MANY THINGS CONSIDERED: Travel Journal No. 6 – What Europe Thinks of the American President

Homeward bound after some weeks away in Europe and I’m left with, what for me, is something rather unusual – a faint feeling of hope.

But first – this is what Europe thinks of the American president.

Crooks attract crooks

A right wing grifter and con man (sounds familiar, eh) lost the election in Brazil this week after coming in first in the initial round of voting in what seemed to be a lock on ultimate victory.

But he lost, so a bit of hope amid a world on fire.

The loser, Flávio Bolsonaro has, of course, fled Brazil ahead of the corruption police, and the Trump State Department, where all despots are welcome, issued a visa to allow him to enter our country.

This really has become country for old – and young – demagogues.

Mr. Bolsonaro is being investigated over his links to a Brazilian lawyer who is accused of laundering more than $1 billion through a scheme involving online gambling and trading, according to a court document reviewed by The New York Times.

No surprise here, I suppose, that our authoritarian regime would welcome a would-be authoritarian who is involved in big money online shenanigans.

Maybe Flávio, who apparently worked hard to rig the Brazilian election, can bunk in at Mar a Lago, our base camp for official corruption. Give him a room adjoining America’s roving ambassador of grift, Jared “the boy wonder” Kushner, the Big Orange’s creepy son-in-law.

Here’s The New Republic on his latest tiny bit of corruption

Jared Kushner was allegedly paid $50 million by a foreign government to get former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson fired.

In the new book Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, author Matthew Cole reported that the United Arab Emirates paid Kushner millions to oust Tillerson, who had allegedly become extremely cozy with the Qataris.

Hum. Qatar? Didn’t that dodgy government of oil sheiks gift the Grifter-in-Chief a fancy airplane a while back that we all paid to refurbish into a flying Cheesecake Factory?

But, back to foreign corruption.

My faint glimmer hope here rests on the fact that Bolsonaro, whose father the former Brazilian president is already in the slammer, rather decisively lost after first appearing to win. It would seem that given the opportunity to give a second thought about the future, Brazilian voters said: “Wait, just a minute …”

Sound familiar? Anyone out there is MAGA land connecting the dots? Hello?

A different kind of hope in Serbia, as Aleksandar Matkovic wrote in The Guardian:

The images from Belgrade on Sunday night – people dancing and crying in the streets, while in Novi Sad, the city that sparked the student movement, a flag bearing the image of the convicted war criminal Vojislav Šešelj, which had hung from a building since the 1990s, was torn down – reinforced the feeling that the future had truly arrived.

Serbia, not normally on the front line of the pro-democracy movement, decisively rejected a corrupt authoritarian leader with a movement led by – students.

By winning the parliamentary election, the Student List has broken the monopoly of political parties. It has become more popular than both the rightwing government and virtually all the opposition parties across the spectrum, most of which did not even win enough votes to meet the electoral threshold. Thus, the “old”, in Serbia’s case, at least, is confirmed as dead.

And what the Serbian people chose was not another party but a list of 250 candidates, 134 of whom hold PhDs, 44% of whom are women, and 135–140 of whom are now projected to enter parliament. Behind them stood an organisation unlike anything seen in traditional, leader-based political parties. In this way, “a bunch of students”, as the Economist described them, has created something that should be studied as it goes beyond the traditional ways of doing politics.

To be sure many challenges lie ahead for Serbia, not least being can a “leaderless” movement actually govern. But let’s take our hope where we can find it.

Celebrations in Serbia after an election defeating an autocrat

As Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations noted, the Serbian student movement has been a response to the same type of political corruption and oligarchy that have become, under Donald Trump, a fixture of American politics:

The student movement reflected a spontaneous mobilization of civil society that spread broadly across the country. One of the main slogans of this movement was “Serbia or the mafia,” indicating exasperation with years of corruption and state capture. The student movement now has wind in its sails and lots of political momentum. It needs to focus on turning that momentum into good policies and good governance.

At this writing it appears the election outcome in Israel will play out for days, maybe weeks. My hope is tempered here, but I do pray that Israel will find a way to step back from the path it is on of becoming an international pariah.

What does any of this portend for our own rendezvous with destiny in a few days? Who the heck knows.

It does seem that American politics is close to some kind of breaking point, but even in the best case – a major change in Congress – we are still contending with an untethered, unstable, profoundly unethical regime running the Executive Branch.

I didn’t think these fascist-adjacent clods were capable of an insurrection the first time around, I have no hope now that they won’t try something equally outrageous this time around.

