By Le Monde
This time the choice was made consciously. In 2016, when they first took Donald Trump to the White House, American voters did not know what a presidency led by him would bring. They made a leap into the unknown. In 2024, the situation is different: not only did Republican voters know their candidate well, including his worst behaviors, but they knew he had become even more radical than eight years ago. Donald Trump’s electorate knows where this president will take them and has pushed him in this direction. This is a truth that must be analyzed with open eyes.
The path in which Donald Trump, who feels even stronger in this second term thanks to the success of his party in the Senate, will lead his country, on a path profoundly opposite to the one that the United States has followed since the end of World War II. This is the end of an American cycle, that of an open and engaged superpower to the world, ready to serve as a democratic model – of a “shining city on a hill”, as President Ronald Reagan boasted.
This model had already weakened over the past two decades. The return of Donald Trump has put the final nail on his tombstone. The world according to Donald Trump is a world that he sees only through the prism of American national interests. A world of power relations and trade wars that despises multilateralism. A world where transactional diplomacy replaces value-based alliances. A world, moreover, where the president of the United States reserves his harshest words for his allies, while favoring autocrats, whom he considers partners, not adversaries.
Europeans rightly have a bad memory of Trump’s first term. The second mandate will be even more dangerous, in a context where the war is taking place on their continent, a war declared by a Russian power, which ignores all its international commitments and is showing an increasing aggressiveness. If, as he has threatened during the campaign, Donald Trump cuts off military aid to Ukraine and negotiates with Vladimir Putin a peace that favors the occupier, the consequences of such an outcome will go far beyond the fate of Ukraine alone: they will affect the entire security of the continent. The risk of division, even of the disintegration of Europe in the face of such a perspective, is real. This risk is existential for the European Union. Its leaders, who have been delayed for a long time, should understand this and prepare to face it, without waiting for the start of Donald Trump’s term.
His victory, after a campaign filled with populism, misogyny and unparalleled racism, is also a bad sign for women, for immigrants and for democracy in general. The 47th president of the United States is reclaiming a system he began to build as the 45th president, a system where the sacred “checks and balances” mechanism that should protect American democratic institutions is now has weakened and where the Supreme Court has submitted to him. He has managed to trivialize the attack on the Capitol by the mobs he encouraged on January 6, 2021.
The image of a chief executive of the world’s biggest power, who calls his opponents “internal enemies”, saying some should be executed by firing squad, who attacked the independent media or threatened to send in the army to go after illegal immigrants in democratic cities, it can be an encouragement to all the illiberal leaders of the planet, including those in Europe. Donald Trump’s voters chose him consciously, as did the business and high-tech leaders who joined him on the campaign trail, following in the footsteps of Elon Musk, the iconic boss turned his gray eminence. But the rest of the world will face the consequences of the result on November 6.
