Dear Commons Community,
New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd interviewed Gérard Araud, who has been the French ambassador to the United States since Ronald Reagan. He offers a bouquet of blunt assessments as he retires from his position and moves to New York City. Here is an excerpt:
“In his exit interview, the departing French ambassador blithely blasted Donald Trump as a whimsical, unpredictable, uninformed Sun King. He also blasted politicians and the media for hyperventilating about Trump.
“You have a city that feels frightened and personally attacked by Trump,” he told me. “At every dinner, you have anecdotes about Donald Trump. And you leave Washington, D.C., and you can spend two days in Seattle and Chicago and nobody says the word ‘Trump.’”
I had several long talks with the charming and bracingly blunt Araud as he packed his belongings… At 66, he is starting fresh in Manhattan. He’s writing a memoir and may be joining Attias, a communications firm.
The diplomat, whose career spanned Reagan to Trump, played de Tocqueville for me, analyzing our Trump hysteria: “I’m using the Chinese saying, ‘When the finger is showing the moon, the fool is looking at the finger and the wise man at the moon.’ In a sense, Trump is the finger. I do think Washington, D.C., is much too obsessed by the finger and should look at the crisis” revealed by the 2016 election.
He said that he pointed out to Democrats in the whiny wake of that election that their own statistics should have shown them that many Americans felt economically shaky.
“I do think the genius — and I’m using the word genius — of Donald Trump is to have felt the crisis,” he said.
Araud noted that Republicans are now “Trumpified.”
“You had a Republican Party that was really free trade, interventionist in foreign policy, connected to budgetary restraint,” he said. “And suddenly you have a Republican Party that is shifting to protectionism, nationalism, defense of the identity. Exactly the same thing is happening to conservative parties across the Western democracies. Social democracy is in a coma in Europe, so I do think the elections in 2020 will be totally fascinating in America because the Democratic Party will be obliged to answer the question, ‘What does it mean to be on the left in America?’”
Like Democrats in 2016, Emmanuel Macron underestimated the resentment bubbling under the surface, he said: “He has been largely elected by the included against the excluded. And he has not been able to widen his appeal beyond basically the people who feel comfortable in a global world.”
He sees similarities between Macron and Barack Obama. “I think they are hyper-rational and it can be seen as patronizing by a lot of people,” he said. “In a sense, even, they despise passions.” Smiling, he said both men are “too slim” and “too elegant” to relate to the man on the street.”
Interesting insights!
Tony
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