Trump's grim Putinesque speech

Americans should be afraid after their president's angry, hateful Inauguration Address, while Europeans should grow up and take responsibility for our continent - and that very much includes Ukraine.

U.S. President Donald J. Trump delivers his Inaugural Address on Jan. 20, 2025.

BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN

I fear President Donald J. Trump is correct in one thing: Everything will change from today. If I were American, I would be scared for my country.

Division. Division. Division. Trump showed no grace, no style, only aggression, even hatred, a willingness, even an urge to sow strife between Americans.

Today, Trump spoke clearer, louder, more calmly but at the same extremely aggressively, spewing hate and implicit threats against the Americans he calls enemies. His reelection has clearly given him a new self-confidence. He will not accept any opposition; he made that clear. Will there be any?

Trump’s emboldened demeanor (in contrast to his first inauguration) reminds me of Vladimir Putin, who also grew from a zero to being all-powerful - because nobody dared to say stop and because there was too big a loot to share if you keep close to the capo.

But don’t listen to me. Just watch the extraordinary act of outgoing President Joe Biden, who only minutes before leaving office, signed preemptive pardons for many members of his own family, stating directly that he fears that the Trump regime will come for them. In other words, Biden believes that the Trump regime will rule unlawfully and misuse the might of the state for their own political and economic purposes - rather like Putin does in Russia. Biden explicitly says that he believes that Trump threatens democracy in the U.S.

It does indeed seem that the Trump regime will do its worst to turn the U.S. into a banana republic where the people in power exterminate their opponents and their offspring. Quite Putinsque.

From a European point of view, it is evident that Trump and the Trumpists no longer see Europeans as their natural allies.

We Europeans will do well to finally understand - as Churchill predicted a long time ago - that Americans are a different species from us. Let us not forget that Trump – a convicted felon, racist, misogynist, liar, and a man who has already once tried to overturn U.S. democracy – won the election easily. And as Trump rightly pointed out today, at the election, he received support from a broad spectrum of all colors, ages, and genders. His victory was not a fluke, his victory is the U.S.A. of 2025.

We Europeans have to change our policies and rapidly learn to think on our feet regarding security and defense. This realization is long overdue. Part of that realization is to take control from Washington regarding support and defense of Ukraine, both now and when rebuilding the country. If anything good comes from Trump, it could be that we finally grow up.

More broadly, we must understand that the U.S. no longer shares our views and way of life on a whole string of vital issues—such as the environment, gender, and trade. If one day, Americans will wake up to the 21st century, that would be great. But Europe must stop relying on them in the meantime.

As Trump said, everything will change from today, Jan. 20, 2025.