The first accurate headline of the morning was written in French. “Une vague bleue,” Paris’s Libération called the American vote, a blue wave, which is generous phrasing for a phenomenon the rest of the planet described with the patience of people watching weather through a window.
By Wednesday afternoon, the foreign press had produced a fuller account of the American midterms than most American campaigns managed all year, and this desk has read all of it so you don’t have to. Britain’s Daily Mail called it a “historic blue tsunami,” the Times of India ran “midterm blues for Trump,” and Canada’s Toronto Star settled on “rebuke,” which is what countries do when they like the result but live next door. Mexico’s El Universal went with two words: “Setback for Trump.” A Briton calling anything historic is like a fish calling water ambitious, but the sentiment carried.
The governments at war were watching the way debtors watch. Ukraine’s Kyiv Independent ran the hopeful version — a blow to Trump, a possible boost for Kyiv. Moscow’s state-run Rossiyskaya Gazeta ran the confident one: “Brussels, brace yourself. After the Republicans’ defeat, Trump’s wrath will fall on Europe.” Read together, the two Russian and Ukrainian headlines agree on the important part: whatever Washington does next, it will do furiously, and Europe will pay for the parking.
In Tehran, the Tehran Times decided the election had been decided months earlier by American foreign policy, running “The Iran war comes home to hit Trump at the ballot box,” a headline an American opposition research firm would have charged eight figures for. Israel, which held an election of its own the previous week, spent its coverage on the Michigan Senate race of Abdul El-Sayed, with the Times of Israel alarmed and Haaretz unsurprised, in the traditional Israeli configuration.
Most heads of state, bound by the old diplomatic courtesy that midterms are a domestic American matter, declined to comment. The Spanish prime minister, who has never declined to comment about anything, posted at length on X that the American voter had voted “against hate,” “against machismo,” and “against the privileges of the elites,” a sentence that arrived with the timing of a man who has looked at a map and found the United States on it.
None of this requires translation. Every country read the same American news the way expatriates read a family argument from abroad — carefully, in the wrong language, and certain of the outcome. By noon Eastern time, at least nine governments had found a phrase for what had happened in America. Americans, to this hour, are still using “wow.”