Ugliness as Beauty - Donald Trump’s Big Win in the US-Congress

Donald Trump has taken branding to a new level. He has sold a bill to the US-Congress that is cruel and ugly as being “big and beautiful”. He has turned populism into a “reverse Robin Hoodism”. He is robbing the weakest in society of their medical cover and gives millions in tax cuts to the rich. Why? Because he can do so. And how? Because the Republican Party as been “gleichgeschaltet” as other parties have been in the history of fascism. So far, the question was why many Republicans voted for Donald Trump but did so against their own interests. Now on the way to an authoritarianism with American characteristics, the question is why Republican Senators and Congressmen cast their votes against the interests of their constituents – and by extension their own? And what that means for the future of American politics. 

On the 4th of July, when Americans are celebrating the birth of their nation, President signed a bill into law that will strip an estimated 12 million citizens of their health insurance (Medicaid) over the next decade and cut Food Stamps. It will slash tax credits for renewable energy. At the same time the “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB) will also give a giant tax cut to wealthy Americans. This will increase the already-bloated budget deficit by another $ 4.3 trillion. And it pours $ 170 billion into immigration enforcement, an increase in the budget of the Immigration Agency (ICE) by 265%; thus creating an “anti-immigrant police state in America” as Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, puts it. 

Its critics describe the 870-page long megabill with a litany of outraged comments: “The most monstrous piece of legislation I ever voted on in my time in Congress” (Senator Chris Murphy); “The Disaster that just passed the Senate” (Podcaster Ezra Klein); “A showcase for fiscal incontinence and ideological exhaustion” (The Economist). 

Indeed, the bill’s economics do not add up. Other Republican Presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have performed their own acts of “voodoo economics”, but that was during a time when the United States could still afford a certain profligacy. And afterwards Democratic Presidents like Carter and Clinton would rein in the out-of-kilter state finances. This time, most critics agree, it will be different. America will end up with a public debt of 120% of GDP and an annual fiscal deficit of about 7 %, further hollowing out its stature of a superpower. 

But how could such a reckless bill come to pass? What has turned Republican lawmakers into North-Korea-like stooges? What explains their collective spinelessness in the face of policies that will be hurting their constituents particularly in “middle America” where Medicaid covers more than 40% of children born in the rural counties of Kentucky, Alabama and Mississippi.  

When I asked people on my trip through those regions in April and May if they were not afraid that Donald Trump would cut down on Medicaid, most said he would not dare. And most of the Republican candidates had promised during their election campaign that they would not agree to somebody touching the health coverage for low-income, elderly and disabled citizens. Well, with BBB Trump did dare, and they acquiesced. 

But why did they sign on to the “Big and Beautiful Bill?” Firstly, because it contained some core promises of Donald Trump’s election campaign: to make the temporary tax cuts from his first term permanent; to roll back the clean energy initiatives of the Biden Administration; to increase spending on border and immigration enforcement; and to eliminate income tax on tips and overtime for workers in the hospitality sector. 

Secondly, because most Republican lawmakers have given up on common sense or political judgment. Some are enthralled by their political master Donald Trump and surfing on the political momentum he has created. Others might even believe the absurd calculations that the promised economic growth from tax relief and the income from tariffs will balance the books. Some might have grown immune against any warnings of a pending catastrophe or damage to their political career, because, hey, everything has worked out fine. In the past the administering of cuts to the welfare system used to hit mainly Democratic voters. That many of those voters have now become members of the new Republican coalition has not yet dawned on most Republican lawmakers. Ideology trumps political understanding. 

Thirdly, and most importantly, their sycophancy is driven by fear of losing their seat at the next election when the President threatens to punish naysayers by supporting yes-men and women as alternative candidates at the next Republican primaries. Under Donald Trump the Republican Party has become a party of fear. 

But shouldn’t the Democrats be happy about the act of political self-harm their opponents in government are just performing? Maybe. Given the negative polling numbers about the BBB its passing should increase their chances at the midterm-elections in November 2026 and at the presidential elections two years on.  

But who knows what political conditions the actual “Gleichschaltung” of the Republican Party, the ongoing dismantling of the rule of law, the systematic destruction of democratic institutions and the replacement of public discourse by a platform-driven influencer culture will have created by then. 

Donald Trump’s forcing the BBB through the legislative is only the most recent demonstration of power by a victorious but unhinged President in a debased political environment. There was his performative bombing of Iran’s nuclear installations and his victory over the Nato allies in Brussels on the 5%-demand on armaments. There has been the dramatic start to his anti-immigrant campaign in Los Angeles and the celebrated win at the US-Supreme Court limiting the ability of federal judges to block his executive orders and his administration’s policies. And there is better than expected economic data on the job market and a record high at the stock market that seems to contradict the dire predictions of his liberal critics, at least for now.  

