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The writer is an FT contributing editor, chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, and fellow at IWM Vienna
A spectre is haunting Europe: that of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. As a recent opinion poll shows, even voters on the European far right — with the glaring exception of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary — are downcast at the prospect of another four years of disruption. But whatever Europeans may think about a second Trump presidency, it is the American people who will decide.
Many among the European elite seem to believe that Trump’s return will not happen because, in their view, it shouldn’t. They are also wary of predicting a Trump victory in November for fear of antagonising the Biden administration. Fortunately, there remain significant reserves of sang-froid on the continent, so if Trump does end up winning, Europe will adjust. It survived his first term, after all.
Addressing the nagging question about how to “get Trump right”, I feel like the main character in the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. He wins his country’s version of the TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? not because he’s smart but because life has taught him the right lessons.
In eastern Europe we have learnt that when a populist leader returns to power, he dreams not of revolution but of revenge. This happened in Hungary in 2010, for example, when Orbán took his revenge on the Socialists who, in their own words, won the previous election by lying from morning to night. It is also what occurred in Poland in 2015 when Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party regained power. The populist leader who returns after having been ousted by the “deep state” is not in the mood for reconciliation, but for payback.
The Trump who governed America from 2017-21 was an outsider, resentful of the elites but quietly pining for their recognition. He dreamt that one day his enemies would be impressed by him. It is no accident that one of his first moves after winning the 2016 election was to meet the editorial board of the New York Times.
But this was the old game. When, last year, political analyst Robert Kagan peered into Trump’s mind, what he saw was a person who spent the last four years “fighting to stay out of jail, plagued by myriad prosecutors and helpless to do what he likes to do best: exact revenge”.
Trump 2.0 will not be about respect or recognition, but about revenge. And the desire for payback is not simply a personal characteristic of the leader — it is the name of the game. By reinventing the Republican party around the myth of a stolen election, Trump doesn’t simply seek revenge, he expects to receive a mandate for it.
European experts trying to divine the priorities of a second Trump administration often make a costly mistake. They assume, correctly, that he has an instinctive revulsion of alliances and, in the words of his former national security adviser John Bolton, that for him “international problems are nails crying out for his tariff hammer”. And that this is enough to know what he will do. But they remain blind to the basic fact that populists don’t return to power with a list of policy priorities. They come back brandishing a list of enemies and regretting their previous naivete. Policy choices, such as they are, will be defined by the logic of revenge.
The politics of revenge can best be understood by reading Shakespeare. In Hamlet, Claudius declares: “And where the offence is, let the great axe fall.”
Shakespeare’s plays are unlikely to be bedside reading for European political leaders debating policy responses to a second Trump administration. But they should be. Only by reading the classics will they understand that Trump’s position on Nato will be defined not by the size of other members’ defence budgets, but by his desire to settle scores with the generals whom he believes betrayed him in 2020.
Massaging Trump’s ego won’t be enough to keep the alliance together. For him, Nato is on the wrong side of history. For the populist returning to power, the war against the deep state is the only one that matters. And in Trump’s political imagination, Nato is part of the deep state. As such, it constrains America’s freedom of action.
Before February 24 2022, most European leaders refused to believe that Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine because they saw such a gambit as irrational and self-destructive. But Putin did what he had threatened. In dealing with Trump, the smartest thing leaders can do is understand that he means what he says.
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