Why Trump?
7th May 2025
The question comes to me from more and more Europeans these days: “Do you still support Donald Trump after all of this?”
By “all of this,” they usually mean the bizarre and destructive tariffs regime the White House rolled out in April, on what Trump called “Liberation Day.” But there is more, of course: Trump’s harsh deportation regime against illegal migrants, his substantive assault on universities, his wrecking of the NATO alliance, his weird trolling of Canada (“America’s 51st State”) and Denmark, over Greenland, et cetera.
My answer is: Yes, I agree that most of this has been troubling, some more than others. So why do I, as an American conservative, still back Trump? The answer is simple: what was, and what is, the alternative? Not the ideal alternative, but the real-world alternative.
Consider where America was before Trump’s re-election.