When Donald Trump won the American presidency last November, the European establishment slipped from deep funk (over Brexit, terrorism, euro troubles, migration, populism) into full depression.

Six months later, the dark jokes about political suicide watches still resonate. They're just not directed at Continental Europeans.

This week, on his first trip abroad, the U.S. President is meeting a changed Continent. The mood has swung — wildly, some might say manically — to confidence veering toward giddiness.

Is it Brussels or Washington that today resembles a "hellhole" (in the bon mot from Trump's campaign that so many have gleefully recalled)?

In contrast to its Anglo-Saxon interlocutors — Trump and Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May who, to be generous, both look a lot more politically wobbly than a few short weeks ago — Europe's famously dysfunctional leadership is positively chipper.

Mood swings, like political swings, happen quickly. This one could sweep back just as rapidly. But for now, to the pleasant surprise of the fervent defenders of the post-war "European project," the Continent's Cassandras have been muted by the events of this spring.

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When your travels take you around Europe, as the new American leader's will have on this tour, you see fewer signs of the political and economic stagnation that the Continent's not-completely-unjustified reputation for political and economic stagnation would lead you to expect.

Start in Frankfurt, where almost a dozen sleek new towers — none branded Trump — are filling out the skyline of the business district. Germany’s financial center feels, unnoticed even by many of its own inhabitants, ripe for takeoff, ready to emerge as a truly European financial cluster. A veteran of the scene points at one sprouting highrise to note that its owners won’t even talk to prospective clients who aren’t interested in at least taking 10 floors.

Germany’s humming economy, which created 4.5 million jobs in the past six years and is near full employment, is the primary engine driving the city's transformation. Now comes Brexit. As it threatens — to London's dawning dismay — to send many well-paid jobs out of the City, Frankfurt is the destination at the top of the list.

To businesspeople here, Prime Minister May's Brexit-means-hard-Brexit is an act of sheer insanity, “an amputation,” as one puts it. And not because it is a rejection of "European values" and liberalism — such airy notions hold little currency for the practical Germans — but because of what it'll cost the U.K. in lost trade and income.

"Brexit is the way for us to find a new will and sense of common purpose” — Alfonso Dastis, Spanish foreign minister

Then come to Madrid or Dublin, until recently synonymous with collapsing banks and bursting bubbles. Both feel like they're back and roaring. The Irish economy expanded 5.2 percent last year, and even if Brexit is causing headaches in Dublin, with Britain's departure the city is set to become a back office for the accountants and lawyers who service European finance.

Spain is enjoying a large dose of political and economic calm after a difficult decade. Its foreign minister, Alfonso Dastis Quecedo, who previously served as Spain’s representative to the EU, allows — as cautiously as any diplomat would — that the painful shocks to the EU body of recent years could make it stronger in the end.

“Brexit may end up being a blessing in disguise,” Dastis says. “It may end up giving unity that was missing. In part, it was the same with the Soviet Union, which was an external [unifying threat] … Maybe Brexit is the way for us to find a new will and sense of common purpose.”

Britain as the new Soviet Union? That may not go down well in London. But then the British capital seems too consumed by political turmoil and unfamiliar stirrings of self-doubt and creeping decline to notice such slights from across the Channel.

It's the same sense of doubt and decline that defined Paris for the first part of the 21st century. Now politics, along with embers of economic revival, has brought a new spring to the French step, giving its capital a mood to match its physical beauty.

The season's sun certainly helps. But it's the election as president of 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron — Europe's own Justin Trudeau with a proper French accent — that has made the city's new atmosphere.

If Macron manages to fix the tax system, overhaul the labor laws, lure back hundreds of thousands of smart, rich French exiles, get along with Germany and remake the EU — if, if, if ...

Macron wouldn't be the first recent leader to fail to match up to French expectations. But for two-thirds of the country, and for the leaders of EU, it is enough that he defeated the National Front’s Euro-bashing Marine Le Pen. “Abyss averted,” is the phrase most often heard.

Even Jean-Claude Juncker is on a political winning streak.

Finally, finish up in gray, much-maligned, underappreciated, quirky Brussels. The mood has gone with the dreary weather since at least 2005, when the rejection of the EU's constitution, by the very voters whom the Euro-elites claim to serve, delivered the first of many hard shocks to come. As recently as this winter, most dinner parties turned into counseling sessions. “Can I allow myself to think I’ve wasted decades of my life by working here?” asked one senior British Eurocrat, on verge of retirement, leaving the question unanswered. Commission officials, normally brimming with confidence, turned to journalists — of all people — for reassurances that everything wouldn't fall apart.

Here’s a real news flash: Brussels is having a good year. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, whom Trump met on Thursday, is on a bit of a political winning streak. The Dutch and French voters did their part by rejecting populists. The EU economy is doing better, at least by its relatively modest standards.

And Juncker, along with Council President Donald Tusk, have pulled off their own trick: to give the appearance that the 27 EU members who will remain after Britain leaves are united and committed to the “project” to build Europe free and whole. And that Brexit and Trump, which in their minds seemed ready to combine into a possibly fatal threat to the Western liberal order, may in different ways actually reinforce it.

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Hubris has, of course, undone Europe many times before. But that's not in the air, not yet. The feeling is of relief and guarded not-pessimism.

For sure, the EU's structural problems are all there. The latest and still inconclusive wrestling match over Greece’s eternal bailout this week was another reminder that the eurozone is a vulnerable place. Italy is a mess; politics in Hungary and Poland continue to cause Euro-grandees headaches; and the democratic deficit in Brussels, the north-south tensions, and the demographic time bomb are lying in wait, as always.

Most of the improved spirits might be chalked up to one big thing: the problem cases in the West aren't, for a change, on this side of the Atlantic (or Channel).

We’re talking about moods and appearances. Then again, that's political reality, especially these days. Trump and May look a bit smaller, so they must be. And Europe is up — a sentence anyone who has followed the Continent for years would be shocked to commit to ink or pixels.

Matthew Kaminski is executive editor of POLITICO’s European edition.