What Donald shares with de Gaulle They both played on national weakness

Trump and de Gaulle both ruled — in Trump’s case will probably rule again — nations in decline. In France’s case, the decline was obvious. The country was defeated in 1940. Stirring broadcasts from London and the presence of small numbers of Free French troops in the allied forces could not change this fact. Churchill was cruel when he told his foreign secretary that the number of Canadians who had shed their blood to liberate France was greater than the number of Frenchmen who had done so, but in purely statistical terms he was probably right. After the Second World War, France lost its empire and the most dramatic moment in this process came in 1962, when de Gaulle, to the bitter disappointment of a million European settlers and much of the French army, decided that France could no longer hold on to Algeria. “High Gaullism” — the period from 1962 to 1967 — was marked by flamboyant gestures in foreign policy but the territory that de Gaulle ruled was smaller than that of the Third Republic (1870 to 1940), which de Gaulle talked of with ostentatious disdain.

American decline is more complicated. It is still the richest and most militarily powerful country on Earth. Trump’s detractors make much of his chequered business career. In truth, though, Trump’s time in business was a good preparation for leading the United States in the 21st century. The USA, like the Trump Organization, inherited much from an earlier generation, which built the country’s power and prosperity after the Second World War. But the United States is living on borrowed money because it has huge debts. It is also, like Britain and France in the Twenties, living on borrowed time. The end of the Cold War brought its apparent zenith — just as the peace settlements after the First World War brought the apparent zenith of Britain and France — and no other country is yet able and inclined to challenge America as the global power. But America’s economic superiority is finished. China’s growth may have stalled in the last few years, but everyone expects it to outstrip the United States within the foreseeable future.

Trump understands the underlying weakness of his country. Hence his obsession with the Chinese challenge and his desire to stop paying for the defence of other countries. Like de Gaulle, Trump has used a smokescreen of grandiose rhetoric to cover what is really a retreat from American commitments overseas. He understands that American greatness has become an illusion to be sustained rather than a reality to be defended. De Gaulle was also an illusionist, and it is no accident that, in their very different ways, both men were products of the television age. De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic was built on the spread of television sets in the Sixties — and state control of the national broadcast — as much as Trump’s political take-off was built on cable TV and Fox News. De Gaulle’s stage-managed press conferences and dramatic addresses to the nation in moments of crisis were as contrived as Trump’s performance in The Apprentice.

When it suited him, De Gaulle would turn a blind eye to repression in other countries if he wanted their leaders as allies. He was on an official visit to Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania when the student began tearing up the cobblestones in May 1968. Trump is equally sure that morality should have no role in foreign policy. He respects power and leaders who are not afraid to use power. If the circumstances are right, he is happy to do business with Saudi Arabia or North Korea.

Since the Second World War, most democratic leaders have had a particular emotional attachment to one country: the United States. Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Barack Obama all believed that America was a repository of virtue. There are two great exceptions. One was Charles de Gaulle. For him, America was simply a centre of industrial and military power; American idealism meant nothing. The American politician whom he most respected was not Kennedy or Roosevelt but Nixon. The other exception is Trump: a man who once, when asked to explain why he was not worried by the fact that Putin was a “killer”, replied: “You think our country’s so innocent?”

There is, of course, one respect in which Trump and de Gaulle differ dramatically. Trump has never accepted the result of the 2020 election and did everything that he could to cling to power after it. De Gaulle, by contrast, sometimes seemed eager to leave office when confronted with the mere hint of an electoral reverse. In 1969, a cause that he supported in a referendum was defeated. This had no constitutional implications — his presidential mandate had another three years to run — but he had resigned, packed his bags and returned to his country house in Colombey-les-deux-Églises within hours.

It would, though, be too simple to see a neat division between de Gaulle the defender of democratic propriety and Trump its enemy. De Gaulle had returned to power in 1958 as the result of what was, effectively, a military coup, during which the army took power in Algeria and threatened to take it in mainland France. De Gaulle did not endorse the actions of soldiers — but those who thought that they were speaking on his behalf did so and de Gaulle never disavowed them. He told the president of the two houses of the National Assembly that, if they did not support this return to power, he would do nothing — but that they would then “have to explain themselves to the paratroopers”.

If something kept de Gaulle from making himself a dictator, it was not admiration for democracy. His last visit abroad was a trip to Franco’s Spain in the summer of 1970. Rather, de Gaulle was restrained by a sense of balance and measure. He thought that dictatorships were likely to finish badly because they would always be sucked into “exaggerated enterprises”. He anticipated that the United States itself might choose “some general” to sort things out during the chaos of the late Sixties, but that this general would probably fail.  Most of all, de Gaulle was distinguished from Trump by his pessimism about all human endeavours including, in the end, his own. He was intensely aware of the difference between de Gaulle the public man — an image that he had so carefully constructed for the French people — and de Gaulle the fallible human being. For more than a decade before his death in November 1970, his writing was frequently marked by reference to old age and the turning of autumn to winter. Somehow, I suspect that Trump — who is now one year younger than de Gaulle was at the moment of his death — is not as reconciled to his own mortality.