With his big, beautiful win in Congress on the eve of Independence Day Donald Trump is on a roll. Or to quote the indomitable Robert Reich again: “That such a regressive, dangerous, gargantuan, and unpopular piece of legislation could get through Congress shows how far Trump has dragged America into modern fascism”. 

The flip-flopping Strongman in the White House

At the beginning the Israeli Iranian challenge to America looked like the first stress test to the MAGA movement. Then Trump’s pondering yet another military intervention in the Middle East showed the weakness of the Democratic Party which did not challenge him making his decision on war and peace without consulting US-Congress. Then, after the attacks on Iran’s nuclear installations and his victory celebrations, some feared highly dangerous consequences of America getting involved in just another war. As the conservative critic Robert Kagan wrote: It will strengthen autocratic tendencies at home and anti-liberal forces around the world. Yet so far, the “12 day war” has just been another chapter in the annals of the flip-flopping strongman in the White House satisfying his narcissistic impulses. 

For days US- and German media had followed the online war of words between the self-appointed leaders of the MAGA base, like chief ideologue Steve Bannon, Ex-Fox Host Tucker Carlson, Talk-Influencer Charlie Kirk and Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Green on one side, and more traditional Republicans like Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham on the other. With the headline “How the Iran war splits the MAGA-movement” “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reported on the hostile-sounding exchanges in the blogosphere and asked how dangerous this might be for Donald Trump. 

As it turns out, no danger to Trump at all. The danger rather lies in the misreading of the politics in the age of Donald Trump. Because the current Republican coalition of screaming influencers and docile legislators is a totally different political animal from the Democratic coalition of a traditional political party with different factions and a frustrated but helpless civil society. Members of the first coalition are all sycophants in a semi-autocratic system, and members of the opposition can’t currently agree on anything in the political wilderness in which they live. The first group is delivering a hideous but entertaining show, the second keeps performing serious acts of a well-known tragedy without ever reaching catharsis. 

The Middle East was the original point of departure for the MAGA movement. It was Donald Trump who recognized already during his first election campaign how out of step with the public the Democratic Party’s foreign policy after the disaster of the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. He sensed how exhausted the American public was after those failed interventions which most people thought came at a cost to their economic wellbeing at home. “All that money wasted that could have been spent on me”, was a phrase you can still hear today. Steve Bannon’s claim today that 80% of MAGA people would be against US-involvement on the side of Israel might be exaggerated. But all polls confirm that both Democrats and Republicans are opposed to entering the conflict by a large margin. 

“This might be a missed opportunity for the Democrats to become the anti-war party, wrote the British “New Statesman”, “a position Trump has dominated since he won in 2016”. There is indeed a confluence of views on the current conflict between Israel and Iran between MAGA proponents and voices on the Democratic left like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But the current leadership of the Democratic Party keeps repeating the mistakes of Hillary Clinton and their forerunners when they did not find the political courage to speak out against President Bush’s invasion of Iraq. There is the War Powers Act of 1973 strengthening the position of Congress after President Richard Nixon had usurped too much power during the Vietnam War. But when it comes to opposing war the leaders of the Democratic Party in Congress are again missing in action. This comes after a week when US-Democrats should be flying high after having mobilised a few million protesters against the raids and immigration policies of the Trump Administration. The former, but now repentant, neoconservative columnist Peter Beinart writing in the “New York Times” calls this “a serious foreign policy blunder” by the Democratic leadership in Congress. 

But why can the threat of another unpopular war make Democratic Party timid while posing no harm to the Trump Administration? Because the MAGA spectacle will quickly adapt its resentment and bile to the new situation and the Republicans in Congress have nowhere else to go but into an oscillating Trumpism. Because for Donald Trump changing yesterday’s isolationist tune into a victorious song of war does not require much effort. It is just another form of TACO, the short form for “Trump always chickens out”, a phrase the Financial Times had applied to his twists and turns on tariff policies, for the way the President fails to stick to any of his promises. In this case of foreign policy Trump was “chickening out”, from his martially declared promise of “no more wars”. 

Trump’s “New Neoconservatism has evolved”, as Bruno Macaes points out in the “New Statesman”. “It has lost the thin veneer of idealism it once had and turned into a thoroughly nihilistic ideology, openly advocating brute force”. That will suffice for Trump’s base, which likes cruel spectacles of any kind as long as they harm others; and, with the war started, it will rekindle the popular “good versus bad”-thinking in a politically exhausted public. 

