The Triumph of Donald Trump: Journal of the Perfect Storm

The new old president of the United States of America will be an old, quartz white man, a racist, a macho man, a reality politician who is on trial for some kind of embezzlement and bribery, who does not distinguish Siberia from Serbia.

Donald Trump is in favor of abolishing women's reproductive rights, pandering to the fears of rural Americans and the impoverished working class, inciting hatred towards dark-skinned migrants who he says steal jobs from good Americans, eat pets and are generally criminals.

He is a notorious liar who spreads conspiracy theories, a political friend of the autocrat, has been indicted multiple times for the 2021 coup attempt, convicted of fraud and sexual abuse.

Donald Trump

From people like Trump, the founders of the United States wanted to protect the country when they adopted the Constitution, which outlined the separation of powers. And now, after the victory of the Republicans in the Senate (the votes for the House of Representatives are still being counted), they will have almost free hands.

The man who has reserved a seat in the White House does not hide that he is "America first", which means that he will not take much into account the interests of America's traditional allies, that his foreign policy will be Amerocentric, which suits his egocentric, narcissistic character and that showed for his presidential term from 2016 to 2020.

Blackmailing allies

His election as the 47th US president is a cause for celebration for all the nationalist, radical right, pro-Russian European movements that exist to weaken the European Union, put powers back in the hands of nation states, and reduce the EU to a single market, if not less.

Richard Grenell, who was appointed by Trump as the US ambassador to Germany and then acting director of the National Intelligence Service, blackmailed German companies during his stay in Berlin from 2018 to 2020 and threatened them with sanctions if they did not follow Washington's policy on the matter the introduction of sanctions against Iran.

Richard Grenell

He supported right-wing populist parties and movements across Europe and directly interfered in the internal politics of the host country. Thus, he sent a letter to the then Minister of Economy, Peter Altmaier, in which he threatens that the US will end the intelligence exchange with Germany if he allows the Chinese concern Huawei to get involved in the construction of a 5G network for mobile phones.

Part of the opposition then demanded that Grenell be declared persona non grata.

The Grenell case vividly illustrates how Trump sees relations with America's allies - as unquestioning obedience.

Change in foreign and security policy

We should expect significant changes in America's foreign and security policy, which will have negative consequences primarily for Europeans.

Donald Trump

"Trump sees the world as a jungle where the right of the stronger rules," writes the German "Spiegel".

He would prefer to get the US out of organizations like the United Nations; for him, an ally is only one who serves American interests as he sees them; he threatened to withdraw the US from NATO if the European allies did not massively increase their military budgets.

It can be expected that Ukraine will very quickly feel the change in Washington's foreign and security policy. During the campaign, Trump boasted for months that he would "make a deal" with Russia - by suspending financial and military aid, he could force Kiev to accept "Putin's peace". The lifting of American sanctions against Russia would follow, because that would be good for "American business".

This would mean a victory for Russia and Vladimir Putin and would practically cement the annexation of all Ukrainian territories conquered by the Russian army. At the same time, it was the biggest post-war defeat of European foreign and security policy

Trump sees America's foreign and security priority in the Pacific region and balancing American forces with China.

Joy in Serbia

Of course, all of this would please all pro-Russian citizens of Serbia, various opposition parties and, certainly, Aleksandar Vučić and all his subordinates. The pressure for "Serbia to harmonize its foreign and security policy" with the policy of the West, and therefore with the EU, would disappear.

Photo: Tanjug/Printscreen/Youtube ZND

The president of Serbia and the just-elected American president are connected by business relations: Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner will build skyscrapers on the site of the ruins of the General Staff that were hit by American missiles in 1999.

Whoever in Serbia thinks that this will not be implemented, believes that the demolition of the Old Sava Bridge will be prevented or that Prime Minister Miloš Vučević will resign because the concrete canopy at the train station in Novi Sad killed 14 people.

Aleksandar Vučić knows very well how to behave with world powers. With a humble walk around the White House, he certainly fell into the grace of Trump.

Obstruction that everything that Donald Trump represents in domestic and foreign policy, his value system, way of conducting politics, disdain for institutions, is compatible with the worldview of the Serbian autocrat.

"Project 2025"

With the candidacy of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, two views of the world collided in the US presidential elections. He lost that liberal symbolized by the modern woman of migrant origin.

Kamala Harris

What does this mean for America, Trump's announcement of a "showdown" with political enemies that he wants to "prosecute", which he repeated several times in his victory speech, Americans will have to deal with.

"Trump's Mein Kampf", a 900-page political list of intentions called "Project 2025", predicts the beheading of the American administration, the shutdown of the state apparatus to be filled by right-wing extremists.

Trump Indictment

On the wish list are the rampant influence of religion in politics, the abolition of the Central Bank and the Ministry of Education, the banning of "liberal", "non-Christian", "anti-family" books in schools, lower taxes for the super-rich (such as Elon Musk), the ban on abortion on the federal level, abandoning all climate agreements, abandoning the policy of reducing harmful gas emissions...

Thanks to the Republican majority in the Senate, Trump will have the opportunity to move the Supreme Court even further to the right, which will mostly affect national minorities, vulnerable women, asylum seekers, members of the LGBTQ community, parents with transgender children...

Donald Trump's first entry into the White House could be characterized as a coincidence. His second victory after all indicates that American society has definitely turned away from the ideals on which it was founded.

At first glance, these are American troubles, but everything that happens in the USA, to a lesser or greater extent, spills over into the whole world.

A hint of a perfect storm

For the Western Hemisphere, Trump's return to the White House means a powerful blow to all liberal values ​​that could turn out to be fatal. His victory showed that tolerance, openness of societies, international solidarity - democracy in itself - is losing ground.

The signatory of these lines is not a fan of America and American interventionism, on the contrary. But the kind of stability of the world that was being built since the end of the Second World War has never needed more the kind of America that for decades, with all its not-so-small flaws, was a symbol of freedom and democracy that stood against totalitarian systems, that America that was truly great , but not as Donald Trump sees it - the land of the free where the Statue of Liberty attracted people from all over the world.

Photo: AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura

Judging by his own promises and his first presidential term, the newly elected old president will largely lead an isolationist foreign policy that will be governed exclusively by American and his personal economic interests, which will favor all non-democratic social arrangements around the world.

History follows its own logic. After decades of prosperity, Western parliamentary democracies are now at a crossroads. The political West has passed its zenith. The inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere, who enjoy the greatest prosperity and the greatest freedoms in the world, became unaware of their privileged position and began to behave in a self-destructive manner.

We live in the age of two world wars that are taking place in parallel: the Russian-Ukrainian one and the Middle Eastern one. These are not world wars in the sense of the First and Second, but they are global confrontations because a large number of countries from different continents and NATO are involved in them. At the same time, liberal democracy is weakening in Europe, from which various belligerent, narrow-minded, populist movements and parties with national flags are taking out one stone at a time. Conservatism has been redefined, while left-wing internationalist ideas about equality and social justice fade more and more under the onslaught of neo-capitalism.

In such circumstances, from the beginning of the presidential campaign, Trump's victory seemed almost like a historical inevitability - as the final introduction to a new historical cycle, as the last part of the equation that was missing to start a perfect storm in the world.