Votes in Canada, Australia and Albania laid bare the limits to the appeal of Trump-ism as his policies sow uncertainty across the globe.
When top figures in Donald Trump’s orbit descended on a small town in southeastern Poland this week to rally support for the right-wing candidate in that country’s presidential election on Sunday, they put MAGA’s ambitions abroad on full display.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Karol Nawrocki “just as strong a leader” as Trump, declaring “he needs to to be the next president of Poland.” Matt Schlapp, chair of the pro-Trump Conservative Political Action Conference, which hosted the gathering, said electing candidates like Nawrocki is “so important to the freedom of people everywhere,” while John Eastman, who aided Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, said Poland under Nawrocki would play “a critical role in defeating [the] threat to Western civilization.”
But if the conservative confab ahead of Poland’s vote was an indication of how hard Trump’s allies have been working to expand the MAGA brand across the globe, the results of recent elections, including in Romania, Poland and Canada, suggest Trump’s influence in some cases may not be helping.
Why actually go somewhere when you can just coordinate propaganda via bots on their social media?
Because some countries have populations that do more than sit at home eating and blindly trusting whatever their screen tells them is the truth.
Like Rwanda. They listen to the radio.
True. Or in most of Europe, where it’s harder to convince people the sky is falling when they can just walk out of their front door and ask anyone on the street if that’s true.