Morten Messerschmidt has a gift for theatrics. On Facebook, the far-right politician posts a steady stream of direct-to-camera videos, showing his thatch of blond hair and perennially raised eyebrows that indicate keen interest in his own observations. He uses buzzwords such as Sharia law and writes in all caps for emphasis, especially when promoting his plan to banish Muslim immigrants from Denmark. “GOODBYE AND THANK YOU!” he wrote recently, adding an airplane emoji.Messerschmidt is the leader of the Danish People’s Party, one of the main far-right factions competing in tomorrow’s election in Denmark. For a small party (share of seats in Parliament: 4 percent) within a small country (population: 6 million), there’s value in having big friends in big countries. Messerschmidt once saw Donald Trump as such a friend. Last year, he traveled to Mar-a-Lago to celebrate Trump’s return to power, which he considered a knockout blow in the culture wars. “Wokeness is dead,” Messerschmidt wrote at the time.But not all romances last forever. Messerschmidt fell out of love with Trump earlier this year, after the president spent several weeks insisting that the United States must own Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. “TRUMP SHOULD BE GIVEN A FIRM REJECTION,” the Danish politician wrote on Facebook in January. “IT’S THE ONLY LANGUAGE HE UNDERSTANDS.” One of Messerschmidt’s party colleagues went further, saying during a debate in the European Parliament, “Let me put it in words you might understand: Mr. Trump, fuck off.”A decade ago, Trump’s election seemed to open a trapdoor in democracy and reveal a realistic path to power for populist movements all over the world. Globalization was showing its ugly side, and voters were noticing. International institutions were creaking under the weight of mass migration; in their place, nationalism seemed poised for a comeback. People like Messerschmidt, but also Marine Le Pen in France and Alice Weidel in Germany, looked at America and thought, It can happen here. To speed the process, they even adopted Trump’s language: woke, witch hunt, fake news.These same politicians are now distancing themselves from Trump. Even Nigel Farage, the Trump-loving leader of the poll-topping Reform UK Party, argued recently that Britain should stay out of Trump’s war in Iran. The European far right identified with Trump’s blood-and-soil vision of “America First” but wants nothing to do with version 2.0, which justifies spilling blood in the Middle East, seizing a leader in Latin America, and expropriating the frigid soil of Greenland. The schism shows how difficult it is to stitch together an international movement of nationalist parties, especially when the standard bearer is acting like a global bully. As one U.S. diplomat put it to me, “MAGA elites badly misunderstand the European far right.”It’s not for lack of trying. Consider Trump’s stated ambitions. He disemboweled USAID and defunded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty based on claims that U.S.-funded programs were exerting improper ideological influence in foreign countries—even inciting so-called color revolutions, popular uprisings to install Western-style democracies in post-Soviet countries. He and his allies then went about doing the inverse, backing far-right movements and parties bent on undermining liberal democracy in Europe and playing nice with Russia. J. D. Vance used his first high-profile address to world leaders, at the Munich Security Conference last year, to tell European governments to stop marginalizing the far right. The administration’s national-security strategy identified as a priority “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”So far, this attempt at inverse color revolutions has failed. I went to Denmark to see why.The first thing I saw when I got to Copenhagen was a large crowd assembled in front of city hall. As I approached, I expected to find a campaign rally or a protest against the war in Iran of the kind staged recently in London and Amsterdam. Instead, the demonstration was against industrial pig production. A retiree holding a balloon pig told me she supported an environmentalist party called the Alternative and cringed when I asked her about Greenland.Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, from the center-left Social Democrats, scheduled tomorrow’s vote earlier than expected in an effort to capitalize on the surge of support she saw after resisting Trump’s efforts to annex the giant island. The argument goes something like this: Doesn’t a prime minister who averted an American ground invasion and staved off World War III deserve another term in office? That remains to be seen, because contempt for Trump is so uniform among the parties competing for votes that other topics have emerged as clearer wedge issues: pig farming, drinking water, food in nursing homes, and one candidate’s past cocaine use.Instead of resistance, Trump has inspired consensus. “There is literally no one in the spectrum of the dozen parties running—no one—who questions the position taken by the present government,” Bo Lidegaard, a Danish historian and former diplomat who edited the Politiken newspaper after he left government service in 2011, told me. “No one is questioning that we had to take a firm stance against Trump.”