Europe Is Done Bowing and Scraping to Trump

Mr. Schmemann, an Opinion writer, is a former Moscow bureau chief of The Times.

“When we’re serious, we don’t every day say the opposite of what we said the day before,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said last week, adding, cuttingly: “And, maybe, one shouldn’t speak every day.”

It sounded like a grown-up speaking down to an obstreperous child, and that was probably what the French president intended. The target of his admonition was, of course, Donald Trump. Mr. Macron was speaking shortly after the American president had issued another boorish rant that included rude comments about the French president and his wife.

Mr. Macron is one of the few European leaders who have dealt with Mr. Trump almost from the first day of his first term. His transition from initial deference and feigned friendship to very public rebuke reflects the degree to which respect for the American president has fallen among European leaders and their publics. Mr. Trump’s war on Iran, about which NATO allies were not consulted and in which they subsequently declined to participate, has made clear that Europeans no longer defer to Mr. Trump as the de facto “leader of the free world.”

Mr. Trump’s comments about Mr. Macron and his wife were made at an Easter lunch with Christian leaders and close allies. They were not intended for public consumption, but they somehow made it onto YouTube long enough to be downloaded and widely shared. Typical of Trump tirades, they are richly laced with grievance, malice and crudeness: In addition to mocking the Macrons, he bashes NATO and the Supreme Court. The video is especially discomfiting when Mr. Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White compares the president to Jesus Christ. (“You were betrayed and arrested. And falsely accused,” she said.)

But that luncheon talk was only a squall in a period in which Mr. Trump, fired up by an Iran war that was not going as he liked, let loose fiery threats to annihilate the country. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you bunch of crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH!” was what Mr. Trump decided to post on the morning of Easter Sunday, with “Praise be to Allah” gratuitously tacked on. On Tuesday, he declared that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” effectively threatening a grave violation of the Geneva Conventions. Eighty-eight minutes before the apocalyptic 8 p.m. deadline, Mr. Trump backed down.

There was a time when Mr. Trump’s stream of insults, falsehoods, expletives, threats and malice would have raised questions among foreign leaders as to whether Mr. Trump was being deliberately obnoxious to achieve a goal — say, to get European allies to pay more for NATO, or as a variant on the “madman theory” strategy devised by President Richard Nixon to convince rivals that the president was dangerously unpredictable. They tried to appease Mr. Trump with praise and pomp, hoping to steer him in a more productive direction.

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Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and worked as the bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations. He was editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.

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