I was curious how people in other countries — particularly our European allies — view the man who, despite having been convicted of 34 felonies and indicted for more, could be America’s next president. Fortunately for me, I was reading The Week magazine and it has a section called “How They See Us,” where the “They” refers to other countries.

Featured in the current edition are excerpts from articles by Marina Hyde in The Guardian, Piotr Smolar in Le Monde, Karl Doemens in Redaktions Netzwerk Deutschland, and Tim Stanley in The Telegraph.

Hyde pointed out that Donald Trump has become the United States’ first president to come from reality TV, the first to refuse to concede an election, the first to lead an insurrection, and now the first convicted of a crime. In most Western democracies, a felony conviction would be disqualifying in the eyes of voters, if not in the letter of the law.

Hyde wonders what has become of America. Trump’s convictions might actually boost Trump’s chances of winning in November — immediately after the verdict, polls showed his odds above 50 percent for the first time. Have Trump’s years of lying, badgering, conniving, and conspiracy theorizing so degraded political debate and public life that half of Americans can actually see him as a “political prisoner” and democracy itself as their enemy?

That the Republicans won’t drop Trump as a candidate speaks to the “moral and ethical degeneration” of the party, said Le Monde’s Piotr Smolar. Since the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, the GOP has become a cult of personality, filled with sycophants who worship at the altar of MAGA. Trump was impeached for inciting the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, but he wasn’t convicted, because Senate Republicans stood by him. It was a shocking display of partisanship over patriotism.

Germany’s Karl Doemens wrote, “Trump should have been behind bars long ago,” and it’s an indictment of all American political institutions — and especially American voters, who continue to support him — that he is still a viable candidate. The guardrails have utterly failed to prevent “the law-breaker and would-be autocrat from taking over.”

Even The Telegraph’s Tim Stanley, who is generously sympathetic toward Trump, said that now that the verdict is in, the November election has become “a referendum on whether Trump should go to prison or the White House.” If Trump wins, Stanley continues, “America gets a president with a rap sheet,” a national humiliation. If he loses, he will claim victory anyway and there will surely be violence. “Whatever the outcome, America will lose.”

It’s sad how America’s standing in the world has diminished so dramatically since Trump threw his hat “bigly” into the political ring back in 2015. As Marina Hyde wrote, “It’s been a wild ride in America over the last nine years.”

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