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By Lisa Van Dusen/For the Hill Times

March 29, 2017

While the rolling car-wreck of the Trump presidency has been sucking most of the oxygen out of the earthly political atmosphere lately, Europe is living through a parallel degradation narrative that’s no less morbidly fascinating.

Just as Donald Trump basks in the triumph of his apparently successful decoupling of character from electoral politics (if not in the triumph of his deal-making skills over congressional free will on the killing of Obamacare), the same disregard for the traditional, pre-Russian-hacking definitions of “disqualifying” and “political suicide” has apparently taken hold in France.

In a photo-op perfectly timed last Friday to coincide with the arrival of European Union delegates at this weekend’s Rome summit marking the 60^th anniversary of the besieged political and economic assemblage, there was Front National Leader Marine Le Pen shaking hands with Vladimir Putin during a mini-break in Moscow in the middle of the French présidentielle.

Some political handshake photo-ops are more important than others. For historic significance: Chamberlain and Hitler in 1938; Nixon and Mao in 1972; Rabin and Arafat in 1993; Sadat and Begin in 1979. For pure entertainment value: Nixon and Elvis in 1970 and the entire, excellent Trump/world leader handshake gallery so far. The Le Pen-Putin handshake photo belongs in the historic category.

Their classic grip-and-grin is set in the Kremlin, where the previously unannounced bilateral was held against the backdrop of an FBI investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and amid mounting concern that Putin has similarly interfered in the French election.

In 2014, Mme. Le Pen’s party received a $9.7 million loan from the First Czech-Russian Bank. She has praised both Putin and Trump, excoriated the EU, whose demise she predicted again on Sunday, for having “mistreated” Putin, and — using the same twisted populism as Trump — vowed to tear up the proposed US-EU trade deal. Neglecting to mention that the global power realignment she espouses would be achieved over democracy’s dead body, she has predicted that “the Europe of peoples will be constructed against globalist dissolution.” She’s the New World Order’s mercenary Marianne.

In the photo, she and Putin are both looking directly at the camera, not at each other, possibly because her expression essentially says, “Va te faire foutre” (or, “f&*k you” in French) and his pretty much says, “Poshel na khui” (or, “f&*k you” in Russian) but in a more impish way. (The Guardian described  Putin’s expression as, “a knowing smirk of epic proportions”).

The geopolitical message of the shot is not so much, “Here we are in the Kremlin, having a full and frank discussion about how to solve the world’s problems,” as just giving the rest of the world — except perhaps Trump, Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage and Geert Wilders — the finger.

Which squares perfectly with Trump’s systematic obliteration of all the conventional political notions of what a candidate — at least a candidate campaigning in a context in which the outcome is unknown — should or shouldn’t do to optimize the odds of victory.  He characterized this unprecedented phenomenon to Time magazine in its “Is Truth Dead?’ cover as a sort of special power unique to 70-year-old former casino-owning beauty pageant impresarios with questionable taste in hair management. “I’m a very instinctual person,” he said.

Elsewhere in the newly exposed conflict between pro- and anti-democratic forces, thousands took to the streets in Russia to protest Putin’s corruption and in England to protest this week’s triggering of Article 50 to begin Brexit, which will weaken both Britain and the EU while the US is being weakened by Trump.

Meanwhile in Rome, the EU, in the words of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, renewed its vows to “reaffirm our commitment to an undivided and indivisible Union.”

In the words of Napoleon’s mother, “Pourvu que ça dure.”

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.