It is ironic that it fell to another old neoconservative and promoter of regime change like Robert Kagan to dramatically warn his countrymen and women of the dangers of going to war in Iran this time. With the United States “well down the road to dictatorship at home”, his argument in “The Atlantic” ran, “I can think of nothing more perilous to American democracy right now than going to war”.  

Going through the possible domestic consequences of a war in or on Iran Kagan envisages all the excuses Trump could use to strengthen his dictatorial control at home. It is indeed a frightening scenario he depicts about how Trump might be dealing with dissent in wartime or after possible acts of terrorism before he comes to his conclusion: “Any success Trump claims in Iran, whatever its other consequences, will be a victory for the anti-liberal alliance and will further the interests of anti-liberalism across the globe”. 

It might be. But for now, Donald Trump is pursuing a “head spinning Iran policy” as the “Financial Times” notes. On his truth social account, it is regime change today and diplomacy tomorrow, a bewildering spectacle alternating between military threats against Iran and diplomatic deals with its regime, between cruelty and magnanimity. This is not the outcome of a split personality, but the systematic flip flopping of a would-be strongman who wants to claim credit for any outcome, be it a “The 12 Day War” or a short-lasting peace. It is feeding Donald Trump’s insatiable narcissism as the ultimate foreign policy goal.

Trump’s Turn to the Enemy from within

251 years ago, the First Continental Congress decided against establishing a standing army because its members feared that a bad government could turn such an army against its people. Last week these fears were confirmed by President Donald Trump when he decided to deploy the National Guard and US-Marines against an imagined insurrection in Los Angeles. On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress finally established a US-army since there seemed to be no other way to get rid of the British colonial power - the very army which Donald Trump is now turning against “the enemy within”. 

The signs for Donald Trump’s planned usurpation of the American military for political reasons had been there. In 2020, when Black Lives Matter protests were shaking the country his attempt to invoke the “Insurrection Law” of 1807 was sabotaged by members of his own administration and the top brass of the Pentagon who still had some constitutional qualms in their minds and professionalism in their bones and boots. And in October 2024 he said explicitly in an interview on Fox-TV: “The enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries”. 

Re-elected in November 2024 Donald Trump banned transgender people from serving in the military. In February he had the top lawyers for the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force fired because he saw them as endangering or slowing down his political agenda. And he ordered all material containing matters of race, gender and diversity to be banned from libraries and teaching at military institutions and had all Pentagon programs concerning these issues cut. 

Starting his second term in office the President has appointed presenters from right-wing media and followers of the MAGA movement to his cabinet and important positions on his national security staff: sycophants, performers, and clowns of the right-wing circus whose loyalty and incompetence would not allow them to threaten his political orders on military matters this time. 

He pushed the appointment of the FOX-TV-presenter, hyper religious philanderer and obvious drunkard Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense through a hesitant Congress after his first choice was even too outrageous to make it through the committee. And in South Dakota Governor, Kristi Noem, he found his type of political woman, anti-masks, pro-gun and full of adoration for her President. 

The worrying thing is not only that Trump could appoint such questionable characters to high office, but that they are still being sheltered from any serious critique by Republican lawmakers despite having embarrassed themselves in front of Congressional Committees week after week. They might present a daily security risk to the United States, but that does not seem to bother the elected Representatives of “America First”. 

Some observers have been trivialising the situation by arguing that many of Trump’s Executive Orders, policies or appointments have been mainly performative or will not last. This has long been naïve. Yet, since last week such arguments have become reckless and dangerous. 

So, what has happened between Los Angeles, North Carolina and Washington, DC over the last few days that should worry friends and foes of the Trump-regime alike - and its allies abroad? 

On May 21, Trump’s main personal aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem had pressed the heads of Immigration Agency ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to arrest 3.000 “illegal immigrants” a day to implement Trump’s election promise of sending back one million of them. This would quadruple the annual deportation rate under Presidents Obama and Biden. What had been practiced in a haphazard manner by local ICE units all over the country should now be coordinated, stepped up and moved to large cities for more effect. 

When ICE units started picking up non-white labourers in front of the Home Depot Store in Central Los Angeles on the first weekend of June there were protests by the local Latino population. Others joined the demonstrations which were restricted to a few inner-city blocks. If there was some violence, it was at most a local skirmish which could have been easily dealt with by the riot-trained Los Angeles Police Force.  

