Trump wasn't invited, but his presence was felt
ATLANTA >> The two-day Republican gathering in Atlanta was supposed to be something of a Trumpfree zone.
The host, conservative commentator Erick Erickson, did not include former President Donald Trump in the confab, and instead conducted 45-minute fireside chat interviews with six of his rivals for the Republican nomination. He told the crowd Friday that Trump, and the criminal indictment handed down against him Monday just 10 miles away, would not be a topic of discussion.
“We've got six presidential candidates — two governors, two senators, two members of Congress,” said Erickson, who is based in Georgia. “I want to ask them about policy questions.”
But even as the featured politicians tried to make their own cases without mentioning the former president, also the party's current front-runner for 2024, his influence — and stranglehold over the Republican primary race — were palpable.
Former Vice President Mike Pence sidestepped a question about how he would close the polling gap with Trump. Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina who served as United Nations ambassador under Trump, thinly complimented the former president even as she explained why she was running against her former boss. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Trump's closest rival, said he hoped that the party would focus more on the future than “some of the other static that is out there.”
On and offstage, participants and attendees alike said they believed that defeating President Joe Biden would not be possible as long as the party repeated Trump's assertions that the 2020 election was stolen.
Georgia will play a pivotal role in the outcome of the general election, both because of recent election outcomes and because the state has the jurisdiction in the most recent Trump indictment. It's why current and former state officials have been vocal about their belief that having Trump at the top of the ticket risks delivering a message that is more focused on 2020 election denialism than policy — one that could hurt their chances of winning in the key battleground state.
“It should be such an easy path for us to win the White House back,” said Gov. Brian Kemp, one of the few figures who was asked about and who directly addressed Trump. “We have to be focused on the future, not something that happened three years ago.”
Trump is expected to skip the first Republican debate this week and post an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that night instead. He still has a solid, doubledigit lead over his rivals, according to recent state and national polls.
At the weekend event, themed “Forward: Which Way,” attendees saw a chance to hear voices other than Trump's. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is in single digits in most national polls, vowed to give governors more power in federal decisions and stayed true to his positive, faith-based message. DeSantis gave highlights from his family's recent campaign trip to the Iowa State Fair while emphasizing the policies he has passed in Florida. Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and author who has received attention recently from voters and rivals alike, spoke of a “revolution” in changing how the federal government operates.
Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Trump's most vocal critic, largely avoided mention of the former president but later railed against him to reporters outside the event, calling him “a coward” for not joining the debate Wednesday, adding, “He's afraid of me, and he's afraid of defending his record.”
Though many in the crowd expressed frustration over Trump's legal troubles, they also said that Monday's indictment was little more than a politically motivated sideshow that distracted from larger policy issues.
Electing a candidate who can defeat Biden in the general election remained their chief goal — one that many attendees said would be challenging if Trump's campaign message focused more on his 2020 grievances instead of policy.
“Honestly, we need a new generation,” said Lyn Murphy, a Republican activist who attended Friday's gathering. “We've got a great bench.”
BERLIN >> For most European governments, it is almost too upsetting to think about, let alone debate in public. But the prospect that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination for the presidency and return to the White House is a prime topic of private discussion.
“It's slightly terrifying, it's fair to say,” said Steven Everts, a European Union diplomat who is soon to become the director of the European Union Institute for Security Studies. “We were relieved by President (Joe) Biden and his response to Ukraine,” Everts said, “but now we're forced to confront the Trump question again.”
Given the enormous role the United States plays in European security, he added, “We now have to think again about what this means for our own politics, for European defense and for Ukraine itself.”
The talk is intensifying as Trump — despite the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election; and his various indictments — is running well ahead of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination and is neck and neck with Joe Biden in early opinion polls.
In general, Central Europeans are more convinced that they can manage a second Trump presidency, but Western Europeans are dreading the prospect, especially in Germany, about which Trump seems to feel significant antipathy.
During his presidency, Trump threatened to pull out of NATO and withheld aid to Ukraine as it struggled with a Russian-backed insurgency, the subject of his first impeachment. He ordered the withdrawal of thousands of U.S. troops from Germany, a move later overturned by Biden, and spoke with admiration of President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
Today, with Europe and Russia locked in conflict over Ukraine, and Putin making veiled threats about nuclear weapons and a wider war, the question of the U.S.' commitment takes on even greater importance. Trump recently said that he would end the war in a day, presumably by forcing Ukraine to make territorial concessions.
