[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]

On Wednesday, even as the legacy-media hacks in the U.S. were freaking out over the Trump landslide, their counterparts in Western Europe were serving up their own unhinged rants about the impending return of the 45th president to the White House. Take Le Monde, whose editors called Trump’s re-election “a major turning point for the United States” and declared that he’s “even more radical than eight years ago.” What, they asked, can the world expect now? Their answer: an America that ceases to operate as “an open and engaged superpower in the world, eager to establish itself as a democratic model – the famous ‘shining city on the hill’ praised by President Ronald Reagan.” Unlike the Gipper, maintained the editors, Trump views the world “solely through the prism of American national interests”: he embraces “power struggles and trade wars,” “disdains multilateralism,” and “reserves his harshest words for his allies but spares autocrats, who are seen as partners rather than adversaries.”

True, Trump believes in America First – just as every Frenchman you ever met believes in France First. So did Ronald Reagan. But will America, during Trump’s second term, retreat from being an “engaged superpower”? Are you kidding? This is the man who stepped across the border into North Korea and engineered the Abraham Accords. Yes, he’s willing to fight trade wars – because the Chinese have pushed him to it. And if he’s suspicious of what Le Monde calls “multilateralism,” it’s because he has a legitimate contempt for vapid diplomacy of the kind practiced by the likes of John Kerry and abhors the UN and other international organizations that seek to restrain America’s ability to act in its own interest. Yes, he criticizes allies when necessary – as he did when he forced NATO members to pay their dues. As for autocratic adversaries, you bet he’s willing to engage with them – because he wants to reduce the likelihood that young American men, on his watch, will be coming home in body bags.

Le Monde went on to accuse Trump of running a campaign of “unprecedented populist, misogynistic and racist virulence.” Populist? Guilty as charged. Definition: “the opposite of globalist.” Rule by the people. As for misogyny and racism, tell that to the women and blacks and Latinos who voted for him this time around in numbers that surprised the experts.

The editors of Le Monde tossed in some of the usual blatant lies, accusing Trump of encouraging rioters on January 6 and of deeming some of his opponents as “worthy of the firing squad.” (The latter, of course, is a reference to his reasonable enough observation that Liz Cheney, a warmonger and war profiteer, would change her attitude toward bloody – if, for her, profitable – foreign entanglements if she found herself surrounded by men with rifles.) They charged Trump with “vilif[ying] dissident media” – yes, the same media that have routinely called him a Nazi, leading to not one but two assassination attempts. 

Le Monde was also displeased by the prospect of Trump rounding up illegal aliens. No, by all means let’s keep letting them come across the Rio Grande and keep putting them up in luxury hotels at taxpayer expense. Could it be that the editors of Le Monde have, with a petty malice not entirely atypical of our Gallic allies, been happy to see illegal aliens make American cities as dirty and dangerous as Paris and Marseille, and would, in their heart of hearts, hate to see Trump clean things up?

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, the newspaper NRC ran an equally ridiculous piece by Roberto Schmidt. He got right to the point: “Never before have Americans elected a president with such openly authoritarian ambitions as Donald Trump,” Schmidt contended, adding that this authoritarianism “could transform norms in American politics and make Trump a more powerful president than America has known before.” You mean more powerful than Obama and Biden, who during Trump’s first term conspired to use the Deep State to bring him down? Trump and his supporters, wrote Schmidt, “seek revenge against almost everyone who has been unfriendly to him in recent years.” “Unfriendly”: a nice euphemistic way to describe the above-mentioned machinations. As for “revenge,” I think Trump would agree with Roger Simon, who argued yesterday that those who’ve engaged in lawfare against Trump & co. must be exposed and punished, but that “it should be…‘Justice Without Revenge.’” Finally, and hilariously, Schmidt warned that Trump would violate the unwritten rule – which, he asserted, has been in effect since the 1960s – that American presidents scrupulously stay “aloof from decisions” made by the Justice Department about “who will or won’t be prosecuted.” Is this statement born of colossal ignorance or colossal dishonesty?

Over to Sweden’s Aftonbladet, where political editor Anders Lindberg was concerned that with Trump in the White House, Sweden will be forced to protect its own national

interests rather than relying on the U.S. First, “Trump is likely to try to pressure Ukraine into submission, perhaps even accepting land cessions to Russia in exchange for peace….We should oppose any peace terms other than those that the Ukrainian people themselves want.” Funny how so many Swedes, whose country sat out two world wars, are so eager to see Russians and Ukrainian soldiers keep killing each other. Second, “Trump and his friends in the oil lobby are going as far as he can to destroy all international frameworks and efforts to save the climate.” Hence the EU will have to lead the way on “climate transition” and “show that green industry and a sustainable society are not only possible, but also competitive and desirable.” Good luck with that! (Why are the people in the coldest countries the ones who tend to get most upset about the planet warming?) Third, Lindberg warned that Trump tariffs would kill “free trade.” No mention of the trade practices of the EU, which just last week imposed new tariffs while raised those on Chinese electric vehicles to nearly 50%.

The slander and disingenuity of these journos was through the roof. But when it came to wall-to-wall Trump-hatred, they all took a back seat to the Guardian, where David Smith and Martin Pengelly predicted that Tuesday’s election results would “sound alarm bells in foreign capitals” because of Trump’s “overtures to authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un of North Korea.” You mean those “overtures” to Putin that kept the latter from invading Ukraine during Trump’s first term, as he had during Obama’s presidency and would go on to do again during Biden’s? In addition, the two Guardian hacks ludicrously described Kamala Harris as having “made…personal freedoms a rallying cry.”

