Paris is a city that knows how to do openings. Hardly a week goes by without the buzz of some new cultural happening, heavily promoted and gorgeously depicted across Metro stations and on kiosks. But the arrival of Krispy Kreme, which plans another 500 outlets across the country, provided a special frisson, and not just because it plans to sell 45,000 doughnuts daily at that first store alone.
Its main selling point is its Americanness. The magnetic hold of that brand on French popular culture is undiminished even as anxiety rises at the prospect of a second presidency for Donald Trump, who is widely loathed here and across much of Europe.
For decades the French have had a split-screen view of the United States as a place it reviles and adores, at once disdaining the country for its vanity and vulgarity and cherishing it for the gusher of fun it exports through movies, music and, yes, junk food.
Disney’s theme park outside Paris was scorned as an icon of U.S. cultural overreach when it opened in 1992. Today it draws more visitors, half of them French, than the Eiffel Tower or Louvre. Of France’s 10 top-grossing movies this year, eight were American.
But the cognitive dissonance of France’s competing visions of the United States may rarely have been as stark as it is these days. To many French, America’s latent menace — its potential for inconstancy, disregard and malevolence — is in intensifying competition with its appeal.
“America’s soft power is still very attractive,” Nicole Bacharan, a French scholar and writer who has spent much of her career studying the United States, told me. “It has very little to do with politics — it’s about fun and cheap entertainment, movies or McDonald’s, and feels a little bit forbidden because it’s full of fat and sugar and all the wrong things. And people need fun these days because life is pretty grim and the mood is pretty grim.”
At the same time, she said, “nearly everybody in France is scared by Trump.”
The fear the former president elicits is filtered through France’s kaleidoscopic views of the United States. Among policymakers, there is growing alarm that American voters would reelect someone who has threatened to withdraw from NATO, tear up Europe’s post-World War II order and leave the continent alone to face Vladimir Putin’s predations.
Among liberals and cultural elites, Trump represents a sinister compendium of his country’s worst traits — gun-loving and racist, domineering and crass, a refracted funhouse image of American ugliness. To them the prospect that Trump could regain the White House, even as he faces multiple indictments, is the latest evidence that the United States is unhinged.
But the reasons for which Trump is detested go beyond stereotypes. They are also personal.
Many people here recall that Trump blamed France’s restrictive gun laws for the most lethal terrorist attack on French soil. Those coordinated assaults in November 2015 left 130 people dead and hundreds injured at Paris’s Bataclan theater and other sites.
Trump’s remarks, in 2018, combined red meat for a receptive audience — he was speaking to the National Rifle Association — with his usual contempt for victims. The terrorists, he said, “took their time and gunned them down one by one. Boom! Come over here. Boom! Come over here. Boom!” he said, pantomiming the shootings for effect. “But if one employee or just one patron had a gun, or if just one person in this room had been there with a gun, aimed at the opposite direction, the terrorists would have fled or been shot.”
Never mind that Americans, armed to the teeth, are gunned down regularly in mass shootings. The former president’s remarks were characteristically cruel, and the people I interviewed in front of the Bataclan recently needed no prompting to remember what he had said.
“I think he’ll win, and I’m really sorry to see Americans make a second idiotic mistake,” said Denis Morel, 71, a retired bank worker. “If he’s reelected, he could do terrible things like help Russia against Europe, for starters.”
“He’s not a good man, and it’s incomprehensible that he could be president again,” said Natalie Perez, 63, who retired recently from a marketing job.
Trump’s presidency remains an open wound in France, and no volume of doughnut sales will sugarcoat the trauma he left in his wake.
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