[The sheen is off
America. But betting against the country’s capacity for reinvention was never a
good idea.]
The sudden
infatuation with North Korea’s Stalinist leader, Kim Jong-un, the
kowtowing to President
Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the “Chinese
virus” obsession, the enthusiasm
for the fracturing of the European Union, and the apparent
abandonment of core American democratic values were so shocking that
Mr. Trump’s departure on Wednesday from the White House is widely viewed with
relief.
The
sheen is off America, its democratic ideals hollowed. Mr. Trump’s imprint on
the world will linger. While passionate denunciations are widespread, there is
a legacy of Trumpism that in some circles won’t easily fade. Through his
“America First” obsession, he galvanized other nations to put themselves first,
too. They will not soon fall back into line behind the United States. The
domestic fracture that Mr. Trump sharpened will endure, undermining the
projection of American power.
“Mr.
Trump is a criminal, a political pyromaniac who should be sent to criminal
court,” Jean Asselborn, Luxembourg’s foreign minister, said in a radio
interview. “He’s a person who was elected democratically but who is not
interested in democracy in the slightest.”
Such
language about an American president from a European ally would have been
unthinkable before Mr. Trump made outrage the leitmotif of his presidency,
along with an assault on truth. His denial of a fact — a defeat in the November
election — was seen by leaders including Angela Merkel, the chancellor of
Germany, as the spark to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol by Trump
supporters.
A
mob amok in the inner sanctum of American democracy looked to many countries
like Rome sacked by the Visigoths. America, to foreign observers, has fallen.
Mr. Trump’s reckless disruption, in the midst of a pandemic, has bequeathed to
Joseph R. Biden Jr., the incoming president, a great global uncertainty.
“The
post-Cold War era has come to an end after 30 years, and a more complex and
challenging era is unfolding: a world in danger!” said Wolfgang Ischinger, the
chairman of the Munich Security Conference.
Mr.
Trump’s talent for gratuitous insults was felt the world over. In Mbour, a
coastal town in Senegal, Rokhaya Dabo, a school administrator, said, “I don’t
speak English, but I was offended when he said Africa is a shithole.” In Rome,
Piera Marini, who makes hats for her store on Via Giulia, said she was
delighted Mr. Trump was going: “Just the way he treated women was chilling.”
“Biden
needs to tackle the restoration of democracy at home in a humble way that
allows Europeans to say we have similar problems, so let’s get out of this
together,” Nathalie Tocci, an Italian political scientist, said in an
interview. “With Trump, we Europeans were suddenly the enemy.”
Still,
to the last, Mr. Trump’s nationalism had its backers. They ranged from the
majority of Israelis, who liked his unconditional support, to aspiring
autocrats from Hungary to Brazil who saw in him the charismatic leader of a
counterrevolution against liberal democracy.
Mr.
Trump was the preferred candidate of 70 percent of Israelis before the November
election, according to a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute. “Israelis are
apprehensive about what lies beyond the Trump administration,” said Shalom
Lipner, who long served in the prime minister’s office. They have their
reasons. Mr. Trump was dismissive of the Palestinian cause. He helped Israel
normalize relations with several Arab states.
Elsewhere
the support for Mr. Trump was ideological. He was the symbol of a great
nationalist and autocratic lurch. He personified a revolt against Western
democracies, portrayed as the place where family, church, nation and
traditional notions of marriage and gender go to die. He resisted mass
migration, diversity and the erosion of white male dominance.
One
of Trump’s boosters, the nationalist Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro,
claimed this month that in the American election, “There were people who voted
three, four times, dead people voted.” In an illustration of Mr. Trump’s role
as an enabler of autocrats, Mr. Bolsonaro went on to question the integrity of
Brazil’s voting system.
Viktor
Orban, Hungary’s anti-immigrant prime minister and a strong Trump
supporter, told Reuters last year that the Democrats had forced
“moral imperialism” on the world. Although he congratulated Mr. Biden on his
victory, Mr. Orban’s relations with the new president are certain to be
strained.
This
global cultural battle will continue because the conditions of its eruption —
insecurity, disappearing jobs, resentment in societies made still more unequal
by the impact of Covid-19 — persist from France to Latin America. The Trump
phenomenon also persists. His tens of millions of supporters are not about to
vanish.
“Were
the events at the Capitol the apotheosis and tragic endpoint of Trump’s four
years, or was it the founding act of a new American political violence spurred
by a dangerous energy?” François Delattre, the secretary-general of the French
Foreign Ministry, asked. “We do not know, and in countries with similar crises
of their democratic models we must worry.”
