EUROPE: Trump is the America they love to hate

Je suis Donald?   Et tu, Europa?    PB
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From Politico.com:

Trump fits many perceived European stereotypes of America: excess, vulgarity, ignorance, superficiality, love of wealth, to name a few.

“Trump represents the America that we love to hate,” said Marie-Cécile Naves, a sociologist and author of “Le nouveau visage des droites américaines” (“The New Face of the American Right”).

“He is our negative mirror image, a man we see as brutal, who worships money and lacks culture — someone who lets us feel a bit superior about being European...”

In France, editorialist Alexandre Vatimbella called him a “provocative clown” whose brand of populism was dangerous for democracy, while Germany’s newspapers have reached a consensus around the label “Großmaul,” or loudmouth.

A YouGov poll this week showed that two-thirds of Germans had a negative view of him.

And the commentary written about Trump in Europe’s newspapers, from Paris to London to Berlin, is almost uniformly disparaging.

One source of irate fascination is Trump’s bombastic, frequently insulting verbal style.

While European politicians are not immune to controversial outbursts (Berlusconi once drew criticism for describing Barack Obama as “tanned”), few compare with the ad hominem vehemence of Trump, who called TV host Rosie O’Donnell a “fat pig” and said that a lot of Mexican immigrants were “rapists and criminals.”

If Trump had said such things in France, where free speech is constrained by laws of propriety, he could have faced prosecution for proffering public insults or inciting racial hatred.   Which makes his outbursts, no matter how offensive, more newsworthy here.

At times Trump has deliberately sought attention in Europe, using his favorite tools: Twitter and provocation.

In January, after the Charlie Hebdo terrorist shootings in France that killed 12, Trump tweeted that the victims might have survived if only they had been carrying guns.

The comment triggered a volley of insulting replies on Twitter (“gros con!” — “moron”), but it also put Trump on the French media radar.

In Germany, where there is great suspicion for the very wealthy, much attention is paid to Trump’s money.

The left-leaning Tageszeitung newspaper described him as the “incarnation of the ugly American,” while the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung focused on Trump’s penchant for insult, comparing him in a profile last Sunday to Dieter Bohlen, a German singer who has been criticized for saying mean things about participants on a TV talent show (“You sing like a garden gnome on ecstasy,” etc.).

Most coverage of Trump in Europe deals with him as if he were an alien phenomenon from Planet America.

But as his poll numbers keep rising, Europeans have also started to think how Trump-ism applies in their countries, giving rise to an array of Trump-is-just-like-our-X comparisons...
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Link: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/trump-europe-213141