It comes to me every now and again. I’m ashamed of it because it’s a really twisted and totally unholy idea, but here it is. I am thinking to myself: if Trump were to be re-elected, massively, clearly, indisputably, it would actually come with many advantages.
Don’t stop reading, don’t break your screen, don’t trample your newspaper! I haven’t gone crazy or become extreme right-wing. I simply want to say, first of all, that the United States would thus avoid an institutional blockage that could lead to a civil war because, if Biden should win, Donald Trump would never accept his defeat. For months now, he has been explaining that the postal vote will cause massive fraud and that the real results will never be known.
He will forget about all this if he wins, but, in case he is disowned by the voters, he would use what he sowed in order to proclaim himself re-elected, he would refuse to quit the White House, and would throw so many firebombs that in the end he would leave the country so drunk with resentment that it would be very difficult to reunite it and to avoid an explosion of political violence.
That America would be a royal present to Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin, to all the regional troublemakers and to all the ideologues of the decline of democracy. Just think for a second of the happiness of all these people to see the United States stranded on the sand, and you will share all the more my unspeakable thoughts, given that the American counter-powers are still strong enough to hold out for another four years against Trump, and that for the European Union, well…
Let’s put it this way.
Without Trump, the taboos which are the European Defence and the common industrial policy would not have fallen down so quickly. All it took was one term of office for this man to assert himself to be the re-founding father of Europe, the man without whom, Covid or not, the new Commission would not have labeled itself “geopolitical” and the Member States would have taken well over four days to break a third taboo, the taboo of common loans for the financing of common investments.
So remove Trump, replace him with a Democrat as reassuring as Joe Biden, and you will hear many capitals explain immediately that the American withdrawal was only a moment of aberration and that the return to transatlantic normality exempts the Europeans from the adventure of a Common Defence, so costly and capable of precipitating the Union into the federal “abyss” so quickly.
I was dwelling on these bad thoughts again last night but, now that I have put them into form, subject, verb, complement: no! They are only nocturnal lapses because the reality is quite different.
Mr. Trump is a provocative braggart, and anything but a brave one at that. The fear of prison and of the massive outpour of hidden secrets that his trial would provoke will soon dissuade him from going too far in sedition. He would finally bow to his defeat and instead of having four more years of incitement to racial conflict, of connivance with dictators, of dismantling the Atlantic Alliance, of global incompetence, of shameless lies, of appointing reactionary judges and of daily vulgarity, we would have the return of America, the true one, which is inventive, committed to its principles, democratic, and a faithful ally of the European democracies.
I don’t know about you, but I, all things considered, prefer the risk of contesting the results to the risk of re-electing this unsavoury outgoing candidate who has already done so much harm to the world and to his country, but …
No, it’s not the way you think. I won’t go back to my bad reasoning that I began with, but the problem is that there is little reason to believe in the return of the real America, the one we loved so much, the one of Roosevelt, of the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, of the election of Obama and of the protection of Europe throughout the Cold War.
The pivot to Asia dates not from Donald Trump but from the second term of George W. Bush. The disengagement from the Middle East goes back to Barack Obama’s refusal to go and destroy Bashar al-Assad’s air force after he had, for the first time, resorted to chemical weapons. The break-up of the American society, above all, is the result of a slow process that began in the 1960s with the dread that feminism, the decline of segregation, and the rise of Hispanic immigration provoked in the more conservative half of the country, which Donald Trump was so good at heralding.
The American crisis is still in its infancy, as this break with the sixties was deepened by the globalization of trade and the deindustrialization it had induced. One part of America wants its revenge, and if Donald Trump, who was once a Democrat, now embodies the Republican right, it is because the extreme right is not at all marginal anymore in the United States.
It is with a polarized country, turned in on itself and obsessed with its rivalry with China, that we Europeans will have to deal with anyway. With Trump, the hope is that we will definitively choose the affirmation of the Union as a sovereign actor on the international scene. With Biden, the advantage is that we could do so not by renouncing a deficient alliance but by negotiating, among allies, a new distribution of responsibilities within the framework of a redefinition of Atlantic solidarity. See you in seven weeks.
