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Paris is a city that knows how to do openings. Hardly a week goes by without the buzz of some new cultural happening, heavily promoted and gorgeously depicted across Metro stations and on kiosks. But the arrival of Krispy Kreme, which plans another 500 outlets across the country, provided a special frisson, and not just because it plans to sell 45,000 doughnuts daily at that first store alone.

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Its main selling point is its Americanness. The magnetic hold of that brand on French popular culture is undiminished even as anxiety rises at the prospect of a second presidency for Donald Trump, who is widely loathed here and across much of Europe.

For decades the French have had a split-screen view of the United States as a place it reviles and adores, at once disdaining the country for its vanity and vulgarity and cherishing it for the gusher of fun it exports through movies, music and, yes, junk food.

Disney’s theme park outside Paris was scorned as an icon of U.S. cultural overreach when it opened in 1992. Today it draws more visitors, half of them French, than the Eiffel Tower or Louvre. Of France’s 10 top-grossing movies this year, eight were American.

But the cognitive dissonance of France’s competing visions of the United States may rarely have been as stark as it is these days. To many French, America’s latent menace — its potential for inconstancy, disregard and malevolence — is in intensifying competition with its appeal.

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“America’s soft power is still very attractive,” Nicole Bacharan, a French scholar and writer who has spent much of her career studying the United States, told me. “It has very little to do with politics — it’s about fun and cheap entertainment, movies or McDonald’s, and feels a little bit forbidden because it’s full of fat and sugar and all the wrong things. And people need fun these days because life is pretty grim and the mood is pretty grim.”

At the same time, she said, “nearly everybody in France is scared by Trump.”

The fear the former president elicits is filtered through France’s kaleidoscopic views of the United States. Among policymakers, there is growing alarm that American voters would reelect someone who has threatened to withdraw from NATO, tear up Europe’s post-World War II order and leave the continent........

© Washington Post