[Read: Trump is learning that his bullying has consequences]Frederiksen’s government might fall, for intricate domestic reasons. But if she’s replaced as prime minister, her successor will be equally committed to resisting Trump’s efforts to seize Greenland. That’s true even in the unlikely event that that person is a far-right firebrand. Messerschmidt built his political brand “with inspiration from the MAGA movement,” Jakob Nielsen, a former Washington correspondent who now edits the Danish political-news site Altinget, told me. Early last year, Messerschmidt lent advice to Trump’s White House team about developing a subtler message on Greenland that could “set the issue up for a win,” a former U.S. official told me. Trump opted instead for warmongering (propelling the Danish military to prepare for an invasion of Greenland by shipping in explosives and blood supplies), and so Messerschmidt had to adapt. “He made this turnaround because it became equivalent to treason to be close to Trump,” Nielsen said.The far-right party didn’t appear to have much interest in revisiting the issue. The lawmaker who had used an expletive to address Trump had agreed to talk with me but went silent around the time that Danish media reported on disclosures showing that a foundation close to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had paid for his travel to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest last year. (He denied any wrongdoing.) I enlisted the help of heavyweights in the Danish press corps, but they told me that they, too, were being rebuffed.Finally, I reached Allan Feldt, the People’s Party’s lead candidate in the capital. He was meeting voters near the airport, so I retraced my steps and found him handing out fliers and potato chips at a small table set up on the curb of an outdoor shopping center. “People are now shopping here because they know prices will go up,” Feldt told me, gesturing at the discount hardware and home-improvement store behind us and explaining that voters were worried about inflation caused by the war in the Middle East. Referring to the U.S. and Israel’s bombardment of Iran, he said, “I personally think it would be great if they can wrap it up.”Feldt, who at 62 has a trim white beard and a bald head, that day covered by a blue Danish People’s Party cap, is the founder of a bottled-water company and a first-time political candidate. “I am a wealthy man,” he told me. But scarcity seems to be the main issue motivating him. “The money we waste on criminals is billions,” he said. “And then we say, ‘Why are we wasting billions on people who don’t want to be here?’ They don’t want to assimilate; they don’t want our culture. They kind of hate us.”To hear Feldt tell it, immigration should be the defining issue in the race, but Trump keeps getting in the way. “Trump is actually getting her elected,” the far-right candidate said of Frederiksen. “People are standing behind her when they hear hostile rhetoric coming from the Trump administration regarding Greenland. And so every time he does that, he’s actually making sure she’s getting reelected.”I pointed out that his party used to idolize Trump. Now the American president’s name can hardly be uttered. “You can’t talk about Trump positively, because it will cost you a lot of voters,” Feldt said.Denmark offers an ideal vantage on Trump’s challenge to the liberal international order, or what’s left of it. But for an unexpected reason.Because of Denmark’s stable institutions and mature political culture, the challenge of establishing liberal democracy so that a state’s economy can flourish, and corruption can be curbed, has sometimes been called the problem of “getting to Denmark.” The phrase was coined by two development scholars in 2003, then popularized by Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist behind the oft-cited “End of History” thesis.In recent decades, however, Denmark has modeled a very specific kind of democratic innovation: accommodating and cooperating with the far right. The Danish People’s Party was founded in 1995 as a breakaway faction from an existing right-wing populist party that had focused mostly on tax issues. Emphasizing immigration, the new party scored impressive results but at first had little influence because it wasn’t considered stuerent, or socially acceptable (literally “fit for the living room”). That changed in 2001, the year Denmark joined Europe’s passport-free Schengen Area and removed checkpoints at its borders. The far-right party acquired a defunct border guardhouse and promised that it would one day resume its old function. That year, the People’s Party became the third-largest party in Parliament and lent its support to the center-right coalition that ruled Denmark until 2011, in exchange for concessions on immigration and welfare, among other issues. In 2011, the party saw its decade-long wish fulfilled when the government agreed to restore border checkpoints in exchange for support for a budget measure.Over time, mainstream Danish parties sought to undercut the party’s appeal, especially among working-class voters, by embracing some of its positions on immigration. The challenge became more urgent after Europe received a surge of new arrivals from the Middle East and Africa in 2015 and 2016. Frederiksen, the current prime minister, successfully formed a government in 2019 after moving her center-left party to the right on immigration, combining social welfare with strict rules for intake and stepped-up deportations.The nativist backlash looked like an opportunity to Trump allies who wanted to take the president’s anti-immigrant agenda global. Steve Bannon, the CEO of Trump’s 2016 campaign, tried to unify Europe’s far-right parties into “The Movement,” pitching his Brussels-based foundation as the right-wing equivalent of the network of liberal philanthropies funded by George Soros, the billionaire financier and Holocaust survivor. Reflecting on that effort now, Bannon told me that creating an international movement of nationalists was more difficult than he had anticipated. “Europeans are European for a reason,” he said. “Their ancestors made a decision not to come here, and sometimes American brashness rubs them the wrong way.” Still, far-right leaders appreciated the solidarity, he said, recalling how Le Pen responded when he asked her why she had invited him to a congress of her National Front Party (now called National Rally) in 2018. “She said, ‘You need to tell us we’re not alone,’” Bannon said.