US Presidential: Why Trump Was "A Really Important President"

INTERVIEW

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Emmanuel Todd, French demographer and historian, was the guest of Europe 1 on Saturday.

He considers, a little against the tide, that Donald Trump, whether or not he is reelected to the presidency of the United States, will not have been a parenthesis but a "really important president" who will leave behind him a political legacy.

The isolationism, the protectionism he has brought up to date in the United States, is in fact inherited from Obama.

But the hostility towards China that he "dramatized" will continue, according to him.

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"Its great victory is China"

“Trump, in his relationship to the outside world, formalized and dramatized a turning point that had been taken since Obama. The first protectionist measures for the orders of the State, the disengagement of Europe, the shift towards the Pacific and China foreign policy ... ", details Emmanuel Todd, who notes, however, that" Obama did not have the courage of Trump to disengage from the Middle East ".

According to him, "in a lot of dimensions, Trump is a more determined Obama and I don't think all of that will go away."

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Especially since according to the historian, the Democrats "have defined themselves so much by a pure anti-Trumpism that they do not have a lot of substance. Me, I think that many orientations dramatized by Trump will remain" .

Among these orientations, its "fight" against the rise in power of China. 

In 2016, recalls Emmanuel Todd, Trump was already speaking "of this America where the death rate was increasing among whites aged 45 to 54 with an industry collapsing under Chinese competition. And that was the correct diagnosis".

Thus, "his great victory, I think, is China, because he entered the debate with a violent hostility of a commercial nature towards this country" which according to him "has destroyed American jobs, and is behind the mortality increases in question - it has been written, demonstrated in papers, "argues the historian.

Report to China "will shape world politics for years"

This "anti-China" attitude has since become widely democratized.

"Trump was eventually joined by the American geopolitical establishment, which saw that China was a threat in terms of power and thus ultimately hostility to China or the perception of China as a main adversary became transpartisan. ".

So much so that today the trend is global, he says.

"China appears, outside the United States, in Europe and everywhere, as a totalitarian threat. The relationship with China is the thing that will structure world politics for years. And it was Trump who accepted and dramatized this made".

Thus, concludes Emmanuel Todd, without going "so far as to say - style prevents it - that he will have been a great president", Trump will however have been "a really important president, yes".