The great Trump delusion

So many in Europe believe America will eventually return to 'normal'; they're wrong

Germany’s general election is in full swing, and yet almost all the headlines over the past fortnight have revolved around one man over the sea. Much of the discourse revolves around how Europe can withstand the onslaught of Donald Trump. Underlying it is a hope, actually more of an assumption, that four years on, the US and the Transatlantic relationship will return to ‘normal’. All we have to do is ride it out.

This thinking is wrong-headed, as I’ve written for politico this week. I’ll be doing weekly commentaries during the course of the campaign. You can read the original here, or below.

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Berlin has no shortage of august surroundings for earnest conversations. And on the evening after the 47th U.S. president’s inauguration, I was in the imposing Wilhelm von Humboldt Hall of the State Library, listening to a discussion on the state of America over the past 60 years.

Every European country’s relationship with the U.S. has been of a different flavor. With France, it’s always been a prickly affair, while Britain’s is of the “please, tell us it’s still special” variety. Germany’s relationship with the U.S., however, is existential — which is why the country feels so bewildered and paralyzed by the return of a man who so proudly shatters all its established notions of how “the leader of the free world” should behave.

In 2019, one Germany’s leading policymakers Thomas Bagger laid all this out in an essay detailing the consequences of Trump 1.0 more vividly than anyone had before. He juxtaposed countries like France, with its traditions and strong sense of national interest, and Germany, which has nothing but its post-war principles to fall back on. And suddenly, all the democratic gains that started with the fall of the Berlin Wall were up for grabs.

“The Trump challenge goes much deeper than just policy disagreements — his approach pulls the rug from under the feet of German foreign policy thinking since the foundation of modern Germany in the late 1940s,” he wrote.

That was three years into a first term that saw Trump display an ostentatious loathing for then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He hadn’t gotten over the fact that Merkel, supremely popular as she was during her peak in the mid-2010s, was named TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year.” He found her deliberative form of politics anathema, while her refusal to disengage from Russian gas and call off the Nord Stream II pipeline, or to bring military spending up to the agreed 2 percent NATO target incurred his wrath — as did her embrace of more than one million migrants.

But that’s all over now. Merkel is no more — largely repudiated by her own Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and its leader Friedrich Merz, who is almost certain to become the next chancellor. But will that be enough to protect Germany from the havoc Trump 2.0 is likely to wreak?

Even amid a domestic election campaign, German media is fixated with all things Trump. Newspaper headlines follow his every step and each presidential decree, with commentaries ranging from nervousness and self-criticism to alarm and warnings of Armageddon. Then, as if they needed any convincing of the gravity of the situation, came tech billionaire Elon Musk’s (Nazi?) salute.

Meanwhile, the country’s politicians from across the political spectrum acknowledge that the only thing they can control is their own response to forces beyond their control — and yet, they’ve been unable to agree on what that should be.

Merz’s approach has been to try and hug Trump close. Dispatching one of his party’s most senior foreign policy figures to Washington for the inauguration, he sent the new president heartfelt congratulations in the form of a hand-written letter that described his election victory as “truly remarkable.”

Incumbent Chancellor Olaf Scholz has — as is the manner of the man — struck a grumpier note. ‘The U.S. is our closest ally outside Europe, and I will do everything for it to remain like that because it is in our mutual interest and … it is indispensable for peace and security around the globe,” he told the great and good (of the old-world order) gathered at the Davos World Economic Forum.

Calling for cool heads, Scholz noted that Trump would keep the world in suspense in all areas of policy. “We are able and will be dealing with this without any excitement and indignation, but also without fake cozying up and telling them what they want to hear,” he said.

Which is exactly the kind of language that Trump won’t want to hear.

Nor is the assessment of the German Ambassador to Washington Andreas Michaelis, whose five-page cable to Berlin, talking of “maximum disruption” in the new era of Trump, found its way into the public domain. “Fundamental democratic principles, along with checks and balances, will be largely undermined; the legislature, law enforcement and media will be robbed of their independence and misused as a political arm; and Big Tech will gain co-governing authority,” he wrote.

Idiosyncratically, senior civil servants are allowed to declare their party affiliation, and Michaelis — one of the country’s most experienced diplomats — is a Green, and an ally of outgoing Minister of Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock. Neither is known for mincing their words.

When asked about Michaelis’ report, Baerbock said the ambassador was merely doing his job and that Trump had already stated much of his agenda openly.

So, it seems Trump will likely loom large over each day of campaigning ahead of Germany’s election. As it stands, the CDU remains far in the lead, but there are tentative signs that the party’s margin is slightly fraying — and the beneficiaries may well be the far-right Alternative for Germany, which stands at a rock-solid 20 percent or just over. Curiously, Scholz’s Social Democrats are the ones now edging their way up the polls —not necessarily surprising given that four years ago, Scholz secured an unlikely victory by playing to Germans’ subconscious fear of change.

Back at the State Library, though, much of the talk was of the U.S. recovering after four years of tumult, just as it had done after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and the Vietnam War. It seems Germany’s perennial yearning for reassurance is still dominating discourse — but this time around, it’s likely to be in vain.