The Trump mafia’s political model is not Europe, but North Korea. We are referring to the Washington administration. It is the exoneration of a powerful apparatus that is transforming the United States into a police state.
“Trump is not extreme in the American context. He is a mainstream that Europe will be up against for many years to come. The USA as Europe’s friend and protector is a deadly illusion”.
Vienna
The terrible thing is not Donald Trump, but the American mentality that makes his terrible regime possible. 77 million supposedly enlightened citizens – out of an active electorate of 150 million – voted last year for the already convicted tax fraudster, misogynist and openly derailed demagogue.
Trump is not the whole of the USA, but he is a real USA with this USA’s contempt for democracy and humanism, present in his own disturbed personality, in his ideologically sharp Vice President JD Vance, in a talentless Secretary of Defence named Pete Hegseth and in Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the supporting role as a smoothing ventriloquist. Trump is not extreme in the American context. He is a mainstream that Europe will be up against for many years to come. The USA as Europe’s friend and protector is a deadly illusion.
It is claimed that Trump provokes, so one does not have to take him seriously. That too is an illusion. Trump is working purposefully to abolish democracy in favour of a dictatorship, surrounded by back-patters and followers. The political model of the Trump mafia is not Europe, but North Korea and Russia. To refer to Washington as an administration is to exonerate a power apparatus that is in the process of establishing a police state.
The mobilisation of the National Guard in Los Angeles and Washington, and the implementation of draconian punishments for even minor offences, are explained away by the long-promised fight against crime. I see it as experiments with a view to a coup d’état. The Trump administration is testing its lines of command, its logistics and its forces. The National Guard is to create fear on the American streets. Citizens are getting used to uniformed terrorists doing whatever suits them. It is a repetition of Hitler’s SS troops and Mussolini’s Squadristi in the fascist Europe of the past.
The White House official recently lectured visiting South Korean President Lee Jae-Myung about his wonderful relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and his desire to meet this excellent friend as soon as possible. Everyone could see and hear it; everyone should see and hear it. Myung sat transfixed next to his host, who spoke up and down the golden curtains of his drawing room (always this tasteless gold) without a word mentioning South Korea’s hard-won democracy or North Korea as a nuclear threat that is aiding Russia in its war against European and democratic Ukraine.
As a show, it was a repeat of the scandalous, carefully staged treatment with which Trump and Vance received Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in Washington eight months ago.
During his monologue, Trump mumbled casually that perhaps Americans want a dictator. Of course! Trump is undermining courts, universities, museums, the National Bank and other public institutions around the clock. There is a demonstrative dismantling of the existing state, extending to the armed forces, whose democratically trained commanders are being replaced by Trump loyalists.
If Trump loses the midterm elections in November in a year – and it cannot be ruled out that his trade wars will increase the price and reduce the supply of goods in American supermarkets, everything from Brazilian coffee to Chinese hair dryers – the regime could launch its coup d’état, motivated by widespread unrest and crime.
Democracy in the United States is already so under attack that smart foreigners stay away. Even the most innocent Dane who arrives in New York with a mobile phone whose content reveals a critical or even hesitant attitude towards the genius Trump risks being arrested, put in the nearest prison and, after a considerable time, returned to Europe or deported to Uganda or El Salvador.
During a recent visit to Austria, economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz predicted an American catastrophe as a result of Trump’s trade wars and the US’s ever-increasing debt, estimated at $37 trillion or 130 per cent of GNP in 2025 (the EU allows a maximum of 60 per cent). Stiglitz recommended that Europe, as the world’s most important trading hub, free itself from the US. The question is how?
A new geopolitical strategy could include different versions of the EU and the non-US NATO. There is talk of an Asian defence union, consisting of Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Indonesia and others. No European assistance is needed for this. Africa and the Middle East are the big problems, but a word of encouragement, including a clear distancing from Israel’s barbarity in Gaza, illegally annexed East Jerusalem, and the illegally occupied West Bank, would not hurt. Real potential is seen in a summit in Colombia in two months between the 27 EU member states and the 33 members of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).
The EU can profitably forget the 500 billion euros that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen promised Trump during their meeting in Scotland in June. This grotesquely staggering sum belongs in European welfare, European jobs and European defense, including everything that Europe is expected to buy from the US but which Europe must be enabled to manufacture within the next few years: planes, tanks, ships, drones, guns and ammunition.
Trumpism is no longer a ride on the ghost train at Tivoli, but a journey into the universe of betrayal. Disappointed politicians and intellectuals act as Trump’s useful idiots in return for expected payback. They belong in Dante’s ninth circle. We must get hold of the true Europe, the Europe that can and will itself, away from the currently comfortable, in the long-term unsustainable existence as Washington’s privileged vassal.
We must achieve a sovereign Europe. Preferably in cooperation with others with whom we do not have to agree down to the smallest democratic detail, but with whom we can agree on this fundamental fact that we must be able to interact with each other in a civilised manner.
Per Nyholm
*These opinions are solely those of the author. The Ukrainian Review does not take any position and is not responsible for the author’s words.
Per Nyholm has been a Danish journalist since 1960. He lives in Austria and is a columnist and foreign correspondent for the liberal Danish daily “Jyllands-Posten”.
