While Europe’s politicians learnt their lesson from 2017 and appear to have decided to play nice in public with the incoming President Trump second term, the continent’s legacy media feels no such restraint and morning-of-inauguration coverage is loaded with dire predictions, accusations, and even unfavourable comparisons to dictators.
While the top story slots for Europe’s newspapers on Monday morning were reserved for the news and images of the Israel hostage deal, as the morning ground on and the clock counted down to Trump-hour these stories were rapidly displaced with inauguration content, with many publications incapable or unwilling of hiding their content for the results of American democracy.
In the United Kingdom, The Guardian sets the tone that could immediately be seen in left-liberal newspapers continent-wide, warning of the coming “Vengeful second term” and stating “the United States was bracing for a new era of disruption and division”. Drawing meaning from the plan for Trump to be sworn in under the Capitol rotunda which featured on January 6th, 2021, the paper stated: “Few imagined then that Trump, twice impeached and now a convicted criminal, would set foot inside the White House again. But over the weekend the 78-year-old revelled in his improbable political comeback with supporters of his Maga (Make America great again) movement.”
Reviewing the feeling in Europe as a whole, the paper’s Diplomatic editor noted the old continent is more hostile to Trump than most other regions worldwide — citing a recent global poll that found “European anxiety about Donald Trump’s return to the White House is not shared in much of the world” — and stating: “the foreboding is great”.
German Ambassador Warns Trump Will Seek ‘Redefinition of Constitutional Order’ and Undermine ‘Democratic Principles’https://t.co/7Fwb1HMEns
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 19, 2025
Yet in the UK, as elsewhere in Europe, the publishers less aggressively opposed to Trump focussed more on procedure: the history of American presidential inaugurations, what to expect from the day ahead, and the timings of events. National newspaper of record The Times led with Trump’s comments from the night before about executive orders and the coming golden age, stating: “Trump vows to start destroying Biden’s legacy within hours”.
In France, which has a very well developed left-wing media ecosystem, Libération warns Trump is to be “Revengeful and more uninhibited than ever” in their lead, while Le Monde the editor’s pick is an op-ed comparing once and future President Trump to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Conservative-leaning newspaper Le Figaro, meanwhile, carries a guest piece by a prominent French lawyer and essayist who states the age of “democratic, open and universalist” America is now comprehensively over, and that for the rest of this century the country is to develop “oligarchic, protectionist and imperial” characteristics.
President Trump thinks and acts “like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin or Recep Erdogan”, he declares, stating President Trump is to build “an imperial America that claims the same principles as the tyrannies and autocratic regimes of the 21st century”. In this view, European states must be content to be vassal states in the new American empire, or the European Union should respond by transforming itself into an imperial power in its own right to “defend our sovereignty, our freedom and our civilization”.
This is not an uncommon point of view in Europe on any day, never mind Trump’s inauguration day: to turn the European Union, what was once merely a free trade area, into an armed and active empire is a matter of simple reflex for the progressive and globalist-minded of the continent. It is the default position for many in the capitals of Europe. In Poland, the liberal-leaning Wyborcza takes this view too, stating what doesn’t kill Europe (Trump) will only serve to make it stronger (pan-European Federal superstate).
Rzeczpospolita meanwhile publishes and absolute laundry list of everything the globalist class hates and fears about Trump, stating its view that while “Democracy and the rule of law have been the glue of the free world for eighty years”, President Trump is working to “extinguish the West”.
German newspapers are just as blunt. The progressives at Die Tageszeitung (TAZ) refer airily to the Trump government as “The Horror Clown and His Cabinet of Horrors” and decry his supporters, as well as fans of Elon Musk, as fools who confuse success with competence, appearing to tacitly imply there is some moral superiority in being a highly technically competent failure. “Many Europeans are looking forward to [the inauguration] with great trepidation”, reckons Tagespiegel, expressing its concern that “Europe will pay the price for American dissatisfaction”.
