When Macron decided to hold legislative elections last year, my hope was that the far right would win and then govern incompetently. That would have served as a message to Americans who thought that Trump would bring back the economy of 2019 instead of chaos and decline. The French did not elect the far right, however, so my theory was never tested.
Now we’re going to see the phenomenon in reverse; Trump’s tariffs and insults are going to make the dangers of voting in right-wing populists clear to European voters. The populists will have to do everything in their power to distance themselves from Trump. That, in turn, will mean that the international alliance of populists that Steve Bannon and his acolytes have been working for will never happen.
Not that it ever could. The notion of an international coalition of nationalists is logically absurd.