The only antidote we have is the good ol’ American ballot box. Better use it while we can.

Random thoughts from the travel journal

Ireland gets my travel award for having the kindest, most engaged, most thoughtful people we encountered on this trip. From the rental car clerk to the person at the grocery store checkout line, we were treated royally, and this from a people who threw off royalty.

At my advancing age driving a standard transmission, right hand drive rental car stretches my capabilities to the max. And locating the rental car return, even with help from an occasionally frustrating Google app, is clearly beyond my pay grade.

After attempting to enter the exit to a rental car return garage in Galway a lovely Irish fella motioned me to roll down the window so he could direct me to the actual entrance a block away.

He didn’t need to stop to do this. Others – think New York perhaps – might have been annoyed by the stupidity of an out of towner. But my Irish guide just calmly led me home.

The kindness of strangers on a busy street, and on the wrong side of the road.

The maitre d’/waiter/barman/comedian at a lovely restaurant in Clifden delivered our entrees and then produced four different servings of potatoes – boiled, french fries (known as ‘chips’), mashed and a gratin.

“This is Ireland,” he said, “you get your potatoes. We had a famine, you know …”

I could go on and on and probably would if we were having a pint, but with all the challenges facing Ireland – expensive real estate, shrinking opportunities for young people, the old sectarian struggles – they sure treat we unworthy Americans well. For the most part the Irish detest what has happened to American west of Boston, but they – thankfully – don’t hold it against us in a car park or a dining room.

“To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart,” the late, great Daniel Patrick Moynihan said. That seems right.

In the meantime let’s live.

Tiny Luxembourg may be the neatest, cleanest, quietest country in Europe.

It’s not a socialist “hell hole,” not socialist at all, but there is totally free public transportation, lovely parks, minimal homelessness, great museums and libraries, and a genuine multi-cultural, international vibe. Of course there are problems – housing, cost of living, etc. – but the country, tiny as it is, works pretty darn well. And they remember their history.

One of many public parks in Luxembourg City

Luxembourg also ranks very high on measures of democratic performance – adherence to the rule of law, participation in elections, etc.

And Luxembourg may have the world’s highest concentration of leaf blowers. Those guys were out early and late managing the falling leaves of autumn.

And the highways! They are superb and you notice just how superb when you cross the border into Belgium, going from well maintained and smooth to potholes within potholes.

Is politics the answer?

Oddly enough Great Britain – and Canada – seem places where politics might actually work again. Andy Burnham, the new British prime minister, seems a regular guy. His opposition not so much.

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney has emerged, by reason of his common sense and backbone, as a genuine leader of the democratic world, so much so that the American clown who serves as ambassador to Canada had thoughts:

CTV news reported that Pete Hoekstra (the US ambassador) told business leaders (Wednesday) at a closed door meeting that if a number of swing races – including Maine and Michigan – go to the Democrats, it could make things harder for Canada because Donald Trump might try to blame the loss on it.

“That’s an interesting way of framing it,” the prime minister, Mark Carney, told reporters when asked about the allegations.

Hand slaps forehead …

France is a mess as you might have noticed, but isn’t it always? And for much the same reason, I think, that young folks rebelled in Serbia.

The future seems devoid of hope for many young people. Education is expensive, jobs are hard to find, pay doesn’t match the costs of living, much decent housing is beyond reach.

Add in the looming dystopia of AI, the vast income divide in most places, the hell hole of online gaming – something now banned in Brazil, by the way – and little wonder the kids take to the streets.

If you believe the polling – and who does – younger Americans who flirted with our own Tangerine Bolsonaro in 2024 have abandoned the Grifter Man in droves.

My final hope today is that these young people actually vote on November 3.

Democrats continue to offer them a muddled message with only occasional flashes of hope for a better future – see Jon Ossoff – but that better future only begins when we show the door to a bunch of the enablers of the Cheesecake Factory designer.

His antics, hatefulness and stupidity have embarrassed us around the world. Maybe, finally, he’s done enough damage to his fellow Americans that they say cancel my order.

Designer Donnie keeps talking about America’s Golden Age, but all he’s given us in six years is the greatest corruption spree in our history orchestrated by a demented 80-year old convicted felon who sees gold leaf as the answer to every problem.

The hell with high prices, inflation, senseless war – let’s talk about men’s rear ends.

As Barack Obama aptly notes: “these are not serious people.”

I do hope we have figured that out by now.