France
is one such country of increasingly tribal confrontation. If the U.S. Justice
Department could be politicized, if the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention could be eviscerated, and if 147 elected Members of Congress could
vote to overturn the election results even after the Capitol was stormed, there
is reason to believe that in other fractured post-truth societies anything
could happen.
“How
did we get here? Gradually and then suddenly, as Hemingway had it,” said Peter
Mulrean, a former United States ambassador to Haiti now living in France.
“We’ve seen the steady degradation of truth, values and institutions. The world
has watched.”
As
Simon Schama, the British historian, has observed, “When truth perishes so does
freedom.” Mr. Trump, for whom truth did not exist, leaves a political stage
where liberty is weakened. An emboldened Russia and an assertive China are more
strongly placed than ever to mock democracy and push agendas hostile to
liberalism.
Toward
China, Mr. Trump’s policy was so incoherent that Xi Jinping, the Chinese
leader, was left appealing to Starbucks, which has thousands of stores in
China, to improve strained U.S.-China relations. Mr. Xi wrote last week to the
company’s former chief executive, Howard Schultz, to “encourage him” to help
with “the development of bilateral relations,” the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Mr.
Xi no doubt feels some Trump whiplash. The president once called him just “great,”
before changing
his mind. China, after negotiating a truce in the countries’ trade war a
year ago, came under fierce attack by the Trump administration for enabling the
virus through its initial neglect and for its crackdown in Hong Kong. The
administration also accused the Chinese government of committing
genocide in its repression of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in
the Xinjiang region of China.
Mr.
Trump’s approach was erratic but his criticism coherent. China, with its
surveillance state, wants to overtake America as the world’s great power by
midcentury, presenting the Biden administration with perhaps its greatest
challenge. Mr. Biden aims to harness all the world’s democracies to confront
China. But Mr. Trump’s legacy is reluctance among allies to line up behind a
United States whose word is now worth less. It seems inevitable that the
European Union, India and Japan will all have their own China policies.
Even
where Mr. Trump advanced peace in the Middle East, as between Israel and some
Arab states, he also stoked tensions with Iran. Mr. Biden has suggested that
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt was Mr. Trump’s “favorite dictator.” But then America is no longer the
world’s favorite democracy.
“Even
if you say Sisi doesn’t give freedom, where in the world is there total
freedom?” said Ayman Fahri, 24, a Tunisian student in Cairo. He said he would
take Mr. el-Sisi’s brand of effective authoritarianism over Tunisia’s turbulent
fledgling democracy. “Look at Trump and what he did.”
Mr.
Trump called the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, “dishonest
and weak,” whereas North Korea’s brutal Mr. Kim was “funny.” He did not see the point of NATO but saluted
a North Korean general.
He
exited the Paris
Agreement on climate change and the Iran
nuclear agreement, and planned
to leave the World Health Organization. He stood the postwar American-led
order on its head. Even if the Biden administration moves fast to reverse some
of these decisions, as it will, trust will take years to restore.
Mr.
Ischinger said: “We will not be returning to the pre-Trump relationship.”
Dmitri
Medvedev, the former president of Russia and now deputy head of Mr. Putin’s
Kremlin Security Council, described America as mired “in a cold civil war” that
makes it incapable of being a predictable partner. In an essay, he
concluded that, “In the coming years, our relationship is likely to remain
extremely cold.”
But
the U.S. relationship with Russia, like other critical international
relationships, will change under Mr. Biden, who has deep convictions about
America’s critical international role in defending and extending freedom.
Mr.
Biden has described Mr. Putin as a “K.G.B. thug.” He has pledged to hold
Russia accountable for the August nerve-agent attack on the opposition
leader Aleksei A. Navalny — an incident ignored by Mr. Trump in line with his
uncritical embrace of Mr. Putin. Mr. Navalny was
arrested this week on his return to Russia, a move condemned in a
tweet by Jake Sullivan, the incoming national security adviser.
Mr.
Putin waited
more than a month to congratulate Mr. Biden on his victory. It also
took a while, but souvenir stalls at Ismailovo, a sprawling outdoor market in
Moscow, now stock wooden nesting dolls featuring Mr. Biden and have dropped
Trump dolls. “Nobody wants him anymore,” said a man selling dolls. “He is
finished.”
The
world, like America, was traumatized by the Trump years. All the razor wire in
Washington and the thousands of National Guard troops deployed to make sure a
peaceful transfer of power takes place in the United States of America are
testimony to that.
But
the Constitution held. Battered institutions held. America held when troops
were similarly deployed to protect state capitols during the civil rights
movement in the 1960s. Mr. Trump is headed to Mar-a-Lago. And betting against
America’s capacity for reinvention and revival was never a good idea, even at
the worst of times.
