What will it mean for Europe when the new Trump regime takes power next week in Washington? The question brings to mind something that happened to me recently on Mount Athos, the isolated Orthodox monastic republic in Greece. The driver of our van stopped to pick up an elderly Russian hermit walking along the dirt path. When the hermit learned that several of us were American, he said, in thickly accented English, “Trump is hope!”
Traveling on the continent since the November U.S. election, I have met ordinary Europeans who all say, in one way or another, that the Trump victory gives them hope, at last, for real change in Europe.
Whatever happens in America eventually comes to Europe. Even in Budapest, a staunch holdout against globalist liberalism, in 2021, the left-wing mayor of one district erected a temporary statue of the criminal George Floyd. When asked by journalists what the purpose is, given that Hungary has almost no black people, she replied, as only a Western leftist can, that we all must be united against racism.
The late Czech novelist Milan Kundera, in his great novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, said that what makes a leftist a leftist is the ability to corral anything into the narrative of the Grand March—a parade through history towards ultimate liberation from oppression. This is the messianism of the Marxists, of course, but it is also a utopian creed believed by Western liberals, both of the Left and the Right. After all, what drove George W. Bush’s insane crusade against Iraq was, in large part, a sincere belief that liberal democracy is the final destination of all humankind.
The same utopianism has long guided the ruling classes on both sides of the Atlantic. Look at what the Davos elect—and more broadly, the utopian liberalism that is the spirit of the World Economic Forum—have done to us. Los Angeles is burning to the ground because they thought left-wing ideals could replace practical governance.
The Los Angeles Fire Department is led by a lesbian chief, who bragged about making diversity a top priority. Before the fire, another lesbian leader in the department boasted on social media about diversity in the department. She said that to a woman who would complain that female firefighters aren’t strong enough to carry her sick husband out of the flames, she (the lesbian firefighter) would respond, “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.”
Think about that: in order to sustain progressive idealism, we have to blame victims for their own suffering.
The same mentality is now exposed in Britain, where the ruling class for years blamed working-class white girls for their own rape and exploitation at the hands of Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs. They had to, in order to sustain the illusion that mass migration is good and that Diversity Is Our Strength™. Now everyone can see what an evil fraud that was. We can only hope that similar lustration happens on the European continent, as the media and establishment politicians lose their iron grip on controlling the narrative.
This is what Trump’s return to the White House could mean for Europe. In the U.S., the ruling class tried everything to destroy Trump’s candidacy—and failed. To the media and the establishment, to vote for Trump is to be a racist, a bigot, and probably a fascist. Most Americans ceased to be intimidated by the insults. Trump even gained a big share of the vote from ethnic minorities who were sick and tired of exhausted liberalism.
Europe, alas, has turned itself into an appendage of the American Empire. This is an appalling tragedy, but one that might turn out well for European national conservatives when the EU bureaucracy can no longer count on unquestioned support from Washington. Look for leaders like Viktor Orbán and Giorgia Meloni to rise in influence in Europe, precisely because they have the trust of Donald Trump.
Unlike 2017, when he first entered the White House, Trump returns to power facing an enfeebled and discredited liberal order, both in North America and in Europe. Now once-powerful European bureaucrats like former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton have been reduced to howling in interviews that the EU crushed the recent democratic election in Romania, and it will do so again if voters choose against Brussels’ interests. In order to save democracy, they have to destroy it: this is not the stance of a confident ruling-class mandarin.
Consider what’s happening in Germany. The German ruling class has made every effort to demonize the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party as neo-Nazi rabble. And yet, as the failures of that class cascade, destroying the German economy and wrecking German society with mass migration, the AfD gains support. German media, goose-stepping faithfully in the Grand March, blockade the AfD’s spokesmen—but thanks to Elon Musk, information finds its way to freedom.
Last week, Musk held an open conversation on X with AfD leader Alice Weidel. If the only thing you know about AfD comes through the establishment media, you would have expected her to be Eva Braun in a pantsuit. In fact, Weidel came across as … normal. She was funny, she was curious, and she was full of common sense.
Weidel’s interview gave lie to the hysterical claim by the ruling classes in Germany and elsewhere that the AfD is a fascist threat to German democracy. For the past three years, I have been trying to tell my fellow Americans that the Viktor Orbán they know from the media, and the actually existing Viktor Orban are very, very different. In 2021, the powerful media renegade Tucker Carlson broke the U.S. media embargo on Orbán. Now, Musk’s passion for free speech and basic political sanity threatens to do that for many politicians of the nationalist European Right.
No wonder the EU bureaucrats want to ban him, and the X platform. They will not succeed. Musk has the most powerful man in the world—the incoming U.S. president—on his side. If Brussels tries to silence Musk, there will be consequences.
True, there will be serious policy consequences for Europe, both economic and military, from the new Trump government. But it will have the biggest effect, I think, on Europe’s political culture. Europeans will be able to see not only the true measure of their governing class’s failures, but also that a real alternative is possible. Trump has learned from the way the Washington swamp blocked his initiatives in his first term, and will not make those mistakes again. Plus, the American people’s loss of confidence in their leaders and institutions gives Trump 2.0 a clear path for change.
It’s a small thing, but it says a lot: Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has turned on the Democratic establishment, which exhorted control on Facebook to maintain the official COVID narrative. Recently, Zuckerberg ordered tampon machines to be taken out of men’s bathrooms in all of Meta’s offices. Commenter Richard Hanania said,
This is like pulling down the statue of Saddam. Now you know wokeness is dead.
This sea change may take some time to come to Europe, but come, it will. The Grand Marchers of Brussels and other European capitals will not be stopped in their tracks soon. But now, at last, there is real hope that they will be stopped.
This might be the last chance Europe has to save itself from the ruin its post-1960s leaders have brought. Nobody could have imagined that a vulgar, orange billionaire from New York and an anti-woke South African immigrant in Silicon Valley might be the champions Europe needs to find its own courage and Make Europe Great Again. But then again, despite the false faith of the left-wing ideologues and their bureaucracies, the march of history follows no predictable path.