Europe moves on as Trump's return unsettles trust in US democracy
Rafael Behr argues that rebuilding European trust in the United States will take decades, after voters returned Donald Trump to the White House four years after his defeat.
Europe's trust in the United States may take decades to rebuild, according to the Guardian columnist Rafael Behr, after American voters returned Donald Trump to the presidency four years after he left office. The argument is that the problem goes beyond the outcome of one election: a country that removed Trump once has since reinstated him, and European governments are adjusting their outlook accordingly.
When Joe Biden entered the White House in 2021, it was possible to believe that Trump's time in power had been an aberration. Shortly after winning the 2020 race, Biden told relieved European leaders that America was back and that the transatlantic alliance was back too. Behr writes that this was true, but not for long. Trump's defeat showed that US democracy was mechanically operational rather than culturally robust, because his supporters tried violent subversion to prevent the inauguration of a successor.
Behr contends that a second Trump term should have been unthinkable, and that Republicans who failed to denounce the January 6 insurrection should have been unelectable. Instead, within four years, US voters reinstated the champion of a failed coup against what Behr describes as their cherished constitution as commander-in-chief. For European observers, that sequence has reshaped expectations of American political stability and of the reliability of US commitments abroad.
Behr also notes that the column was published in the Guardian's commentary section, where readers were invited to respond with letters of up to 300 words. The piece is framed as an opinion rather than reporting, and its central judgement is that the question is no longer only whether US democracy can be salvaged. Behr's point is that Europe is already acting as though the transatlantic relationship will be shaped by a recurring American political shock.
A separate commentary carried in the Daily Mirror, under a headline suggesting that any Republican defeat in the midterms would be entirely Trump's fault, offers a complementary view of the domestic picture. It says Trump has urged his MAGA base to behave as if he were on the ballot, because turnout among low-propensity voters has been dramatically higher in past elections when he was a candidate. In this cycle, that approach has not helped and may even have hurt Republican prospects.
Taken together, the two pieces describe a political landscape in which Trump remains the dominant figure both in mobilising his supporters and in the calculations of European capitals. Where Behr focuses on the long-term damage to trust, the Mirror commentary concentrates on the short-term electoral dynamics of the midterms, and the two angles reinforce one another: a leader whose presence drives turnout in his own favour is also the figure whose conduct has changed how allies judge American institutions.
Source: theguardian.com
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