Got it in one- I've said much the same myself.
Trump and the assorted scum around him being in power *is* a problem in itself. But the problem, even if all those people were to drop dead tomorrow and be replaced by others less awful, it doesn't change the fact that the majority of the US electorate at the 2024 presidential election either voted for Trump or were okay or indifferent enough at the prospect of him winning that they didn't bother to vote against him.
There's no excuse the second time round that they didn't know what type of person Trump was or what he was planning to do. (*)
If the US had clearly accepted that it made a mistake after Trump 1 and demonstrated that Trump was unelectable after the January 6 attacks, that would have been one thing. But neither of those were clearly the case- it was clear very quickly that support for Trump hadn't died and that there was a real chance of him getting back into power.
Trump is- perversely for someone who built his career on cosplaying an idiot's stereotype of a dealmaking businessman (**)- not someone you can do business with.
The self-proclaimed "dealmaker" whose "deals" are worthless because he goes back on them after five minutes. Whose constantly changing and capricious tariffs make "doing [actual] business" with the US not worth the hassle, who costs huge amounts of other countries' attention, diplomacy and political capital to deal with, only for the results of that to be rendered irrelevant within no time.
The person who threatened to take Greenland by force.
Only an idiot would risk tying economic future and military security on a person like that and the country that saw fit to put him in power.
Problem is that Europe made a huge, short-termist mistake by letting itself get into that position over the past thirty years. This was already a mistake before Trump got in, it just took someone like him being elected- particularly the second time(!)- to make that mistake and the consequences of it obvious.
Now it has to get out of it.
That's not going to happen overnight, but it has to happen because there is no alternative.
(*) Not that it wasn't already transparently obvious the first time round what sort of person he was or that he was clearly unfit to be president.
(**) Never forget that Trump is a failed businessman who was only ever able to spend his life doing this because he inherited a shitload of money from his slumlord father in the first place... and ended up no better off than he would have been had he put it in a tracker fund and done *nothing* else.
