confront it, without waiting for Trump to take office – they are long overdue.

Trump’s victory at the end of a campaign of unprecedented populist, misogynist and racist virulence also bodes ill for women, immigrants and democracy in general. The 47^th American president inherits a system he began to put in place when he was the 45^th, one in which the sacrosanct checks and balances, those safeguards supposed to preserve American democratic institutions, are already weakened, and in which the Supreme Court has gone over to his side. He succeeded in downplaying the assault on the Capitol by rioters he encouraged on January 6, 2021. The image of a head of the world’s leading power who calls his opponents “enemies from within,” deems some of them worthy of the firing squad, vilifies dissident media and threatens to send the army to hunt down illegal immigrants in Democratic cities can only encourage illiberal leaders the world over, including in Europe.

Trump’s voters chose him in full consciousness, as did the business and tech leaders who rallied behind him, following in the footsteps of Elon Musk, the iconoclastic CEO turned eminence grise. The rest of the world will suffer.