Barely two weeks have been enough for the whole world to come to wonder whether Donald Trump will be able to see out the four years of his presidential term of office. Two short weeks have been long enough to realise that, though he has become the president, he remains the reality TV showman and is still the same person who stated in his 2004 book, “How to get rich: Big deals from the star of the Apprentice”: “Sometimes people are surprised how quickly I make big decisions, but I’ve learned to trust my instincts and not to overthink things. The day I realised it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience”. The experience is no less unfathomable today for the American citizens who, shocked and often appalled, are getting to know the unstable personage who has been elected to the White House and the immoderate flourish with which he signs the battery of executive orders that his instinct leads him to make.
But this doesn’t only concern American nationals, or just the Muslims from those countries which Donald Trump sees as hotbeds of terrorism – conveniently ignoring other countries every bit as suspect but where the businesses of what he claims to be his “previous life” are located. It concerns the whole world and first and foremost the European Union which finds itself held in disdain by Trump and the rag-tag band that surrounds him. The diplomatic clown whom the White House proposes to send to Brussels as its ambassador cannot wait, in his greedy anticipation, to see the EU suffer the same fate as the erstwhile Soviet Union and the eurozone disintegrating even faster. Here is proof, if proof were needed, that Nigel Farage is the most feted “European” in Washington.
While President Donald Tusk was perfectly correct to see the statements coming out of the United States as “worrying” (see EUROPE 11715), why did he not suggest in his letter inviting the twenty seven heads of state and/or government to the informal meeting in Malta that the credentials submitted by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch be disdainfully refused by the whole Union or by one or other of its member states? Some will no doubt object that realpolitik often causes institutions to little consider matters of dignity. They should be quiet because this is the dignity of European citizens and of the integration project that has been backed by generations since the start of the 1950s that is being offended.
In reality, at a time when, according to Joschka Fischer, “the United States and the United Kingdom are abandoning the liberal world order of free trade and collective security” (Alternatives Economiques, 26 January), the Union, its states and its citizens need to man the barricades, adopting the motto of the Netherlands: I will maintain”. Citizens and those who claim to speak in their name must state their determination to uphold their values no matter what. The time has come to look reality in the face: “Trump stands for over-exaggerated individual brazenness”, observes French philosopher Marcel Gauchet, stating immediately: “Behind radical individualism lurks radical authoritarianism” (Le Monde, 27 January).
This is where we are, all of us, not just the United States. Orban, Kaczynski, Fico, Erdogan, Putin (and next, Le Pen and Wilders – who knows?) are all, in their way, the products of a societal malaise that is rocking democracies. It is important, then, that we address without further delay what Gauchet describes as “the main weakness in our democracies at the present time: Democracy is taken for granted and no further thought is given to it”.
According to a survey in France, the poor, those who find themselves excluded, the vulnerable, the middle classes who have been left worse off, all those who say they are having difficulty making ends meet are likely to vote overwhelmingly for Marine Le Pen in the presidential elections (Le Monde, 29-30 January). This is a state of affairs that holds true for more than just France. European democrats, both leaders and citizens, need to wake up give careful thought to it. Urgent consideration is required, then – as Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström belatedly agrees – in how to “protect the losers from globalisation” (Le Monde, 31 January).
It goes without saying that Trump is not the example to follow to contain the popular protest that is swelling throughout the Western world. The newly elected American president, on the contrary, has all the makings of a scarecrow who is sufficiently scary for the vultures circling around Europe perhaps not to be frightened but at least to be forced to realise that they face strong reaction from all those who cherish democracy above all.
The time has indeed come, as President Tusk wrote to his colleagues, for the Union to take “assertive and spectacular steps” to lift European integration to a higher level. The time has come to remind the leaders of the member states of the Union, those princes who claim to speak on behalf of the people, that most definitely citizens do not want to “return to the provincialism of narrow horizons”, that most citizens know that they have, as Jacques Attali wrote, “the opportunity to build a great nation, a democratic, sovereign nation, as large as its main rivals”.
The time has come to point out to them that listening only to the minority who dream of having their own Trump would be more than a mistake made in the name of sanctified and outdated sovereignties – it would be a mistake that will leave an indelible mark on history! The time has come to point out to them that, while the first cuckoo is not necessarily the harbinger of spring, how welcome that a vulture might be.
Michel Theys