Μake us preferred on Google Before, nobody was with Donald Trump. After, everybody was with Donald Trump. And now, once again, nobody. Donald who? Oh, him.
This pattern did not take shape in a political vacuum. Between the before, the after and the now came the 2024 presidential election and the 2026 midterm elections. One victory and one defeat, a triumphant comeback and a crushing loss of historic proportions. The vote of a people that, according to the populist cliché, “never makes a mistake” at the ballot box, and the vote of the same people who two years later corrected their mistake.
Before the 2024 election, nobody was with Donald Trump. The hillbilly who would become his vice president wondered in a private conversation whether this guy “is a cynical asshole or America’s Hitler.” Publicly, in The Atlantic magazine, he saw him as “cultural heroin.” After, at the Munich Security Conference, JD Vance appeared more royalist than his king. And now he blames the defeat on the greatest of his king’s follies: the war.
The wealthy and powerful in the United States followed the same curve. Before, the tech bros bowed to the totem of woke culture and, at least until the odds tilted in Trump’s favor, jewels in the crown of the press such as The Washington Post did their job without interference from their super-rich owner. But after? In November 2024, Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel told it like it was: Elon Musk’s support for Trump, he said, gave “significant political cover” to others in his industry to speak out. Goodbye woke, forget the inclusion exercises at big corporations, along with the green sustainability goals.
Not long after Trump’s second inauguration, someone wrote that in the country whose national symbol is the bald eagle, the political class looked like a dizzy chicken. Nowhere was this reality clearer than in Congress and the State Department. The legislative branch and the diplomatic corps gave in to the wave. Everyone was with Trump, even if they weren’t. With his unfulfilled peace deals in Ukraine and his supposed military strolls in the Middle East.
Despite the ocean between us, the same before, after and now curve was also recorded in our own country. Before, a law on same-sex marriage was passed and hydrocarbons were abandoned in favor of the green transition. In February 2021, from the floor of Parliament, Kyriakos Mitsotakis condemned “Trumpism” (albeit the “left-leaning” kind), speaking of “practices that were condemned in the U.S.” But after, the marriage law was all but disowned, hydrocarbons returned as an El Dorado, and he himself gave two interviews to Breitbart, a far-right pillar of Trumpism, along with a promise: “You can certainly expect that he will have a good time,” he replied when asked about a possible visit by the American president to Athens. And now? “You can’t buy an election, however rich you are,” he said of the midterm results and the $400 million Musk gave to Republican candidates. Anatomy of a defeat? No, a clear jab.
If the prime minister’s pirouettes answered to the needs of some kind of realpolitik, the image of politicians crowding around Kimberly Guilfoyle served nothing but the grotesque. Everyone was with her because his ambassador was the one who “whispered in Trump’s ear,” or so we thought. And now? Kimberly who? Welcome to the 51st State of the U.S.
