Cas Mudde
It was always going to be this way. Whatever Donald Trump ended up actually doing on his trip, Europe was going to go wild. Turns out, he did a lot. He gave incoherent interviews, offended hosts, told his usual (as well as some new) lies, and, of course, played golf at one of his shamelessly promoted businesses. The Guardian called it “the visit from hell”. As Trump was telling everyone within earshot that the British people loved him, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in central London to protest against his visit. Many demonstrators at the “Stop Trump” protest took great pains to emphasise that they loved the US, but hated Trump. Like the European leaders at the Nato summit a few days before, they insist on a strong separation between the country, as well as its people, and its leader. Still utterly confused by the new reality, they continue to hope that the US will come to its senses once the American people see how incompetent and unpopular Trump is. But I have bad news for them: Trump’s “visit from hell” will not hurt him at home.
Study after study has shown Americans determine their voting behaviour (exclusively) on the basis of domestic issues
The fact that almost every single European leader, from the British prime minister, Theresa May, to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, disagreed with Trump on some fundamental issue will help rather than hurt him with his base. To the Trump supporter, it proves that he is different from “them”, ie the globalist elite. It shows them that Trump puts “America First!” and does not care what other countries think – another thing he has in common with his base.
Many people will have seen the Nato summit photograph in which all the other leaders look to the left and only Trump looks to the right. When I tweeted that image, both opponents and supporters interpreted the picture as the perfect illustration of the schism between Trump and European leaders – although some claimed, as is to be expected these days, that it was #FakeNews. But where most Trump opponents saw a US president out of touch with the rest of the world, making fun of him for not knowing right from left (or referring to the famous eclipse picture), his supporters saw a king, who chooses his own way, standing apart from the lemmings who follow each other into an apocalypse.
While Trump’s isolation might mainly play to his relatively narrow base, his critique of Nato allies touches a much bigger nerve. Few share Trump’s view of Nato as a kind of mafioso protection racket, but many Americans, including foreign policy experts, have long been frustrated over the low defence budgets of many European member states. Moreover, Republicans have long seen Nato in much less favourable terms than Democrats. In fact, last year only a minority of Republicans (47%) had a favourable view of the organisation.
But the frustration is not limited to the Republicans. President Barack Obama regularly complained about “free riders” in the transatlantic alliance. Although the recently increased contributions predate Trump’s presidency, and there is still debate about what individual Nato members promised at the summit, Trump is already claiming victory. And he even finds cheerleaders within hawkish liberal circles, such as the New York Times, which wrote an editorial proclaiming, “Trump got from Nato everything Obama ever asked for.”
But the key reason why Trump’s European visit will not hurt him at the polls is that foreign policy is largely irrelevant to Americans. Like their president, they don’t know much about the rest of the world, and they don’t care much about it either. Study after study has shown that, despite presidential candidates spending quite a lot of time talking about foreign policy, Americans determine their voting behaviour (exclusively) on the basis of domestic issues.
The last week once again showed that Europe understands neither Trump nor the United States. Europeans see Trump as an aberration, whose policies are not just out of touch with their own priorities and values, but also with those of the majority of Americans. They feel strengthened by US foreign policy elites, who for decades have made policies without much public input or scrutiny. A good example is Robert Kagan, who in a series of recent columns in the Washington Post has decried the decline of the “liberal world order”. As liberals enthusiastically retweet his columns, they should remember that Kagan was one of the prominent neoconservatives behind the foreign policy of George W Bush’s administration, which for eight years ignored or undermined that same liberal world order in support of another American First ideology.
Trump is certainly a different political leader and US president. His style is unique, but he mainly says out loud, and more vulgarly, what many Americans, including political elites, think in private. America First has always been the motto of US foreign policy, even if previous presidents believed this was better achieved through a (US-dominated) liberal world order. The sooner Europeans come to turns with that, and start planning for a future without US dominance, the better.
Cas Mudde is a Guardian US columnist
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