EUROPE

Now Playing Around the World, the ‘Trump Show’

It is no secret that Donald J. Trump, who has dominated the race for the Republican presidential nomination for the past month, has become a reviled figure in Latin America for his inflammatory remarks about Hispanic immigrants. His statements have won him plaudits from nativistsat home, but his showy candidacy has not gone unnoticed in other parts of the global village.
In France, for instance, the “vulgar” Mr. Trump was described on Thursday as “a nutcase” on the front page of Libération, the left-wing daily, which pictured him in full flow above the headline “The American Nightmare.”
Then again, because he is vying for the candidacy of a party whose strategists seemed to suggest in 2004 that John Kerry was unfit to be president because he “looks French,” disturbing the editors of a newspaper founded in part by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre might be considered an achievement.
A French television report on Donald Trump’s hair. BFMTV, via YouTube
Mr. Trump’s paternal grandparents were German immigrants, and his remarks have been welcome summer fodder for the tabloid Bild, which ran a dispatch this week on the success of the “Trump Show,” illustrated by a photo of an enraptured crowd in Alabama.
Germany’s more highbrow press, meanwhile, has devoted quite a lot of energy to trying to explain the appeal of Friedrich Drumpf’s brash grandson. “Weird, egomaniac, racist … yet he leads in the polls; how can that be?” Süddeutsche Zeitung asked last month.
While observing that the billionaire’s candidacy is “a perfect fit” for tabloids like Bild, Veit Medick, who is reporting on the campaign from Washington for Spiegel, the German magazine, was quick to point out that the American presidential campaign was getting far less attention than the plight of Syrian refugees in most news outlets back home.
That said, there is something of a “wow effect about Trump and his candidacy,” Mr. Medick said. “Someone like him would never even be close to being accepted as a politician in Germany, so it is an exotic phenomenon.”
“Trump exposes a lot of what Germans particularly hate about the United States,” he said, “a rather narrow-minded worldview, a brutal form of capitalism and a militaristic approach to various crises in the world.”
A German television report on Donald Trump’s “propaganda against foreigners.” ARD Mittagsmagazin, via YouTube
For Germans who have had little firsthand experience with Americans, Mr. Medick added, Mr. Trump appears to confirm their beliefs. “They say, ‘Hey, this is what we think of the U.S. and he doesn’t even try to hide it.’ ”
And what of China, the country Mr. Trump speaks of so often with disdain on the campaign trail?
Donald Trump says “China.” HuffPost Movie Mashups, via YouTube
After the candidate mocked the accents, and attitudes, of Chinese businessmen this week — by way of suggesting that he would “negotiate against” them better than Jeb Bush or Hillary Rodham Clinton would — a correspondent for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported that while “not many Chinese Internet users picked up Trump’s controversial remark, those who did found it very offensive.”
“I feel this guy is a racist,” one blogger observed on the Chinese social network Weibo, according to the newspaper’s translation. “I would not want democracy if men like him are elected.”
Elsewhere on Weibo, Mr. Trump’s remarks about China as an economic rival drew angry rebukes. “George W. Bush must be hoping the guy could be elected,” one user wrote, “so he will be no longer the most stupid U.S. president ever.”
Other threads on the site are devoted to sharing jokes about Mr. Trump’s hair first made on Buzzfeed or “The Daily Show.”
On Friday, one popular subject of discussion on Weibo was a Chinese news report with video of Mr. Trump asking a woman to touch his hair, to dispel rumors that he wears a toupee.
A Chinese television report on Donald Trump’s campaign. Sina Video, via YouTube
“This is not canvassing,” one blogger wrote, “but an entertainment show.”
Mr. Trump’s frequent China-bashing has, however, elicited a more angry response on Friday from the editors of The Global Times, a nationalist tabloid, which, in an editorial with the headline “China Must Have the Hawks to Deal With the Trumps,” urged Chinese officials to respond in kind.
“The West is not free of problems,” the editors suggested. “We can pick up on this. We should encourage people to speak up so as to exert pressure on the West to respond, instead of simply letting the West point its fingers at China without doing anything about it. Ideological accusations from the West come constantly, and being tolerant is not a wise strategy.”
Yufan Huang contributed research from Beijing.