[Read: Trump casually denigrates NATO’s war dead]Today, it’s the American right that’s looking for solidarity from Europe. Bannon appeared in January at a dinner north of Dallas alongside Geert Wilders, the ostentatious leader of the Dutch far-right Party for Freedom. At the dinner, organized under the rallying cry “Save Texas From Radical Islam,” Wilders spoke about the dangers of Sharia law, urging members of the Republican grassroots to act in what Bannon described as a “to the ramparts” address.But when Wilders and other far-right leaders gathered today in Budapest for the first “Grand Assembly” of the Patriots for Europe grouping in the European Parliament, there was no high-level American representation. Vance might make a swing through Hungary next month, to boost Orbán before a difficult reelection contest on April 12, but his plans aren’t final, and former Hungarian officials and experts I spoke with predicted that last-minute interventions from the Trump administration would have little impact. They could even backfire.Since the early days of the republic, Americans have understood that foreign interference in elections can have unintended consequences. In 1796, a French diplomat in the United States openly campaigned for the francophile Thomas Jefferson, in an effort that was so brazen—including publishing diplomatic secrets suggesting that war with France could be imminent—that scholars think it contributed to the victory of Jefferson’s opponent, John Adams. In parts of the country, a journalist claimed at the time, you couldn’t find an elector who “would not sooner be shot” than vote for France’s preferred candidate.Trump’s interference abroad has been almost as self-defeating. Just look north to Canada. At the beginning of last year, the country’s Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre, were flying high, riding dissatisfaction with the Liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to a 25-percentage-point lead in the polls. Then Trudeau stepped down, power changed hands in the White House, and Trump turned what seemed like jokes about Canada becoming the 51st state into a campaign of international intimidation, tying tariff threats to his insistence that the United States should absorb its northern neighbor.The new Liberal leader, Mark Carney, called an election in April, which became a protest vote against Trump that the Liberals won decisively. The most devastating ad of the campaign was a spot that simply pointed out similarities between Trump’s rhetoric and language used by Poilievre. “Trump transformed Canadian politics,” Erin O’Toole, a former Conservative Party leader, told me.Denmark could be a similar story. Frederiksen’s Social Democrats were in the doldrums last year, at one point recording their worst polling result since 2013; they lost the mayoralty in Copenhagen for the first time in more than 100 years. Trump’s onslaught may not be enough to save Frederiksen’s premiership, but it has offered her a fighting chance. She acknowledged uncertainty about the future in her closing speech of the campaign over the weekend, exhorting her followers to vote by saying it was “by no means a given” that she would stay on as prime minister.[Read: Why Europe is talking about nukes]She was speaking at a folk festival in Copenhagen before her party’s faithful, who clapped and sang along to musical performances. Frederiksen mentioned Trump by name just once, saying Danes had been “reassured by our handling of the Greenland crisis and Trump’s threats against the kingdom.” Afterward, she shook a few hands, then sat in the front row to listen to a children’s choir. The stage was framed by two small bouquets of flowers, a very different foreground to the pyrotechnics that burst from the rostrum at some of Trump’s biggest rallies.I couldn’t understand why Frederiksen wasn’t making an even bigger deal of her standoff with Trump and her success, so far, in steering Denmark through its most severe security crisis in decades. Danish journalists I spoke with suggested that the parties had an informal agreement to leave these issues out of the campaign precisely because of how existential they are. Some of the press seemed willing to oblige as well. As candidates arrived for a televised debate on Sunday hosted by the Danish broadcaster DR, journalists shouted questions about possible coalition configurations but steered clear of the most substantive issues. Days before, DR had revealed that the Danish armed forces had flown blood supplies to Greenland and prepared to blow up runways on the island in the event of a U.S. invasion. But the lone question posed to Frederiksen was whether she had ever passed up the chance to vote in an election. (She said she hadn’t.)Outside the debate hall, I met Carl Emil Lind, a leader of the youth wing of the Social Democrats. He granted that the election is unusual. Foreign threats are bearing down on Denmark, but its politicians are focusing on the most intimate needs of all, such as food and drinking water. But perhaps this is another sign of Trump’s influence: a turn inward, away from a world in chaos and toward issues Danes can comfortably control.*Sources: Liselotte Sabroe / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP / Getty; Annabelle Gordon / AFP / Getty; Getty.