Old Europe. New Backbone.

The bad polls just keep coming for Your Favorite President. The latest New York Times/Siena poll finds that only 32 percent of Americans believe the country is better off than a year ago, compared to 49 percent who believe it’s worse off. (Personally, we’d love to pick the brains of the 19 percent who clock it as “about the same.”)

“A majority of voters disapprove of how Mr. Trump has handled top issues including the economy, immigration, the war between Russia and Ukraine and his actions in Venezuela,” the Times reports. “And significantly, a majority of Americans, 51 percent, said that Mr. Trump’s policies had made life less affordable for them.” Happy Thursday.

Will Democrats Be as Strong as the Europeans?

by William Kristol

Can the Democrats in Congress match the performance of the Europeans in Davos?¹ Will the Democratic opposition to Trump’s assault on liberal democracy here at home be as clear-eyed, as tough-minded, as unintimidated, as the European opposition to Trump’s attack on the liberal international order abroad? We’ll see when Congress returns next week and the battle over government funding comes to a head in Washington.

In the run-up to Davos, Trump blustered and threatened. He said that he needed full control of Greenland. He announced that he’d impose 10 percent tariffs on goods from eight European countries if he were denied that control. He refused to rule out the use of military force to obtain that control. “There can be no going back,” Trump posted on Tuesday.

But, as Joshua Keating put it, Trump “seemingly went back.” The “seemingly” is important: Trump didn’t entirely rule out the use of military force. And the fact that Trump may have pulled back for now doesn’t change the fact there’s been a fundamental rupture in the post–World War II global order. The spectacle of the United States behaving like an out-and-out mob boss can’t be unseen.

But at least the Europeans realized that further appeasement of Trump was untenable, and that refusing to face reality wasn’t working. Last July, the EU agreed to a one-sided trade deal with the United States in hopes of placating the bully—and, perhaps, buying time to think up better options. Now, French President Emmanuel Macron speaks for much of the continent when he says, “Europe has very strong tools now, and we have to use them.”

And so the EU announced that it would move to suspend parliamentary approval of that trade deal. It also indicated that reciprocal tariffs against American goods were on the table. And there was talk of denying American service providers, such as tech companies, access to the European market, and even of a refusal to buy more U.S. treasury bonds.

Europeans faced bullying with strength, and the bully at least temporarily backed down.

One of the most powerful statements of European resistance came from an unlikely source, the conservative populist and Flemish nationalist prime minister of Belgium, Bart De Wever. On a panel at Davos on Tuesday, De Wever was blunt:

Until now, we tried to appease the new president in the White House. We were very lenient, also with the tariffs, we were lenient, hoping to get his support for the Ukraine war. We were in a very bad position at the moment, we were dependent on the United States, so we chose to be lenient.

“But now,” he continued,

so many red lines are being crossed that you have the choice between your self- respect. Being a happy vessel is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else. If you back down now, you’re going to lose your dignity, and that’s probably the most precious thing you can have in a democracy is your dignity.

The right-wing Belgian prime minister went on to paraphrase the famous remark by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “If the old is dying and the new is not yet born, then you live in a time of monsters.” “It’s up to [Trump] to decide if he wants to be a monster, yes or no,” De Wever concluded.

Of course Trump is a monster, and he’s not going to stop being one, and he has three more years in office in which to do great damage at home and abroad. But the lesson of this week was that if you want to defend the liberal international order, facing the truth works better than averting your gaze. Standing your ground is more effective than rolling over. Behaving with self-respect and defending your dignity is a better guide than calculating and calibrating various degrees of appeasement.

Do those who have the responsibility of defending liberal democracy at home understand these lessons? Will Democrats fund ICE and DHS without attaching any limitations or restrictions on their truly monstrous activities? For that matter, will they do nothing to insist on the overdue release of the Epstein files? And will they say nothing about Trump’s shameful betrayal of Ukraine?

In an age of monsters, one needs to hold firm to the guardrails of self-respect and dignity. Europeans now seem to understand that. Do Democrats?