- Apr 29, 2010
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http://www.vox.com/2016/5/5/11590870/trump-world-reaction
I feel the need to point out that many of the countries that are freaking out about Trump are ostensibly allies. France, Germany, Israel, South Korea... These are all allies and trade partners. It's not like Russia or China or ISIS is looking at this and worrying (in fact, Putin seems pretty happy about the whole thing). The entire world, essentially, is looking at America and shaking their heads in awestruck disappointment. Like, "Wow, we were mostly joking when we said you were a bunch of fat, arrogant blowhards obsessed with money above all else, but now we're not so sure it's funny any more."
That is, if anyone cares about an outside perspective. It can be very useful. I sure know that if a whole bunch of my most trusted and well-off friends told me, "What you're doing is crazy, you're hurting yourself, please stop", I'd at least take a moment to consider that what they're saying has some merit.
"The craziest US presidential election campaign begins," Germany's Die Welt daily wrote. "The unthinkable has come to pass."
You've seen similar coverage from the foreign press throughout Trump's rise, the tone of which has been a mixture of panic, terror, and gallows humor.
France's Channel 2 once aired a debate titled, "That Donald Trump could become president of the United States: should we laugh or cry?" In January, the leading German magazine Der Spiegel published an issue titled, "Madness: American Agitator Donald Trump."
[...]
"If a communist propaganda ministry had commissioned a gifted cartoonist to draw a typically-American rogue, he would have invented a figure like 'The Donald,'" Mounk writes in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "A man who embodies the wealthy, boorish philistine, from his self-important attitude to the way his hair is folded this way and that, and someone for whom nothing is sacred — other than money, bosoms, success and power."
Germans, Mounk writes, see Trump as "a symptom of a distinctly American disease":
[...]
Now, most non-Americans don't only see the bad in America — and a lot of the time, these stereotypes are fodder for jokes rather than taken seriously.
But in Trump, they see the bad parts of America swamping the parts of it they admire. That's not just in personality, but also the policies he proposes. Trump's personal qualities would become the ones that define American governance.
"For [some], Trump's mere existence confirms their worst suspicions of the United States," Joyce Karam, the Washington bureau chief for the Arabic daily Al-Hayat, writes. "In a region already predisposed to anti-Americanism, Trump’s Islamophobic and racially charged message is reinforcing long-held suspicions that America is a racist, imperialist nation that wants to exploit and subjugate the Arab world."
You've seen similar coverage from the foreign press throughout Trump's rise, the tone of which has been a mixture of panic, terror, and gallows humor.
France's Channel 2 once aired a debate titled, "That Donald Trump could become president of the United States: should we laugh or cry?" In January, the leading German magazine Der Spiegel published an issue titled, "Madness: American Agitator Donald Trump."
[...]
"If a communist propaganda ministry had commissioned a gifted cartoonist to draw a typically-American rogue, he would have invented a figure like 'The Donald,'" Mounk writes in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "A man who embodies the wealthy, boorish philistine, from his self-important attitude to the way his hair is folded this way and that, and someone for whom nothing is sacred — other than money, bosoms, success and power."
Germans, Mounk writes, see Trump as "a symptom of a distinctly American disease":
In no other democracy in the world, it is said, could voters be so openly motivated by greed, show so little concern for less-privileged fellow citizens and be so politically ignorant. Only in hate-filled, under-educated 'Ami-land' could someone like Trump be successful.
Mounk describes Trump as fitting stereotypes of Americans held not just in Germany but in places around the world. A 2005 Pew survey of people in 16 nations found that majorities in most countries described Americans as "greedy" and "violent." A 2005 study in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology looked at data from 48 non-American samples, finding that they described the typical American as (among other things) "arrogant" and "achievement-oriented."[...]
Now, most non-Americans don't only see the bad in America — and a lot of the time, these stereotypes are fodder for jokes rather than taken seriously.
But in Trump, they see the bad parts of America swamping the parts of it they admire. That's not just in personality, but also the policies he proposes. Trump's personal qualities would become the ones that define American governance.
"For [some], Trump's mere existence confirms their worst suspicions of the United States," Joyce Karam, the Washington bureau chief for the Arabic daily Al-Hayat, writes. "In a region already predisposed to anti-Americanism, Trump’s Islamophobic and racially charged message is reinforcing long-held suspicions that America is a racist, imperialist nation that wants to exploit and subjugate the Arab world."
I feel the need to point out that many of the countries that are freaking out about Trump are ostensibly allies. France, Germany, Israel, South Korea... These are all allies and trade partners. It's not like Russia or China or ISIS is looking at this and worrying (in fact, Putin seems pretty happy about the whole thing). The entire world, essentially, is looking at America and shaking their heads in awestruck disappointment. Like, "Wow, we were mostly joking when we said you were a bunch of fat, arrogant blowhards obsessed with money above all else, but now we're not so sure it's funny any more."
That is, if anyone cares about an outside perspective. It can be very useful. I sure know that if a whole bunch of my most trusted and well-off friends told me, "What you're doing is crazy, you're hurting yourself, please stop", I'd at least take a moment to consider that what they're saying has some merit.