(*This opinion / analytical article was written by Ivan Dikov for The European Views website.)

Somehow Donald J. Trump seems to be on his way out of the White House some time by early 2021. The ripple effect from his one-term “reality show” presidency is going to be hovering around US and world affairs for quite some time. And European and EU affairs, for that matter.

Trump’s close election loss massively aided by the coronavirus pandemic and the existence of a mail-in voting option in American democracy (apparently hardly so by election rigging and fraud as his tweets allege) has led many in Brussels, Berlin, and other power centers of the EU to let out a big sigh of relief.

The problem is that the sigh of relief is coming from complacent elites from the pre-Trump era whose moral failures, elitism extremes, and unfettered globalization delusions caused Trump’s rise in the first place.

Even with Trump now more or less out of the picture, those Westerns elites, which are the same thing on both sides of the Atlantic for the most part, in the EU as in the US, do not epitomize a return to the “status quo ante”.

Their integrity and capacity to lead of any sorts were already highly questionable even before they had brought about Trump, and are even more so today.

Yet, just as in the United States, many in the European Union are willing to dismiss Trump as a one-time anomaly, a very unpleasant pathology which kind-of just happened, nobody knows why, but, luckily, has now been removed surgically, and everybody can go back to their complacent pre-pathology lives.

In Europe, even more so than in the US, there seems to be very little inclination to look at Trump’s stint as an American president as a foreboding alarm bell, a wake-up call, and overall a very grave warning.

A warning that things shouldn’t go back to their pre-Trump old normal. (They won’t go back anyway.)

And that’s not even mentioning that his election loss by a thread must be seized even more so in the EU to reflect upon the trove of opportunities presented by the Trump presidency that the [European] Union has once again missed.

For the fact of the matter is that Donald J. Trump’s term as president of the United States of America was good for the European Union. Or could and should have been good.

Trump was a blessing in disguise for the EU. Or could and should have been so – had the EU taken advantage.

Read the rest of this article on The European Views website here

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