The ghost that haunts Trump | EUROtoday
Get real time updates directly on you device, subscribe now.
” L’European Union was created to enter the United States. If Ronald Reagan had heard this sentence of Donald Trump, he would likely have won over his presidential chair, incredulous. It is enough to browse again the speech that the former republican president delivered, in the Strasbourg Parliament, four decades ago today, on May 8, 1985. A singular date, located as the central fold of a secular newspaper since that day, we also celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Nazi capitulation and the end of the Second World War on European soil.
Reagan in Strasbourg? This one evocation today seems almost anachronistic as “Noisy Don” execates the community building and disdaining with ostentation its representatives. Finally, perhaps an inflection is looming on the horizon: Donald Trump would have sketched the promise of an upcoming meeting at Ursula von der Leyen during their brief exchange in Rome, at the funeral of Pope Francis.
Donald Trump in Strasbourg? Unthinkable today
Let’s replace events in their chronology: Ronald Reagan had been at the helm of the American executive for a little over four years in 1985. He has laid down in Alsace, went to the European Parliament, shares a lunch with the president of the institution, Pierre Pflimlin, then pronounces a speech which, reread today, resonates with biting irony when we juxtapose the European vision of the European vision Political legacy: Donald Trump.Read too Europe is horrified by Trump but it has no excuse
“I am here to tell you that America remains, like 40 years ago, attached to the unity of Europe. We continue to consider a strong and unified Europe not as a rival, but as an even stronger partner, “said the former Hollywood actor and unionist before European parliamentarians. Words which, four decades later, seem to belong to an antediluvian era.
Ronald Reagan’s predictions
The contrast is striking: for Trump, who surreptitiously captured in Reagan the slogan Make America Great AgainEurope constitutes a “Machiavellian commercial cartel designed to exploit the United States”, which elected the true cost of its security and has repercussions on this expensive invoice on American taxpayers. Trump emphasized Brexit emphasized as “a great thing” (January 27, 2017) and insidiously suggested that other nations could judiciously draw inspiration from British secession.
For Ronald Reagan, such comments would be geopolitical heresy. Here is how he articulated his thinking this famous May 8: “We are not just looking for the security of Europe, but the recreation of a larger and more authentically European Europe. “I hope that at the XXIe A century, in only 15 years, all Europeans, from Moscow to Lisbon, will be able to travel without passport, ”he added in an virtually prophetic imaginative and prescient that has partially materialized with the institution of the Schengen space. The subsequent 12 months to this speech, the Berlin Wall collapsed; The USSR ended up falling in addition to the Warsaw Pact. However, it took barely greater than the fifteen years (nineteen exactly) to combine into the European mission the traditional “well-liked democracies” of the Communist Bloc, in 2004.
Trump, the antipodes of this conception, has erected in herald of hermetic borders, separations by walls and territorial fractionation. His manifest fascination for autocrats and his inappropriate complacency towards Vladimir Putin contrast violently with the intransigence of Reagan in the face of “the Soviet Union ever extra hegemonic”. Where Reagan discerned an “Europe with out illusions, firmly anchored within the beliefs that cast its greatness”, Trump perceives an exsangue continent, weakened by his anachronistic attachment to democratic values and multilateralism. The Philippicals of JD Vance at the Munich Conference sounded the death knell for transatlantism at the father who had rocked Europe in the sweet chimera of an indissolubly united West in the face of authoritarian regimes.
Far from Ronald Reagan the idea that NATO would only constitute an unbearable budgetary puncture for the American Treasury. “NATO was a triumph of group and efforts, however it was additionally one thing very modern and singularly totally different,” he explained to the Strasbourg desk. Because NATO drew its strength directly from the moral values of the peoples it represented, from their high ideals, from their unwavering attachment to freedom. »»
The knight of democracy against the friend of tyrants
Should we remember that Trump qualified this same alliance as an “out of date” organization before threatening its foundations by suggesting that the United States may not defend member countries which would not respect its financial commitments? Ronald Reagan, on the contrary, evoked an alliance “ensuing not from state passenger pursuits, however of widespread beliefs”. Trump reduced this conception to a prosaic mercantile calculation, reducing American protection to a vulgar commercial transaction with leonine conditions.
Ronald Reagan devoted, this May 8, 1985, a substantial part of his speech to the importance of democratic values as a base of the transatlantic relationship. “We should understand that every nation should struggle for democracy inside its personal tradition,” he said, before calling to support “rising democracies”. His distant successor has largely put the importance of the democratic character of the regimes. Its proximity to authoritarian leaders, from Viktor Orban to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, passing by his repeated praise of Vladimir Putin, testifies to a deep break with the inheritance Reaganian.
Who would imagine Trump declaim with solemnity: “Europe, you are the treasure of centuries of Western thought and culture; You are the father of Western ideals and the mother of Western faith. […] Are you a moral success ”? Ronald Reagan dared. The discourse also contains this striking metaphor comparing European construction to build a Gothic cathedral. “The work that awaits us is harking back to the development of a giant cathedral,” he said. It is a slow, complex and meticulous work. It is transmitted with pride from generation to generation. My friends, Europe is the cathedral, and it is still illuminated. »»
The attentive rereading of the Strasbourg discourse cruelly highlights the flagrant intellectual imposture that constitutes the Trumpian claim of the Reaganian heritage concerning Europe. If the two men share certain guidelines of domestic policy – deregulation, tax reductions -, their visions of transatlantic relations could not be more diametrically opposed.
When Reagan quotes Hannah Arendt
A particularly revealing aspect of Strasbourg’s speech remains largely overlooked: Reagan’s explicit reference to Hannah Arendt and his “banality of evil”. Faced with the horrors of Nazism, the American president did not hesitate to draw on European philosophical thought to support his reflection on totalitarianisms. An intellectual depth that we rarely attribute to this outstanding communicator. Needless to say, a reference to Hannah Arendt in a Trump speech would be as likely to see Vladimir Putin to host a seminar on participatory democracy …
Ronald Reagan was not welcome for everyone. His speech was interspersed several times by demonstrations of hostility, particularly during his digressions on Central America. Some parliamentarians ostensibly left the hemicycle as a sign of protest. Faced with these demonstrations of animosity, Reagan demonstrated a biting but never acrimonious irony. “I realized one thing edifying,” he said with malice. Maybe if I express myself long enough in front of my own congress, some of my opponents would also leave their functions. »An elegant way of mourning those who deserted the assembly …
To uncover
The kangaroo of the day
Answer
When the phrases “Nicaragua!” Nicaragua! “Fusted assistance, Ronald Reagan died maliciously:” Is there an echo right here? ” »Disorming the tension by humor rather than confrontation.
Without annoying himself, he ends up with a note from a premonitory irony against communist protesters. “Those who reap the benefits of this democratic proper appear to disregard that if the federal government they advocate grew to become actuality, nobody would have this freedom of speech. »It is an attention-grabbing level of comparability with Trump which advocates the “Free speech” With vehemecne however evacuated from the oval workplace the journalists of Associated Press (AP) who dare to ask him embarrassing questions … In forty years, America – and undoubtedly the world – has modified.
https://www.lepoint.fr/monde/il-y-a-40-ans-reagan-a-strasbourg-le-fantome-qui-hante-trump-08-05-2025-2589100_24.php