Published November 7, 2024
Europeans awakening to the reality of Donald Trump’s victory will be asking themselves what it means for them. The obvious answer is that US policy and attitudes towards European countries and the European Union dramatically change.
The less obvious but more poignant answer is that his win is a glimpse of Europe’s future.
Trump won because he painstakingly built a multiracial conservative populist coalition. That coalition is rooted in America’s working class — the people who never graduated from university and perform the hard labour on their feet and with their hands that undergirds the modern economy.
Europeans awakening to the reality of Donald Trump’s victory will be asking themselves what it means for them. The obvious answer is that US policy and attitudes towards European countries and the European Union dramatically change.
The less obvious but more poignant answer is that his win is a glimpse of Europe’s future.
Trump won because he painstakingly built a multiracial conservative populist coalition. That coalition is rooted in America’s working class — the people who never graduated from university and perform the hard labour on their feet and with their hands that undergirds the modern economy.
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Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, studies and provides commentary on American politics. His work focuses on how America’s political order is being upended by populist challenges, from the left and the right. He also studies populism’s impact in other democracies in the developed world.
