Trump's Counterrevolution

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Trump and Vance have done nothing less than expose the naked truth—the king has no clothes, dramatically and pathetically so.

Looking at what’s happening in the world these past months and weeks, it’s enough to leave anyone speechless for many reasons. First and foremost, there are the “Trump revolutions” – in both domestic and foreign policy – that are radically reshaping scenarios and narratives that once seemed solid and almost unchangeable.

Another reason for astonishment comes from Europe, meaning the European Union and the United Kingdom, due to the spectacle of impotence and indecision they’ve been displaying to the entire world regarding peace between Russia and Ukraine. Peace seemed distant and complicated by the intransigence of all parties involved: Putin’s Russia, Zelensky’s Ukraine, Joe Biden’s United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and NATO. Then Trump arrived, and almost miraculously, peace now seems just around the corner, or at the very least, much, much closer than it was just a few weeks ago.

Adding to this is the embarrassing inconsistency – dramatically and relentlessly highlighted by JD Vance in his “historic” speech in Munich – of the European Union in relation to its own founding values of democracy and freedom. It’s practically a dystopian scenario where the will of the people is crushed and mocked by an all-powerful bureaucracy completely aligned with international economic and financial elites.

Victor Davis Hanson

The same scenario, to be sure, that Biden’s America and his puppet masters have been presenting – an America that has forgotten its history, its “exceptionalism,” and the immortal principles on which it was founded. In this case as well, Trump’s arrival has shaken things up. A revolution, or rather, as the ever-sharp Victor Davis Hanson observes, a “Trump restoration” emphasizing it as a counterrevolution against the changes brought by the Obama and Biden administrations. “ We don’t really appreciate what we’ve been through with eight years of the Obama revolution and the four-year, more radical third term of Obama using or employing the wax effigy of Joe Biden,” says Hanson. It was a revolution that was a cultural, economic, political, social revolution, he continues. It was very similar to the French Revolution under the Robespierre brothers: “You should remember what they tried to do. They changed the days of the week. They renamed things. They tore down statues. They went after the churches.” Does this sound familiar? It was a revolutionary movement: “Movies were different, sports were different. Take a knee.” Then Donald Trump came in and… “It’s a return to normalcy. It’s a return to common sense. It only looks revolutionary to revolutionaries. But to the rest of the people, it is a counterrevolution to restore normalcy and bring the country from the far-left fringes back home again.”

Simon Jenkins

In foreign policy, the “restoration” is certainly no less remarkable. Let’s set aside the polemical tone of Trump’s statements, including some of his lexical choices—which could be debated at length. If we focus on substance, we can’t help but acknowledge the high level of realism, pragmatism, intellectual honesty, and common sense in what the President and his Vice President have proposed so far. So much so that even the left-leaning British Guardian, through one of its most prominent columnists—former Times of London editor Simon Jenkins—has had to recognize it. Read it and see for yourself: 

As for Ukraine, enough is enough. Putin is not going to invade the US, nor has he any intention of invading western Europe. If Europe wants to pretend otherwise, champion Vladimir Putin’s foes, sanction and enrage him, it can do so alone. […]
What Trump/Vance are now saying to western Europe is get serious. The cold war is over. You know Russia has no desire to occupy western Europe. This proclaimed threat is a fantasy got up by what a wise president, Dwight Eisenhower, called the US’s military-industrial complex, long practised at extracting profit from fear. If Keir Starmer really wants “to give priority to defence”, he can slash his own health and welfare budgets to pay for it. But is he really that threatened, or does it merely sound good?
Joe Biden was meticulous in the degree of help he extended to Kyiv. Now is the inevitable moment of extrication, but it will require a very difficult ceasefire to precede it. Without a substantial guarantee from Washington, it is hard to see anything other than eventual defeat for Kyiv. Ukraine could yet prove a rerun of the US in South Vietnam.
With a minimum of delicacy, Trump/Vance have decided to expose the mix of platitude, bluff and profiteering that underpinned much of the cold war. Nato’s victory in 1989 suggested the need for a shift to a more nuanced multipolar world, one that was never properly defined.
Trump/Vance are right that a realignment is badly needed. They have chosen the worst possible moment and the worst possible way to say it. We can be as rude to them as we like, but they will have US democracy on their side.

In short, according to one of Britain’s keener observers, Trump and Vance have done nothing less than expose the naked truth—the king has no clothes, dramatically and pathetically so. Of course, in other parts of the editorial, the tone is scornful (as expected!). And yet, the message is crystal clear—a lesson not just for “progressive” commentators on both sides of the Atlantic, but also for certain conservative pundits who have greeted the Trump administration’s moves with a degree of condescension, if not outright skepticism. If a President and his Vice manage to restore a measure of truth and common sense through their actions, sweeping away lies and hypocrisy, shouldn’t we at least acknowledge that we’ve all taken a huge step forward?

* An Italian version of this article is being published in Atlantico magazine.