Europeans are obsessed with Donald Trump The loud-mouthed billionaire businessman embodies what Europeans love to hate about the U.S.

PARIS — The media here has got a Continental strain of Trump fever.

Since the real estate mogul made a shocking surge to the top of the Republican presidential polls in the U.S., Europe has fixated on the unapologetic showman, churning out a steady stream of news coverage and commentary.


On Thursday, France’s Libération newspaper devoted its entire front page to a photo of a snarling Donald, with an inch-high headline that read: “Donald Trump — The American Nightmare.”

The Continent has its share of outrageous personalities on the political right of center: Britain’s Nigel Farage, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, France’s family Le Pen. But 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 Europe’s capitals, feelings of superiority sometimes translate as concern for an ignorant American public that Trump, described by Britain’s Observer newspaper as a “malign buffoon,” is supposedly exploiting. “His constituency is ignorance,” the Observer wrote on Aug. 9 in an unsigned editorial. “In this, he is heir to a long, inglorious American tradition.”

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.

His brand of politics-as-entertainment, in which a scathing one-liner is always better than a boring policy idea, may not be as alien to Europe as many commentators suggest.

In Britain, The Donald is likened to Jeremy Corbyn, who’s favored to win the current race to lead the Labour Party. Though Corbyn is on the further reaches of the left, their embrace of “simplistic populism” supposedly unites the two men.

In Italy, he evokes Berlusconi. Both stand at the head of a business empire (media for Berlusconi; real estate for Trump), employ elaboratehair treatment, share a taste for simple language. While Berlusconi is known for bunga-bunga parties involving prostitutes, Trump sells himself as a Bible-loving man (“It’s my favorite book,” he likes to repeat), though thrice married.

In France, Trump is mentioned in the same sentence with another thrice-married politicians who has an eye for the bling, former President Nicolas Sarkozy, or with ex-National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen during the 1980s, when he sported a flashier dress style.

All of these comparisons lead Europeans to a distressing thought: It is only a matter of time before we get a Trump of our own.

There is little chance the man himself would seek to emigrate. Trump’s chief interests in Europe are his five-star hotel and golf resort in Doonbeg, Ireland (“an unparalleled opportunity to experience luxury accommodations,” its website says), and the Scotland of his forebears, which he frequently invokes in musing about “how far we’ve come.”

But Trump-ism — his brand of politics-as-entertainment, in which a scathing one-liner is always better than a boring policy idea — may yet become the next big American import to Europe, after McDonald’s and Mickey Mouse.

Look out for French intellectuals proposing to ban Donald Trump as culturally toxic.

That will show he’s truly arrived.

Janosch Delcker and Matthew Karnitschnig in Berlin, Alex Spence in London and Jacopo Barigazzi in Brussels contributed reporting to this article.

