Bernie Sanders speaks to supporters at a rally in support of the nation's first universal health-care system, in Boulder, Colo., October 17, 2016. Brennan Linsley/Press Association. All rights reserved.All mainstream European newspapers professed themselves “shocked” by Trump's victory. Representing large swathes of liberal and institutional elites, they expressed fears that his presidency will be destabilising and adventurist for both sides of the Atlantic.
Le Monde characterised the victory as "a fundamental transformation" comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. For The Guardian, Trump "will halt all the progressive narrative about America in the 21st Century"; further, xenophobic and right-wing Europeans, with Le Pen first among them, will be "jumping on Trump's bandwagon", whereas Moscow and Damascus "will cheer" and the "Latvian" and the Ukrainian" will suffer. Handelsblatt, Germany's financial daily, connects Trump to a serious threat to "the liberal international order". Paul Krugman complains that this is a president who knows nothing of law, politics and economics, with an army of "bad advisors" in all of these respected disciplines. Some Italians draw parallels between Trump and Berlusconi, whereas some middle-to-upper-middle class white feminists wonder what Hillary got wrong about "gender equality". Yanis Varoufakis, belatedly, has realised that Trump's success means that "America, too, needs democracy", and not just the Eurozone, as his DiEM25 movement advocates.
Then there are ‘explanations’. Michael Kazin in Foreign Affairs, brands Trump an "unlikely populist", and initiates a discussion drawn from the American populist traditions of the nineteenth century. Francis Fukuyama, too, turns his rage on Trump's "populist nationalism" and laments the fact that the working class is lost to the Democratic party, which is now a party of "identity politics: a coalition of women, African-Americans, Hispanics, environmentalists and the LGBT community". Others, quite rightly, blame the democratic establishment, which sidelined Bernie Sanders, an advocate of democratic socialism who could have taken on Trump, winning the vote of the declining, white, male working class, eventually cast to Trump. Indeed, Trump snatched Sanders' claim and argued openly that, unlike Clinton – the personification of Wall Street and the bureaucratised oligarchy of Washington DC – he could improve the conditions of those "who have been left behind by globalisation, failing domestic industries and crushed small businesses".
