What credibility does the 40-year-old vice president carry? Considered by himself, he’s a brash and bumptious neophyte on the world stage, one who has thus far demonstrated little meaningful grasp of international affairs.
And what of President Trump, the man he speaks for? Back in 2016, Vance called Trump “a fraud” who was “leading the white working class to a very dark place,” called his rhetoric about immigrants and Muslims “reprehensible,” and wondered whether he might be “America’s Hitler.”
Today, he serves as acolyte for the man he once loathed — a nationalist demagogue who has proved a greater threat to democracy than anything Vance described in his European address. It was Trump who told the enormous lie to the nation and the world that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him. That lie was the precondition for both Trump’s sordid scheming to stay in power and the Jan. 6, 2021, MAGA storming of the US Capitol, an attempt to prevent the transfer of power to Joe Biden, the legitimate winner of that election.
Nor have the effects of Trump’s toxic falsehood ended. Everyone who serves Trump now has to accommodate Trump’s twisting of history. Pam Bondi, the attorney general, will say only that Biden was “duly sworn in” as president, not that he was duly elected. Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI pick, will allow that Biden was “certified” as president, but won’t acknowledge that he was honestly elected. Vance dodges that issue altogether.
That malicious lie is also the foundational falsehood for the absurd Trumpian notion that the Capitol stormers, including the violent police-assaulters among them, were somehow American patriots deserving of presidential clemency.
It provides the rationale for the identification and possible purging of agents who worked on prosecuting the MAGA Capitol stormers.
Certainly those whose own national history has put them on high alert to the pernicious power of determinedly dishonest, democracy-eroding demagoguery have ample reason for alarm about what’s now happening in America.
They have even more reason to be alarmed since they recognize that the divisive rhetoric Trump used in the last election — claims that his enemies were “vermin” and that migrants were “poisoning the blood” of America — are echoes of things Hitler himself said.
So the mix of anger and consternation German leaders as well as other European officials feel at having Vance lecture them about how to conduct their own democracies is well-founded. They must deem him devoid not just of a sense of international niceties but also of history, introspection, and irony.
The reality that Vance’s denunciation of “firewalls” was in effect a defense of Alternative for Germany, the hard-right Nazi-sympathizing movement that is on the rise there and that Trump’s de facto second-in-command, Elon Musk, openly backs, makes the American vice president’s speech even more dismaying.
So, too, does the fact that Vance’s speech comes even as the Trump administration and that of Russian czar Vladimir Putin are meeting to decide the fate of Ukraine — without yet granting either NATO or, incredibly, Ukraine, a seat at the table.
No wonder, then, that European leaders are holding their own emergency sessions on Russia’s brutal war with Ukraine.
During Trump’s first presidency, European leaders tiptoed around his authoritarian inclinations and his affinity for dictators.
But it is now obvious that the American president has no desire to honor America’s traditional role in the world.
In that context, Vance’s speech isn’t a sudden alarm but rather a confirmation of an uncomfortable but impossible-to-ignore truth.
In matters that count, the United States is no longer the reliable leader of the free world or a dependable ally of the European West.
Europe must recognize that truth and act accordingly.
Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @GlobeScotLehigh.
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Publish date : 2025-02-18 11:22:00
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