There is a natural psychological impulse to downplay what is happening in the United States. It is hard to accept that we may be entering dystopian times. Some people are too complacent to mobilize and instead look for excuses. Others look for excuses to keep voting for Trump, or to continue supporting European parties that sympathize with him, or that see it as natural to ally with parties promoting similar policies.
In an effort to remain balanced, I want to reflect on how bad Trump 2.0 really is, why there is still hope, and why this matters — even for us Europeans.
How bad is Trump 2.0? Unfortunately, what is happening is not entirely un-American. There are precedents: racism, violations of human rights, segregation, McCarthyism, and the extermination of Indigenous populations. Violence, racism, imperialism, and repression are undeniably part of U.S. history. Still, many of us believed that these phenomena were being left behind with the civil rights movement and the end of the Cold War.
Trump himself, however, is unprecedented and far worse than his predecessors: the trash-talking, bullying, racism, corruption, threats to — and violations of — freedom of speech, attacks on science, culture, and global public goods, the imperial impulses, and the sycophancy, narcissism, and idolatry surrounding the “king" and the first lady. This spectacle feels closer to the Roman emperors of the decadent era than to any sane contemporary democratic leadership (and I do not count Milei, Bukele, or Orbán among those leaders).
His occasional hostility toward other authoritarian regimes — Iran, Venezuela, Cuba — should not mislead us. One cannot play the good cop in just carefully selected places abroad and the bad cop at home.
Of course, there is also the United States that liberated Europe from fascism and launched the Marshall Plan. And it is true that we do not see mass killings on the scale of Iran, thanks to institutions that still act as constraints: the media, protesters, churches, and courts. But we already see innocent people being killed or arbitrarily detained.
This is not Hitler — but waiting for perfect historical parallels would be a grave mistake. The outcomes may differ, but the psychology of the tyrant and his supporters looks disturbingly familiar (January 6th should still echo loudly in our minds).
People may disagree on how to label what we are witnessing, but not on the direction of travel. John Burn-Murdoch asks whether we are seeing shocking events without durable change: How steep is Trump’s democratic backsliding? Others are less hesitant.
Why there is still hope? If there is hope that the United States will not be lost to democracy forever, it is not because of any residual humanity in Trump or his inner circle. It is because of the strength and diversity of the resistance — collective, institutional, and individual.
We see it in parts of the mainstream and independent media that continue to tell the truth (try watching Amanpour on CNN, or reading the Substacks of Paul Krugman and Timothy Snyder). Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Minneapolis is a beautiful tribute to those who resist — and who have, at least temporarily, forced Trump to retreat.
There is hope because many intelligent, principled people in the U.S. are resisting. Unfortunately, the most powerful and wealthy do not seem to be among them. Those who resist may not control the tectonic forces of inequality and brutality that drive the worst forms of capitalism, but they oppose them. I have been fortunate to meet — and remain friends with — some of these people during my PhD in Florence, through visits to New York, Madison, Berkeley, and elsewhere, and through collaborations in Europe, including the remarkable CORE Project, partly led by U.S. academics.
They are among the smartest and most generous people I have ever known. Their universities and research centers are not perfect, but they remain among the most important global public goods we have. Many of the resisters come from these institutions. They remind us that theories of free-riding and collective-action failure tell only part of the story.
Why this matters? Some people tell me I pay too much attention to what happens in the United States. But it remains — by many measures — the world’s largest economy, with unparalleled cultural influence, and still the dominant force in the social sciences and in my own discipline, economics.
Things may never be the same between the U.S. and Europe. Still, we must continue to resist together, and we must stay connected.
This is not to ignore the many challenges facing European democracies (I promise they are a priority for many of us). But when I was younger, I learned that developments in the U.S. often reach Europe a few decades later — and now the delay may be much shorter.
We want a divorce from the Trump regime, not from our American friends.
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