No, Europe Won't Be Ready for Trump 2.0 Either

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock says Europe will be better prepared for a future Donald Trump presidency than it was for the “total shock” of the first. If only that were true. The reality is that nobody except the former US president and his supporters will be ready for round two, if it comes.

Baerbock is from Germany’s Green Party and a liberal by any standard, so she had exactly the right instincts on her US visit. Rather than stay in her comfort zone, visiting more-or-less like-minded Democrats and Biden administration officials, she entered the lion’s den of MAGA in Texas, meeting Governor Greg Abbott, among others.

It’s hard to picture that conversation. Abbott has supported the banning of abortion and same-sex marriage, opposed any gun control and promoted investment in fossil fuels over renewables. He’s also against the Biden Administration’s “blank check’’ policy of funding Ukraine’s defense, which Abbott says is coming at the expense of domestic needs.

So Baerbock deserves a lot of credit for trying to understand what she’d be up against. As she rightly pointed out in Sunday’s Bloomberg TV interview, foreign diplomats don’t get to pick US presidents. Trump right now looks like a good bet to win at least the Republican primary, and if he does make it all the way to the White House again, it’s very likely that a revolution in US domestic and foreign policy would follow.

The shock would be greater than in 2016, though, because Team Trump will be able to hit the ground running and the impact would be greater —in Europe as in the US. Back then, Trump had no team and few policies ready for office because nobody expected him to win. It took three years of a four-year term for him to purge the last of the so-called “adults in the room’’ — think former executives like Gary Cohn and Rex Tillerson, or military commanders like James “Mad Dog” Mattis — who as cabinet members frustrated the implementation of some of Trump’s worst ideas. Even his attempt at stealing the 2020 election didn’t work out.

So while Baerbock is right that seven years ago, no European had even imagined sitting across the table from a US president who didn’t support the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the alliance also survived. For every Trump outburst at a NATO summit, there was a US general on hand to offer reassurance. US military spending in Europe actually peaked at $6.5 billion under Trump in 2019, up from $3.4 billion in 2017, the final year of the Obama administration.