Yascha Mounk

Trump’s public breakup with Elon Musk is symptomatic of his failure to hold together the broad coalition to which he owes his re-election. The ‘HUGEst’ political alliance of the century is breaking apart before the eyes of the world in suitably spectacular fashion. For the last few months, the most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump, and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, were a political item. Musk donated large sums to Trump’s campaign, lavished the newly re-elected president with praise on his social network, and neglected his companies to pursue his side quest at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

After surviving an assassination attempt and winning reelection with a clear lead in the popular vote, Donald Trump was – briefly, and for the first time in his political career – seen by many pundits as incarnating the future rather than the past. In his first months back in the White House, the radicalism and vindictiveness of the administration have given jitters to a lot of independents who were key in helping him win and hardened opposition among his longtime critics. Any fleeting sense that the MAGA movement was culturally ascendent appears, at least for now, to be gone. And yet, the conventional wisdom holds that a broader ‘vibe shift’ is here to stay.

Today is World Happiness Day. So, like every year on 20 March, you are likely to see a lot of headlines reporting on the publication of the annual World Happiness Report. ‘Finland is again ranked the happiest country in the world [while] the US falls to its lowest-ever position’, a headline in the Associated Press ran this morning. Forbes even got philosophical, promising ‘5 Life Lessons From Finland, Once Again the World’s Happiest Country’. Published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University, the basic message of the report has remained the same since its launch in 2012. The happiest countries in the world are in Scandinavia; this year, Finland is followed by Denmark, Iceland and Sweden.

Over the last weeks, the words and actions of the Trump administration have caused the biggest rift between the United States and Europe since the end of the Cold War. Relations between the longstanding partners are more strained now than they were in the run-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq or in the aftermath of Trump’s 2018 joint press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. Over the last few weeks, European officials were horrified that Trump pressured the prime minister of Denmark, a longtime ally, to cede parts of its national territory to the United States. They took umbrage at a speech at the Munich Security Conference in which J. D. Vance, Trump’s vice president, seemed to ally himself with the continent’s right-wing populists.

For the past decade, Donald Trump has been the most famous and influential man on the planet. But he had too many failures and electoral defeats to his name to be able to claim he dominated a whole political era. That changed on Tuesday night. Trump will be remembered as both the 45th and the 47th President of the United States. At the time of going to press, he is very likely to win full control of Congress. He is even likely to win the popular vote – making him the first Republican to do so in 20 years. All of this will allow him to impose his will on the nation to a much greater extent than he did during his first term in office. Every country is vulnerable to this form of political appeal Back in 2016, the whiff of aberration hung over Trump’s success.

America is retreating from the world stage. The country’s senile president appears absent from the dramatic events unfolding in the Middle East. Joe Biden urged Israel not to go into Rafah; to abstain from taking on Hezbollah; and to forgo retaliatory strikes against Iran. At every stage, the Israeli government followed its own counsel and is now reportedly ignoring his administration ahead of next month’s election. Biden’s term in office has been marked by similar haplessness elsewhere in the region. He will be remembered above all for America’s ignoble and chaotic retreat from Afghanistan, which left local contractors and translators in the lurch and allowed the Taliban to reimpose their theocracy.

Before Thursday’s debate, the leading contender to win the upcoming presidential election was already Donald Trump, a man whose first stint in the White House provided all the necessary evidence that he is spectacularly ill-suited for the job. During that term in office, Trump ruled rashly and selfishly. He lavished praise on his appointees before firing scores of them for incompetence or insubordination. He picked constant fights with the independent institutions that preserve the separation of powers. And when he lost a hard-fought race, he refused to concede defeat, inspiring a mob to assault Congress, and breaking the key norm that has sustained the American Republic for the past centuries.

When two planes flew into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, the world stood in solidarity with the United States. In London, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ was played at Buckingham Palace. ‘We are all Americans,’ declared Le Monde. In Berlin, 200,000 people took to the streets to express their sorrow. This makes it all the more striking how different – and how morally obtuse – the reaction to Hamas’s slaughter of around 1,400 Israelis has been. Major news outlets were strangely reluctant to dwell on the horror before jumping straight to the Israeli response. Instead of declaring that we are all Israelis, Le Monde editorials fulminated against Israel’s ‘desire for vengeance’.