Mort Rosenblum: Europe views America with pity and contempt

and analysis of the writer:

AMPUS, France — “He’s gone nuts,” Jenny the baker-philosopher told me, describing her take on Donald Trump while politely not adding what her face plainly expressed. She now thinks the same about the country that elected him.

I’ve seen that reaction a lot since returning to Europe two weeks ago.

Jenny delivers insightful views on what she hears each morning from villagers who wait in long lines for baguettes and her pains au chocolat, which levitate off a plate. In big cities, people mutter over newspapers and at TV screens.

Visiting Americans need not worry about hiding behind a red maple leaf. The general mood, not hostile, varies mostly between pity and contempt.

The French national sport of grumbling about domestic politics follows closely behind football (the kind played with feet). A mention of Trump during his first term routinely prompted amused smiles and such replies as, “Ah, but we have Emmanuel Macron.”

These days, I need a glossary to keep up with dirty-word slang when questions turn toward America. In a YouGov poll on March 1, only a third of Frenchmen, Germans and Britons approved of Trump. That has since fallen like a collapsed soufflé.

In contrast, Macron’s ratings climb as he steps in to protect Ukraine against Vladimir Putin’s imperial designs on Europe and bits of the ex-Soviet Union. France’s nuclear-tipped armed forces are on alert. The government hands out “survival kits” just in case.

Macron says he plans to recognize Palestine as a state at the United Nations in June. France backs Israel as a Jewish homeland and a strong democracy in a hostile region, but it opposes its hardline leaders’ onslaught on Gaza and the West Bank.

In America, “the past” has a brief shelf life. Trump left behind economic collapse, with inflation from a pandemic he let run wild. His foreign folly led to war in Ukraine and the Middle East. Yet he demonizes his successor, who restored prosperity and sanity.

In France, a longue memoire recalls history learned the hard way. A malignant narcissist in Germany started global war that brought death to perhaps as many as 60 million people worldwide, with unspeakable suffering for countless others.

At the end, France caught the brunt of it. The heart of Paris was hours away from being obliterated by dynamite packed under bridges and its world-heritage monuments.

For an analysis of what the world now faces, I found a piece by Serge July in Liberation, the scrappy daily he founded along with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1973. The headline read, “Putin, Trump, Xi: The New Emperors.”

“Each...is an absolute master, they rule planetary empires, on land but also at sea and in space,” he wrote. “This triumvirate directs the world, sweeping aside a United Nations meant to respect all states’ territorial integrity without force or threats.”

Predators now rule. As July wrote, Trump now gets away with declaring that the world, including Denmark, understands America must own Greenland — or Panama, Gaza and even Canada — and sensible people don’t burst out in laughter.

Big powers that seize territory with impunity inspire lesser ones to do the same. Or, as in Hungary and Turkey, leaders rig elections and crack down on dissent, adopting today’s new geopolitical buzz-term, “illiberal democracy.” In short, dictatorship.

Macron faces internal discord from the left and the right. But, like most European Union partners and other functioning democracies, he defends free-world principles that are at risk in America: non-partisan institutions, unmuzzled expression — and the rule of law.

A court just barred Marine Le Pen from seeking public office for five years. The far-right National Rally firebrand stood a good chance of being president when Macron’s term expires in 2027, but she was implicated in her party’s embezzlement of public funds.

She denounced a political witch hunt. To no surprise, Trump declared that was just like in America. But it wasn’t.

Judges, being human, are susceptible to personal leanings. French courts demand solid evidence, with thick dossiers built up over time. Recent presidents have been punished for abuse of power or corruption that amounts to chump change by U.S. standards.

In the ruins of war, Charles de Gaulle imposed his will on France until a 1968 student uprising forced him to step down. Valery Giscard d’Estaing on the right and François Mitterrand on the left ruled as elected monarchs until 1995.

Since then, the French have taken “we the people” seriously. Presidential overreach routinely sends them into the streets, like anti-royalist sans-culottes wielding pitchforks at the Bastille. Labor union strikes can paralyze much of the country for weeks.

In recent years, inflamed rioters have clashed with increasingly violent well-armed riot police. The gilets-jaunes (yellow-vest) movement began in 2018 over tax cuts for the rich, fuel prices, wage disparities and reduced government services.

By the time it cooled down 14 months later, 11 people had been killed in traffic accidents, and 4,439 protesters and police were injured. Macron was forced to make significant concessions.

In 2023, more than a million people across France protested Macron’s decision to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. He said that was essential to keep enough funds in reserve to meet future demand. Ineligible for another term, he refused to back down.

Macron eventually prevailed. The uproar was less about delaying retirement for two years than his fiat by executive action with no debate in the National Assembly.

Today, the lines are drawn. The French, like other Europeans, know a wannabe tyrant when they see one, particularly one who is transparently self-focused, unhinged and ignorant about real-world reality.

They are preparing to avert unstoppable war, within NATO or not. They see Putin play Trump for a sucker, taking whatever he is given and then demanding more. Benjamin Netanyahu is doing something similar in Gaza and the West Bank.

Ronald Reagan’s “trust but verify” is over. Trump’s “peace through strength” is a bad joke.

Europeans are finding workarounds for exports and imports that exclude the United States, even if that means dealing with China at the expense of human rights, freedom of thought and unmuzzled media in much of the world.

They struggle with growing tides of migrants and refugees, largely driven from their homes because of needless wars that America sparked, climate collapse that Trump worsened by scrapping the 2015 Paris Accords and now by slashing foreign aid.

Much of America’s news media focuses inward, along with social media posts in which people guess about complex events in places they can’t find on the map.

In Europe, people read multiple daily papers and watch dozens of multilingual all-news TV channels that draw on seasoned correspondents in the United States who report and analyze at firsthand.

They see clearly through the blizzard of Republican truth-twisting, and they already feel the impact on prices and supply of mercurial tariff lunacy. It helps that most have health care, free universities and functioning public services.

But just about everyone, from baker-philosophers in deepest Provence to cabinet ministers at the Elysée Palace, fear what is coming. And they know who to blame.