“The Western world has a patriotic, pro-peace, anti-migration, and pro-family president in Washington,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared on Jan. 20, the day of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, adding that “in just a few hours the sun will shine differently over Brussels.” Orbán spoke of “great enthusiasm” among Europe’s “patriots who are tried and tested and love their country,” adding that “the sick man of Europe today is the European Union… So the great attack can start. Hereby I launch the second phase of the offensive that aims to occupy Brussels.”

In an interview for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Orbán sounded even more upbeat. Thanks to Trump, he said, in just 10 days the world had changed as much as in years before. “What Trump is doing and what we have been doing in the past 15 years is the future,” he said. 

Patriots for Europe (PfE), an alliance established last summer in the European Parliament, held its first summit in the Spanish capital on Feb. 8. Jubilation reigned in the auditorium of the Madrid hotel, with a dozen European leaders addressing an enthusiastic crowd. With 86 MEPs, the PfE is the third-largest force in Strasbourg. Its slogan, “Make Europe Great Again,” is a direct reference to MAGA. 

The host, Spanish Vox Party leader Santiago Abascal, described Trump as a “comrade-in-arms in the battle for good, for truth, common sense, and freedom.” The Italian vice premier and Lega Nord leader Matteo Salvini said “Trump has shown that the common-sense revolution is possible.” Marine Le Pen, France’s National Rally head, said “the global disruption” embodied in Trump’s victory would “sound the awakening of the Old Continent.” It was not just a change at the helm of a democratic country, Le Pen said: “We are facing a truly global tipping point.”

“Our friend Trump, the Trump tornado, has changed the world in just a couple of weeks,” Orbán told the Madrid crowd. “Yesterday we were heretics, today we are the majority,” he declared. That was echoed by Herbert Kickl, leader of Austria’s Freedom Party via video link from Vienna, where he is on the way to become Austria’s new chancellor. 

Trump brings “a message of hope after years of misery, corruption, and deceit by leftist liberal elites,” said Geert Wilders, whose Party for Freedom has been in government in The Hague since last May. People have had enough of illegal, mostly Muslim immigration and “woke insanity,” he went on. “You [the Spanish] were the first who rolled back Islam and restored the rich heritage of Christianity in your country,” Wilders told the cheering crowd.

The same spirit of enthusiasm and hope is also felt among Europe’s smaller nations. Milorad Dodik, president of the beleaguered Serb Republic in Bosnia-Herzegovina—a man I know and respect—said that Europe and Western civilization are returning to their roots, tradition, family, and Christian faith. “The process of redefining Europe has begun and is now unstoppable,” he said. “Sovereignty will prevail over bureaucracy. Peoples have the right to their self-determination. We want to belong to that new Europe because the Serbian people made enormous sacrifices for those same values ​​in the 20th century.”

Croatia’s foremost right-leaning political thinker, Tomislav Sunić, who has written for Chronicles over the years, sees Trump’s victory as an opportunity for his country eventually to discard the straitjacket imposed by Brussels. “Thanks for clamping down on USAID and other US govt donors and their outgoing sidekicks at US embassies overseas,” Sunić wrote to Trump.

Further east in Serbia, the anguished gnashing of teeth by the legions of USAID-subsidized “activists” has been welcomed by the defenders of traditional family and gender roles. Miša Djurković, former director of Belgrade’s Institute for European Studies, sees Trump’s actions in the first few weeks of his second tenure as a welcome step towards the dismantling of the “dark corridors of power.”

It was in Germany, though, that the new administration has made its greatest and most critical political impact. Elon Musk has repeatedly taken aim at top German politicians on X. He called Chancellor Olaf Scholz a “fool” and Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier an “anti-democratic tyrant,” asserting that only the Alternative for Germany (AfD)—long ruthlessly demonized and ostracized by the ruling establishment—can save the Federal Republic from the immigrant deluge and left-liberal oppression.

A guest article by Musk in the mainstream German newspaper Welt am Sonntag last December, in which he praised the Alternative for Germany, caused a great stir. The “firewall” around the AfD, scrupulously observed by the German media machine for years, was blown to pieces. 

The establishment went berserk. “Political power is now increasingly easy to buy, which will cause great damage to democracy,” then-Health Minister Karl Lauterbach fumed. His party colleague, SPD General Secretary Matthias Miersch, was “shocked” that Musk was given a platform to advertise for the AfD. This “shameful and dangerous” incident shows “how far right-wing networks have now advanced,” he said. The German Journalists’ Association warned that “German media must not allow themselves to be abused as a mouthpiece for autocrats and their friends.”

