A visit to Denmark reveals how terrified people there are of Donald Trump. PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK PETERSON / REDUX

I’ve spent the past few days in Denmark, the country into which I’ve married and where, over the years, I’ve often been asked to explain what’s happening back home. Reality sometimes gets distorted by distance, as when, eight years ago, several Danes informed me that the United States would never elect a black man as President. This year, the visit was a chance to express the belief that, though Americans may practice political brinksmanship, we are not about to let loose a bomb—or probably not.

I was uneasy about this trip, because I knew that I would hear a lot and be pushed to say a lot about our Presidential election and about the bomb in question: the inescapable Donald J. Trump, the nominee of a party that, like the Democratic Party, has certainly chosen its share of poor candidates (from Warren G. Harding to George W. Bush), but never someone as goofy and possibly deranged as Trump. It’s tempting simply to opine in what the British novelist Ian McEwan (through one of his characters, in “Sweet Tooth”) called the “why-oh-why” mode. In pre-Brexit Great Britain, it was “Why-oh-why must we stagnate among the ruins of our former greatness?” In modern America, it would be “Why-oh-why has a country so large and diverse ended up with Trump?” Or why, for that matter, has it ended up with the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is neither liked nor trusted by a majority of Americans and is perhaps the Democrat most vulnerable to Trump’s loathsome and increasingly strange campaign, just as Trump is perhaps the Republican most beatable by Clinton. The only reply is that millions of Americans are asking the same question: Why-oh-why?

An election like ours probably couldn’t happen in Denmark, Bernie Sanders’s ideal nation, which has so many factions that sometimes it’s hard to figure out which party is which, and why. (For instance, although venstre means “left,” the Venstre Party leans right.) Denmark certainly has its problems, from immigration to a stifling bureaucracy, but it seems to manage pretty well. The closest Denmark comes to Trumpism is the program of the anti-immigrant Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party), which finished second in the most recent election. The liberal Social Democratic Party came in first, but its governing coalition, in aggregate, lost seats, and ceded power to a center-right partnership that includes the current Prime Minister, Venstre’s Lars Løkke Rasmussen, and the rightist, tax-cutting Liberal Alliance. Unlike Trump, though, the Dansk Folkeparti leader, Kristian Thulesen Dahl, who favors strict border controls and sympathizes with the impulse that led to Brexit, opposes the idea of discriminating on the basis of religion; his party, like the Social Democrats, favors increased benefits for Denmark’s elderly and sick. The policies and programs of Danish parties tend to soften when coalitions form, which forces compromise among opposing factions. If Dahl, Rasmussen, and the Liberal Alliance can’t keep working together, Rasmussen may be forced to call a new election.

Copenhagen, meanwhile, is being dug up to complete the Metro, a startlingly effective infrastructure project (it should be done by 2019) that takes you from the clean, modern airport to the city’s center in fifteen minutes. It’s an enormous undertaking for a small country, and any traveller coping with New York’s airports feels envious. Why-oh-why can’t the United States do that? We’ve grown accustomed to a two-party system, but perhaps it’s time for more options and more attempts at forming natural coalitions.

Friends and relatives, though, would rather talk about Trump, and want assurance that he is an aberration, even more so when his words are translated without subtlety into Danish. (A headline in the widely distributed Metroxpress read “Trump: Gun Owners Should Stop Hillary Clinton.”) In the Barry Goldwater-Lyndon Johnson race, in 1964, about which I’ve written, the Republican National Committee chairman, Dean Burch, as if anticipating years of future G.O.P. campaigns, wanted to emphasize “crime and violence in the streets—a breakdown of law and order—terrorizing our people,” and a foreign policy in which “we have weakened ourselves and permitted our enemy to make gains all over.” While not quite saying “Crooked Lyndon,” Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, called President Johnson “a wheeler-dealer, not a leader,” and accused him, with some justice, of trying to stifle the investigation of the onetime Johnson protégé Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, a former Senate page and secretary to the Senate majority, who made two million dollars when Johnson was Majority Leader. “Bobby Baker’s affairs lead right straight into the White House itself,” Goldwater said. Polls showed that seeming “trigger-happy” or “impulsive” was what most hurt Goldwater, unfairly, in his view, and he accused the Johnson campaign of charging him with “virtual madness” over his view that NATO commanders sometimes had the authority to employ tactical nuclear weapons. The charges clung to him.

The resolutely centrist broadcaster-commentator Eric Sevareid wrote that, unless the polls were altogether wrong, the 1964 election would turn out to be “another demonstration . . . that the United States is not the unstable, unpredictable and reckless political society that so much of the world likes to think it is.” Johnson, as polls predicted, went on to win by a lopsided margin, a landslide of landslides, which he seemed to interpret as a domestic mandate to pursue his Great Society programs, and, in his Commander-in-Chief role, to sink the nation ever more deeply into what was once a ruinous French colonial war in Indochina.

As for the view from Denmark, when I asked a favorite member of my extended family if she was really worried about the rise of Trump, she seemed uninterested in a possible Clinton landslide, or in Trump’s bad polls, but rather, with an alarmed look and speaking perfect Americanese, said, “I’m scared shitless.”