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Paul Josephson is professor emeritus of history at Colby College, and resides in Barcelona, Spain, and Vinalhaven.
I taught at Colby College in Waterville and now live in Barcelona, Spain. What do Europeans think of the ongoing Trump revolution? Why is U.S. President Donald Trump abandoning Ukraine, a democracy on Europe’s doorstep? What do Europeans think about eggs and gas prices? Of immigrants? And, can Europeans make sense of the GOP’s attack on “woke” politics?
In my experience, Europeans are confounded by Trump, his abandonment of American values and commitments at home and abroad, and will go alone, if need be, as the committed representatives of democracy in the 21st century.
Most disturbing to Europeans is Trump’s foreign policy. Trump has abandoned alliances that have protected the free world from communist aggression since the Cold War, such as NATO. He is essentially working with Russian President Vladimir Putin to destroy Ukraine by tacitly giving Russia carte blanche over Ukrainian territory. In apparent support of the Kremlin, he briefly withheld U.S. intelligence from Ukraine to defend itself. He mocked Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for not wearing a suit — Elon Musk doesn’t either — in the Oval Office.
Europeans all too well recall that in the last 80 years, Russia (the USSR) invaded Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, and Poland twice; Hungary (1956); Czechoslovakia (1968); Afghanistan (1979); and Ukraine (2014, 2022). In light of these occupations Trump’s determination to revoke legal status of Ukrainian refugees in the U.S. is gratuitous help for Putin.
Europeans rightly condemn Russian interference in European and U.S. elections. Trump, in fact, denies the interference against the findings of his own intelligence officers. Instead, he ordered his defense secretary to dismantle U.S. cybersecurity programs. Trump’s DOGE leader, Elon Musk, directly supported Germany’s fascist political party, the AFD, in recent German elections, to the disgust of all European leaders.
Trump agents are meddling in Ukrainian politics by trying to bring down Zelenskyy. Would Trump tolerate President Emmanuel Macron of France or Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany meeting with democratic leaders to plot his downfall?
The storm over Gaza and Greenland angers Europeans. They condemn U.S. threats to take Greenland as no different from Russian aggression in Ukraine. Second, they support an end to the Israeli war in Gaza against civilians, not the removal of Gazans from their lands and the creation of a Trump waterfront tower.
As for tariffs, they see government taxes on imports that raise prices for consumers as the epitome of economic ignorance — as does the U.S. stock market, apparently.
On the domestic front, Europeans cannot understand why Americans have to fight for medical care. Europeans have health insurance. No one will ever ask you for an insurance card. No distant office will arbitrarily deny coverage. No parliamentary representative in Madrid or Paris or Berlin will seek to dismantle health care.
And what about eggs and gasoline? Yes, gasoline costs twice as much in European countries as it does in the U.S. Otherwise, the cost of living is cheaper.
Finally, I get asked each day about what some American leaders contend are the most important problems facing Mainers: “woke politics” and “immigrants”? European countries idolize America as a country of immigrants. More than 25 percent of Americans are first or second generation immigrants. Immigrants are the major source of population and economic growth. And “illegal aliens” — who largely operate the food industry and fill the construction industries — have significantly lower crime rates than U.S.-born individuals.
Instead, Trump worries about “transgender mice” (he meant “transgenic”); cuts funding to the world’s most outstanding scientific institutions; fires leading defense officials many of whom are Black and women; and orders the historical record to be changed in search of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). For example, the Department of Defense is purging photographic and document archives. (Putin instituted similar white-washing policies from the Kremlin.) In the process Defense will eliminate reference to the “Enola Gay,” the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The B-29 was not gay.