AfD Co-Chair Alice Weidel subsequently invited Musk to an online interview on X. The 75-minute conversation,in which Musk reiterated his view that the AfD was Germany’s only hope, was watched by millions of people live on Jan. 9.

On Jan. 25, Musk unexpectedly addressed a hall of almost 5,000 AfD supporters via video, calling on them to preserve German culture and protect the German people. “It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” he said. “Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents.”

On Feb. 14 at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President J. D. Vance condemned the European liberal elite for stifling free speech, allowing rampant immigration, and undermining democracy. He noted Europe’s retreat from its fundamental values and warned against censoring a substantial part of its own population. He said he feared the threat to Europe from within more than that from Russia or China. This was an oration of historic significance.

Until last November, the European patriotic right had regarded the United States as a genuinely evil empire. Over the past three months, this has changed. Radically new forms of trans-Atlantic alignment, antithetical to the rogue, post-Cold-War NATO consensus, are becoming not only thinkable but potentially viable. 

A friend remarked recently that the partnership between Trump and Musk is uncannily similar to alliance of convenience between Pompey and Crassus, respectively the Roman Republic’s most powerful man and its richest man. This is an attractive but misleading parallel. In the First Triumvirate, the two used the political newcomer Caesar to promote their respective intentions, but today there is no third man.

As for Europe, the choice is no longer between Greece and Rome, it is by now about survival as a demographically, morally, and culturally recognizable entity. For that reason, to many European patriots of indubitably conservative disposition, the misgivings and doubts of some of their American counterparts concerning Trump’s “real” agenda and “true” motives seems bizarre, arcane even. They note that their kindred spirits in the U.S. are so used to the climate of treason and betrayal that they are now prone to assume, by default, that Trump is a Trojan horse of the enemy, or else the neocons’ useful idiot.

What European patriotic right sees as important—a “divine surprise,” in the words of a French member of the European Parliament—is that Trump, Musk et. al., by aptitude, by design, or both, are creating a new political equation which is fast becoming irreversible.  “Trump is a conservative by default, despite himself, which is a good thing,” Sunić told me. “This is infinitely preferable to some fanatical Antifa/DEI intellectual at the helm in Washington. Admittedly, he had to cut a deal with the neocons, however they call themselves these days: You can have Gaza; I’ll have my latitude on the home front. So be it.”

Of course, the neocons will not go gentle into that good night, but they cannot control the narrative or the course of events when those events—which they had made possible—start creating new realities. 

After Lenin’s death, the fanatical Bolshevik elite thought that Stalin—whom they despised for not being an intellectual like themselves—could be manipulated. In the following decade he had them all killed.

The industrialists of Turin and bankers of Milan thought they had it made with the March on Rome in the fall of 1922: the Red Menace would be contained, and the blackshirted parvenu would be discarded in the fullness of time. To their surprise, they had unleashed Il Duce.

The same applied to von Papen’s German national conservatives in January 1933. Less than two months later, they were outsmarted with the Enabling Act, and soon thereafter neutralized. 

The same happened to those Kemalists in Turkey who facilitated Erdoğan’s rise in the early 2000s. Within a decade, they saw Atatürk’s secular legacy comprehensively dismantled and ultimately destroyed. 

Trump is not an intellectual, which is a good thing. Our readers are well aware that this column has raised alarm about some of his foreign policy appointments, and the concern still stands. On the other hand, wittingly or not, he and his team have engendered the revival of multipolar political struggle in Europe, which until last November seemed almost suffocated by the leaden fist of the left-liberal monolith. Suddenly we are witnessing the emergence of an unexpectedly revitalized European political scene. 

Caesarist oligarchs in America, even if their endeavors risk the emergence of the principate of Augustus in some postmodern form, are greatly preferable to senile mummies or monosyllabic halfwits (like Biden and Harris) who are manipulated by the invisible deep staters of distinctly leftist-totalitarian disposition. Their counterparts in Brussels, Berlin, London, and elsewhere deserve to join them on the dust heap of history.

It is in the American interest for Europe to free itself from the shackles of self-loathing globalists and population-replacement enthusiasts. Whatever their long-term ideological and personal agenda, Trump and his team already have made an unexpectedly important contribution to that outcome. That is an achievement of potentially historic magnitude.  ◆