“The end of an American world” after Trump’s re-election to the White House, headlines a European publication

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The re-election of Donald Trump for a second term on Wednesday, November 6, and the success of the Republican Party, over which he took total control, represents a major turning point for the United States, Le Monde writes in an editorial.

This time, they made an informed decision. In 2016, when they first entrusted him with the White House, American voters did not know what a Donald Trump presidency would be like and were taking a leap into the unknown. In 2024, the situation is different: not only do Republican voters know their candidate, down to his least glorious behavior, but he is even more radical than he was eight years ago. Trump’s electorate knows where this president will take them, and they want more.

It is a reality that must be examined with eyes wide open. The path Trump, bolstered for a second term by his party’s success in the Senate, will take his country is a fundamental departure from the path the United States has taken since the end of World War II. It marks the end of an American era, that of an open superpower, committed to the world, eager to establish itself as a democratic model. It is the famous “shining city on a hill” praised by President Ronald Reagan. The model has been challenged over the past two decades. Now, Trump’s comeback puts a nail in the coffin.

Trump sees the world only through the prism of American national interests. It is a world of power struggles and trade wars that despises multilateralism. A world where transactional diplomacy replaces value-based alliances. A world, finally, where the US president reserves his harshest words for his allies but spares autocrats, who are seen as partners rather than adversaries.

Europe risks being fractured

Europeans rightly have bad memories of Trump’s first term. The second will be even more dangerous, with a war raging on their continent, initiated by a Russian power that disregards all its international obligations and is increasingly aggressive. If, as he threatened during the campaign, Trump ends military aid to Ukraine and negotiates peace with Vladimir Putin in favor of the invader, the consequences of such an outcome will go far beyond the fate of Ukraine. They will affect the security of the continent as a whole.

There is a real risk that Europe will be divided or even fractured by such a perspective. This threat is existential for the European Union, and its leaders must be aware of it and ready to face it, without waiting for Trump to take office – they are long overdue.

Trump’s victory at the end of a campaign of unprecedented populist, misogynist and racist virulence also bodes ill for women, immigrants and democracy in general. The 47th American president inherits a system that he began to implement when he was the 45th, a system in which the sacrosanct checks and balances, those safeguards that should protect American democratic institutions, are already weakened and in which the Supreme Court sided with him. He managed to play down the assault on the Capitol by the rioters he encouraged on January 6, 2021. The image of a head of the world’s first power who calls his opponents “enemies within”, considers some of them worthy of the firing squad, defames dissident media and threatening to send the military to hunt down illegal immigrants in Democratic cities can only embolden illiberal leaders around the world, including Europe.

Trump’s voters elected him knowingly, as did the business and technology leaders who rallied behind him in the footsteps of Elon Musk, the iconoclastic CEO turned gray eminence. The rest of the world will suffer, concludes the Le Monde editorial.