Chinese: “The theme of Trump’s speech for running for president: I really am very rich.”
Americans are no strangers to embarrassing exports (sorry for
Grey's Anatomy and Papa John's pizza, Planet Earth!). And our political nutbaggery is no exception. But when it comes to Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, we may have outdone ourselves. The GOP frontrunner is a woman-hating reality TV star whose campaign has mostly focused on his lust for ethnic cleansing.
The global reaction to Trump mania has been a sense of disgust; Trump is the native son of a country that worships selfishness above empathy, corporate interests over justice and notoriety over prestige. As French author Marie-Cecile Naves put it to Politico, "Trump represents the America we love to hate...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 short, the rest of the world seems as flabbergasted about Trump's rise as we should be. Here's how seven other countries have reacted to his befuddling popularity.
1. Mexico Mexicans have a special right to resent Trump, given his well-documented disdain for them. He's pushed blackmailing Mexico into paying for a border fence, called undocumented Latinos "rapists" who are "bringing drugs and crime," and even vowed to implement a mass deportation of millions of undocumented people and their American children.
One July issue of Mexican comic book
El Peso Hero featured its hero slugging Donald Trump in the mug on its cover, just as Captain America once socked Hitler. Not to be outdone, Mexican artist Dalton Javier Avalos Ramirez designed a special Donald Trump piñata so people can fulfill their dreams of bashing Trump with a stick.
2. FranceFrance's
Liberation Newspaper didn't go for subtlety in its August 27 cover story, "Trump: The American Nightmare." Text that ran alongside his pink grimace declared him to be "vulgar and opportunistic." Resentment against Trump has long been
brewing in the land of brie and berets: back in January, he sparked widespread outrage when he blamed the Charlie Hebdo murders on strict gun laws. (Say
quoi?!) More recently, Trump's nationalism and tendency to make outrageous comments in the media led a columnist at
Le Figaro to dub him the American Le Pen, a comparison to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the notorious patriarch of France's far-right. Le Pen could also give Trump a master class on how to alienate practically everyone with reactionary bullshit: over the past year, Le Pen has gone off the deep end by denying the Holocaust and singing the praises of Nazi-collaborationist Vichy government occupiers who deported thousands of Jews during WWII.
Comment: The psychopathology of those who are social domination oriented is on full display when looking at the actions of the leaders of the U.S., UK, Germany, and many other countries, along with a number of leaders in finance and industry. These are people who feel good when they are hurting others. For more research on Authoritarians, see Bob Altemeyer's website, The Authoritarians, and also the following article: Moral Endo-skeletons and Exo-skeletons: A Perspective on America's Cultural Divide and Current Crisis