Not content with a single article full of the usual inane anti-Trump calumny, the Guardian ran another by editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, who warned that his second term will endanger the “free press in the United States and beyond.” Viner patted herself on the back for never, during his “tumultuous” first term, having “minimised or normalised the threat of Trump’s authoritarianism.”

For years, charged Viner, Trump has “stirred up hatred against reporters, calling them an ‘enemy of the people’ and referred to legitimate journalism as ‘fake news.’” No, he’s called out legacy-media shills for stirring up hatred against him – and for being the tools of an international elite that is, indeed, hostile toward “the people.” And of course, if he’s spoken frequently of “fake news,” it’s because everything from the Russia hoax to the deep-sixing of Hunter’s laptop has been fake news.

The Guardian had even more to say. Plenty more. There were, believe it or not, several additional articles by different hands, each of which discussed in considerable detail the threat that Trump represents to this or that beloved left-wing cause: from gun control, abortion rights, and illegal immigration to “the progressive criminal justice policies of left-leaning prosecutors,” the rights of children to undergo “gender transition at any age,” and “efforts to slow the climate crisis.” To the lunatics at the Guardian, the above list adds up to a nightmare scenario; to anyone remotely sane, it’s a litany of desiderata.

In Norway, journalist Helge Lurås summed up on his Facebook page the verdicts of some of the nation’s major newspapers. “The world awoke to a new nightmare,” proclaimed Dagsavisen’s Lars West Johnsen. In Aftenposten, Christina Pletten lamented that Trump’s second term will pose a “challenge” to Norway and the rest of Europe. In Dagens Næringsliv (which I used to regard as a sober business daily along the lines of the Wall Street Journal), political editor Frithjof Jacobsen cautioned that the U.S. may be heading into a “majoritarian dictatorship” like Hungary’s. And Nettavisen’s editor, Gunnar Stavrum, saw a silver lining in this very dark cloud: the return of Trump could well force Norway to join the EU in order to avoid tariffs and trade wars.

I’ll close this overview with a dollop of sheer nonsense from yet another Norwegian daily, Dagbladet. In an article that should win an award for utter fatuity, reporter Johannes Fjeld interviewed an “expert” on rhetoric about the speech Trump gave in Palm Beach after he was named the winner. The “expert,” Kjell Terje Ringdal, M.A., who teaches communication at Christiania University College, gave Trump a score of “E,” the lowest passing grade.

Why? Several reasons. First, Trump’s failure to be inclusive enough in his speech suggested that it was fueled by a hostility toward “enemies” such as the “evil state.” (As if Trump’s dislike of Deep State actors who’ve tried to jail and bankrupt him were somehow unreasonable!) The second reason, related to the first, is that Trump represented himself in the speech as a “Sun King” who will stand up for Americans against all of his, and their, enemies. (Well, he did precisely that in his first term, didn’t he?) Third, Trump’s story about Elon Musk’s rocket was “poorly told.”

But mostly, said Ringdal, the problem with Trump’s speech was that, when experienced by a Nordic viewer – a viewer, in other words, who is by definition (unlike, apparently, your average lowbrow MAGA voter) “well educated” and accustomed to an “egalitarian” society – it could only have generated “despair.” Why? Because Trump is “so alien” to the sophisticated Nordic mind. Ringdal asked: “Could Jonas Gahr Støre have done this? Could Erna Solberg?” (Støre is the present prime minister of Norway; Solberg is a former P.M.) “Of course not.” Nordic people, stated Ringdal, simply can’t relate to a politician who “pays tribute to the strong” – and who, by doing so, seeks to depict himself as strong, too.

Priceless stuff, this. I’ve read more than my share of absurd attacks on Trump, but to compare his rhetoric unfavorably to that of colorless technocrats like the stiff, uninspiring Støre (a classic empty suit along the lines of John Kerry) and Solberg (a plump Polish grandma type who’s never said anything that stuck in my head for two seconds) is as dumb as it gets. Think of it: if only Trump had better rhetorical skills, he might have ended up as the internationally obscure prime minister of a country of six million – or, even better, as a communications professor at some middling institution like Christiania University College (rated #5 in Oslo and #3121 in the world). Imagine the audacity of making this kind of judgment about an off-the-cuff speech by a 78-year-old man who, when he delivered his remarks well after midnight, had been campaigning without surcease for weeks, had spent a total of six hours the day before addressing rallies in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and whose allegedly “D”-level performances at rallies have drawn some of the largest crowds in modern political history and have won him a historic second term and earned him an indelible place in the pantheon of all-time great world leaders!

A brief postscript to this Dagbladet drivel. Somebody at NRK, the Norwegian state broadcasting system, was apparently so impressed by Ringdal’s imbecilic comments in Dagbladet that on Wednesday evening he was invited to appear on TV to pronounce judgment upon Kamala’s vapid, asinine concession speech at Howard University. He said it was “beautiful.”

What’s the most outrageous thing about these legacy-media tools’ all-too-predictable takes on Trump? Their chronic mendacity? Their breathtaking condescension? Or their unmitigated idiocy? Hard to say. In any case, these fools shouldn’t be given too much blame, because their claptrap is almost entirely secondhand: pretty much everything they think they know about Trump, and about the U.S. in general, they get from the New York Times and CNN. In any event, one thing’s for sure: in the wake of Trump’s magnificent victory on Tuesday, reading these screeds, rooted in the irrational rage of intellectual mediocrities, was, for once, more entertaining than it was irksome.