Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse! I hope you all had a lovely long Fourth of July weekend, broken though it was by news of yet another mass shooting. I decided to stay in Europe for the holiday after all that conference hopping last week, and it’s from the old continent that I’m sending you this dispatch on what I learned in my travels.

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The upcoming American midterms loomed particularly large, though they paled in comparison with the heartburn people were feeling over the 2024 presidential election. (The German Marshall Fund even hosted a panel on the midterms and what they would mean for transatlantic unity.) Europeans I spoke to gave the Biden administration very high marks for how it has handled both the lead-up and fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But everyone was worried about what a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, with a presumably more MAGA-ified character, would mean for Ukraine and NATO. They were even more worried that Trump—or someone just like him—would win the White House in November 2024. Would that mean that American isolationism would again become ascendant and Europe would have to face down Russia on its own? Would the next American president go back to flattering Putin and knee-capping NATO? Would Ukraine get any aid? (As I wrote back in May, this is hardly an idle concern.)

Two things struck me about these worries. First, among the people I spoke to, it was almost a foregone conclusion that there would be no second Biden term, and, furthermore, that there would not be a Democrat in the White House come January 2025. Second, many felt the damage Trump had done to the alliance—as well as to America’s standing in Europe—was still unhealed and festering. More than two years after Trump violently left office, Europe was still traumatized by the man’s destructive, dictator-friendly foreign policy. The European foreign policy establishment was enjoying the Biden interregnum while simultaneously understanding that it was coming to an end. They were very clearly bracing for what they fear is coming soon: a return of Trumpist, America-first isolationism, leaving Europe at Putin’s mercy...