Europe

American here! Its because this is all rhetoric for the idiots that follow him. He doesn't care if Europeans see him as an idiot, he cares that the idiots here see him as big brained. And the rubes eat up anything that has "free speech" in it because they generally interpret that as "its OK to be racist and misogynistic, its my right because freedoms!"

Hope this helped explain.

And probably also explains why I want to leave.

The important thing is, that in Europe free speech is normally defined as the freedom to say everything as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. This is also with a lot of different forms of freedom. Your freedom ends where the freedom of others begin.

Americans always freak out when they hear Canada has hate speech laws and claim they're anti free speech.

Most of us don't ever need to worry about hate speech laws, because most of us aren't going around calling for violence and open bigotry against entire ethnic groups.

Not accepting hate speech, in particularly inciting violence is not contradictory to free speech in my opinion.

We should not follow the US idea, that speech is only free, if any vile poison can be spread. In the context of Musk that is also ironic, as he is using his powers to censor people.

I hope you guys can get through it without anything dramatic happening, but I don't think the world can afford to rely on the US being consistently reasonable any more. This is genuinely Russia level stuff.

1. The people who voted for him unironically ain't the brightest bulbs. I guarantee they'll see Tr*mp blame Dems and run with it.

2. Even if they do see them going off the rails, there's no guarantees we'll be able to do anything about it. For all we know, he could easily turn the country into a dictatorship where nobody gets to vote for anything anymore. As Tr*mp has said before, He'Ll OnLy Be A dIcTaToR dAy OnE (or something along those lines). In English, I'm positive that translates to "Democracy Is Dead".

I honestly hope not, although I worry for the US.

I think if the people want to fight back it needs to happen pretty soon. Trump already announced military force against „enemies from within“.

Well, true.

But on the other hand, sanity from not being beholden to a demented child-raping fascist is a big bonus.

Is the US power projection at the long term benefit of the EU though? The consistent destabilization of the Middle East for instance brought more tension to Europe as people had to flee from the region. EU member states getting dragged into US wars didn't help our image in the world either.

When it comes to defense, UK and France have enough nukes for effective deterrent. The EU is also large enough to thwart aggression at its borders and buffer zones like countering the Russian invasion of Ukraine, if the EU chooses to develop and maintain a joint defense infrastructure. Unfortunately that was postponed instead of forwarded after Biden won in 2020 and EU politicians went back to the status quo.

"Power projection" isn't necessary for a strictly defensive alliance.
The fact that a direct attack on one member counts as a direct attack on all members (some of which have nukes) is enough.