What Trump’s voters can explain to European leaders

The study Beyond MAGA, by More in Common, recently published, forces Europeans to abandon that analytical comfort for good. What it describes is a durable transformation of American society, with structural implications for the country’s foreign policy and, by extension, for Europe.

This diagnosis fits with a well-established literature that challenges the idea of a foreign policy autonomous from public opinion. Voters’ attitudes are neither erratic nor irrelevant: they display relatively stable patterns that delimit what is politically feasible in advanced democracies. Leaders do not act in a vacuum: they interpret, aggregate and, at times, amplify pre-existing social dispositions. Trump is not an exception to this logic; he is its most visible expression.