United States embassies across Europe were not planning to party on election night. Staffers headed home instead of gathering around the television at work, swapping stories and sharing libations as they have in elections past.
With a victory by former President Donald Trump increasingly likely and predicted the diplomatic establishment is seeing 2016 all over again when Trump soundly defeated Hillary Clinton and promised to drain the swamp and defeat the Deep State in Washington.
“I don’t think there was appetite to watch another Trump victory,” a senior European diplomat told Politico, explaining that Trump’s win in 2016 had “calamitous” effects on the party mood. Former US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power remembered in her autobiography that she invited all the female UN ambassadors to a private election night party in anticipation of Clinton becoming the first female president and watching it all collapse. It doesn’t look like it’s Vice President Kamala Harris’ year either.
For an American diplomatic world that leaned heavily towards the Democrats in 2016 as it does now, a Trump victory was, and is, seen as a right-wing populist backlash to be feared, not applauded.
The embassy titans are not staying up late Tuesday night to be disappointed by Trump’s reelection or seen sobbing with a Martini. Only the US Embassy in Rome has planned for a party. If the blatant ideological bias of the ambassadors and their staff seems surprising, even outrageous, it’s because of the prevalence of political patronage in the diplomatic corps and due to President Joe Biden having appointed so many to their current jobs, Politico noted.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy in London told Politico that it “appreciates the long-standing energy and excitement around U.S. presidential elections which have been carried out over nearly 250 years of democracy,” while it appreciates how “election day does not end on election night. Time may be required to count votes and let the electoral process work.”
Though the process didn’t work well for Trump in 2020, he appears to have captured enough of the hearts and minds of American voters to become only the second person to win the presidency twice in non-consecutive terms, the other being Grover Cleveland. But his Make America Great Again message will not be any more popular to European liberals than it was the first time.
