There is no nation on the planet that more wholeheartedly, fervently and passionately supported Donald Trump over the past 10 years of his political career, in which he rose from the status of a complete political outsider to the pedestal and last January victoriously returned to the White House for the second time.
That support also has official backing, because in a large Gallup poll conducted just before the 2024 elections, as many as 67% of Serbs chose Trump over Kamala, and a higher percentage was recorded only in Russia.
Serbs supported Trump, both those American ones and those who remained in the Balkans, as if he were their own kin, so much so that at one moment the descendant of German immigrants and Melania’s husband seriously threatened to dethrone even among Serbs adored and unquestionable Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Trump was the reason why many Serbs used their voting right in America for the first time and massively went to the polls where, according to some estimates, they voted for him in more than 90% of the cases.
To be fair, we also loved him to a good extent because his opponents were figures we disliked from the 1990s, first Hillary, and then sleepy Joe Biden.
The Serbian diaspora in America loved him also because during the Covid pandemic he was against vaccines and masks, resisted the introduction of lockdowns, the closing of companies and the shutting down of life… and before and after that because he pushed business at the expense of taxes.
But certainly the most important thing for which we cheered Trump was his foreign policy.
We liked that, unlike his predecessors, he stopped blackmailing Serbia, so it did not bother us, it was even amusing to us when he publicly bragged about how he stopped the war and reconciled us with the Albanians, although we knew very well that it had nothing to do with reality!
He charmed us so much that we watched him with a dumb, calf-like look full of gratitude even after the signing of the Washington Agreement, which brought nothing good to Serbia, unlike the so-called Kosovo which on that occasion received Israeli recognition of independence, and Israel which secured two more embassies in the then newly proclaimed capital – Jerusalem.
Some Serbs were, again, delighted also because he seated Vučić in the Oval Office where he belongs – on a little stool.
However, more than anything we appreciated his principled policy when it comes to American interventionism and the role of the global policeman.
It will remain recorded that Trump in his first term did not start a single war, and that was also one of the main slogans in the campaign for his second presidential term.
A slogan because of which he received many votes, not only Serbian ones, but also the votes of reasonable, pacifist-minded people, members of all immigrant nations, and above all those real, un-sprayed Americans.
Serbs were ready to forgive him for the fact that he had hundreds of them arrested in road raids, stuffed them straight from trucks into immigration prisons, made their lives miserable, emptied their pockets and deported some of them.
His downfall in our eyes, however, began with that kidnapping of the president of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro, the sovereign of one sovereign country. Because Serbs do not like when presidents are kidnapped and taken to prisons of foreign countries. Because they experienced that once, and they did not like it.
Trump’s story that he kidnapped Maduro and his wife because of drugs and all sorts of things was useless, when Serbs (and every other semi-intelligent being) knew that it was a farce and that the real reason was – oil!
If with Maduro he cracked Serbian trust, with the war against Iran he definitely lost it. Perhaps even irreversibly.
Serbs, although deceived a million times by the pre-election promises of domestic politicians, did not expect that from Trump, so the very first bomb dropped on Tehran sealed Trump’s fate in Serbian souls.
We did not forgive him Iran, and I do not believe we ever will.
Although during the civil war Islamists came from that same Iran who cut off the heads of Bosnian Serbs, that same Iran today is to us like the apple of our eye.
Because we are a strange people.
With a hundred flaws and one great virtue – a love of justice.
Although in the past several decades we have gone through golgothas inflicted on us by others, and for quite some time we have been going through a hell served to us by domestic villains, we have nevertheless deep in our ganglia preserved that feeling that we unmistakably distinguish the tyrant from the victim and that throughout history, and even today – we stand on the side of the weaker, the oppressed, and against the conqueror.
Vučić and Dodik may publicly curry favor with Israel and Netanyahu as much as they want, it will only affect the fall of their ratings, but not the change in the mood of the Serbian electorate.
And that mood you can notice at every step, on social networks, in the media, in comments.
And one personal impression in that regard…
Rarely in recent times have I been proud of my tribe as much as in these past few days, since this whole commotion around Iran started.
That defiance against the arrogant and powerful within us, to my great joy, has not yet withered. Nor has our collective memory betrayed us, we have not forgotten what we experienced from similar ones in the recent past, including NATO bombs.
Maybe we forgave, but we did not erase from memory Milica Rakić, the train in the Grdelica Gorge, the heroes from Košare…
And we will not. And in every photograph of those girls from the Iranian school today we see Milica’s eyes.
And as for Trump…
The fact that he lost the support of Serbs, who are not really a large voting machine in the American framework, may not worry him that much. But what should worry him is the fact that he has lost the support of a large number of Americans, including those who in previous years lifted him to the heavens.
And that is because against their will he entered a war from which America has no benefit, and could suffer great damage.
Only 27% of Americans raised two fingers for military intervention in a poll just before the start of the war. And somehow I suspect that now there are even fewer of them. Which in the November elections could lead Trump to lose the majority in Congress, which, along with the fact that many Republicans also do not support the bloody adventure in the Middle East, would reduce his role to collecting dust in the White House.
And it is not impossible that he will face another impeachment and perhaps leave Washington before the end of his term.
And all that because of one unnecessary, dirty war. Which annoys the Serbs.
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Source: Antonije Kovačević Foto: AP Photo/Alex Brandon