A second Trump term “would be different from the first, and much worse,” said Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, a former German government official who is now with the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. “Trump has experience now and knows what levers to pull, and he's angry,” he said.
Kleine-Brockhoff said he remembered talking with then-Chancellor Angela Merkel the night she returned from her first meeting with Trump as president. As usual, she was “all about managing the man as she had managed dozens of powerful men,” he said. “But no one will think” they can manage “Trump Two.”
For many European officials, Biden restored the continuity of the U.S.' commitment to Europe since World War II: a dependable, even indispensable, ally whose presence eased frictions among former European rivals and allowed the continent to cohere, while providing an ironclad security guarantee.
In the view of Trump and his supporters, that relationship allowed Europe to shirk spending on its own defense, a resentment that fueled Trump's threats to reduce or withdraw U.S. commitments.
“The NATO alliance is not a treaty commitment so much as a trust commitment,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO. Given the doubts Trump raised in his first term, his return as president “could mean the end of the alliance, legally or not.”
In conversations with Europeans, Daalder said, “they are deeply, deeply concerned about the 2024 election and how it will impact the alliance. No matter the topic, Ukraine or NATO cohesion, it's the only question asked.”
Jan Techau, a former German defense official now with Eurasia Group, said that in the worst case, a United States that turned its back would set off “an existential problem” for Europe at a moment when both China and Russia are working avidly to divide Europeans.
Absent U.S. engagement, “there would be a destructive scramble for influence,” he said.
For Germany, Techau said, there would be the difficult question: Should Berlin be the backbone of a collective European defense without the Americans, or would it try to make its own deal with Russia and Putin?
France most likely would try to step in, having long advocated European strategic autonomy, but few believe it can provide the same kind of nuclear and security guarantee for the continent, even together with Britain, that the United States does.
President Emmanuel Macron of France has made it clear that he believes a politically polarized United States, more focused on China, will inevitably reduce its commitments to Europe. He has been pushing Europeans to do more for their own defense and interests, which are not perfectly
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So far, he has largely failed in that ambition and, given the war in Ukraine, has instead embraced a stronger European pillar within NATO. But even Macron would not welcome a U.S. withdrawal from the alliance.
“It's absolutely clear that Putin intends to continue the war, at least until the American elections, and hopes for Trump,” as does China's leader, Xi Jinping, said Thomas Gomart, the director of the French Institute of International Relations. “It could be a big shock for Europeans.”
A Trump victory, Gomart said, most likely would mean less U.S. support for Ukraine, more pressure on Ukraine to settle, and more pressure on the Europeans to deal with Putin themselves, “which we are not ready to do militarily.”
There is also concern that a Trump victory could breathe new life into antidemocratic forces in Europe. Trump's victory in 2016 gave a major boost to European populist politics, and another victory almost surely would do the same — a major worry in France, where Marine Le Pen, a farright leader, could succeed Macron.
Even in Trump's absence, the far-right Alternative for Germany, which Germany's domestic intelligence agency has under surveillance as a threat to its constitution, is for the moment the country's second-mostpopular party.
Dominique Moïsi, a French analyst with Institut Montaigne, a research organization, said a second Trump term would be “catastrophic” for Europe's resistance to populism.
Trump is a prince of chaos, Moïsi said, and with a war raging in Europe, and China open about its ambitions, “the prospect of an America yielding to its isolationist instinct” and embracing populism “is simply scary.”
Not everyone in Europe would be unwelcoming, to be sure.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary long has celebrated ties to Trump and his wing of the Republican Party. Orban and his self-styled “illiberal democracy” is considered a sort of model by the hard right, especially his defense of what he considers traditional gender roles and of religion and his antipathy toward uncontrolled migration.
In Poland, too, the governing Law and Justice party shares many of the same views and criticisms of established elites. It had excellent relations with Trump and succeeded in getting U.S. troops sent to Poland.
“The view in the government and in a large part of the strategic community here was that the worst didn't happen; he didn't sell us out to the Russians,” said Michal Baranowski of the German Marshall Fund in Warsaw, Poland.