But because it was the Democrat stronghold of California and - in conservative eyes – the “sin city” of Los Angeles, Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth sent in the National Guard and US-Marines, hoping to embarrass Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and to get dramatic TV-footage for increasing popular support of Trump’s deportation agenda. 

Courts ruled the use of the National Guard without a real emergency illegal, Governor Gavin Newsom gave a fighting speech defending democratic rules against the choreographed demonstration of federal power, but to no avail. The pictures provided what the Administration was looking for to sway the majority of the population towards its deportation agenda. Not without success. The conservative media celebrated this action. The national polling is still inconclusive, but roughly half of the population seems to be in support of a stronger immigration policy although Trump is losing some voters on the question of calling in the military. 

The manufactured mayhem also showed the failure of legacy media in an environment that has totally changed since the LA-riots of 1992 or even the nation-wide Black Rights Matter protests in 2020. Even the coverage of the usually more balanced cable channel CNN did give its viewers the Trumpian impression that all hell had broken loose in Los Angeles. Some balaclava clad youth throwing a water bottle at the police is visually much more attractive than thousands doing their normal weekend shopping undisturbed just half a mile away. 

These changes in the media matter a lot, not the least for the Democratic Party. Nostalgic Democrats who are just wishing for another Obama, writes Tressie McMillan Cottom in “The Atlantic”, forget “that we no longer have that country” (of 2008, R.P.); a country of IPhone 3G, when a web-based discourse was just coming up with twitter and “a president benefited a lot from a media world in which we shared the same reality”.  

Around 2012 came the shift from an open web to one in which algorithms of Big Tech were shaping your media consumption. That was already the case when Black Lives Matter happened, but since then extremist influencers have made the right-wing propaganda even more dominant in a deeply polarized media ecosystem. And after Elon Musk bought twitter in 2022 it turned from a platform for discourse into a machine shaping and justifying what people believe. Whatever those right-wing influencers say and do, argues McMillan Cottom: “The real power is the platform that can amplify that popularity and insulate it from detractors”. 

So, Congress has failed to safeguard the neutrality and professionalism of the armed forces, and a fractured media can no longer produce an shared reality, neither in LA nor elsewhere. And the military itself? 

Whilst the spectacle in LA unfolded President Trump gave a very partisan speech at Fort Bragg, wearing his MAGA hat, attacking the Governor of California and enticing the young recruits to follow his political agenda; that is, defying all military traditions and the rules of civil behavior. And nobody from his appointed military leadership ventured to speak up to their commander-in-chief as it would have been their duty in a threatened democratic order. “The Silence of Generals”, the headline in “The Atlantic” ran. It was just the Philosophy Professor Graham Parsons at West Point who put his resistance into words after resigning from the revered military school, writing in the same magazine. 

The military parade that followed on Saturday June 14 in Washington D.C. was just another act in a week of militarized spectacle. The costs of driving large tanks through Washington D.C. were enormous, the actual marching of the soldiers atrocious, the crowds disappointing; and watching it Donald Trump was falling asleep. But he made “his military” march to his political tune. 

Much of what happened during this week was designed as revenge for failures during his first presidency: not getting his parade in 2020, not being able to deploy troops during the protests of “Black lives matter”, not be able to follow through on his promises to deport immigrants of all sorts. 

But in retrospect, it might be also remembered as the week when Donald Trump’s performance as a strongman turned into the real thing, as Susan Glasser ventures in the New Yorker; when, by turning the military towards the enemy within “he redefined national security”. 

Saturday’s military parade in Washington has been a flop with less than 200.000 people attending whereas the simultaneous “No Kings” protests of millions all over the country have been encouraging. But the American military remains in the hands of an unhinged leadership with its Generals sleepwalking into the threat of a civil war which is already being fought online. 

Leaving America

I am leaving America with a heavy heart. It is no longer the place I thought I knew. It is as if the crackpots that could always be found in the niches of a country so spacious have taken over the reins. It is a place where fear is up, and empathy is down. Where the borders between truths and lies are no longer visible, where extremism has gone mainstream and cruelty is accepted as the cost of political change. 

Where neighbors used to talk over the garden fence and across the political divide, silence has crept in. I never met so many Americans who did not want to talk, be it out of fear or out of shame: the federal workers in Washington who were suddenly sacked but still hoping for reinstatement; the medical researchers who’s programs were being cut who’d better say nothing; academics who just did not reply to an interview request; the Mexican immigrants watching their kids play on a baseball ground in Georgia who preferred to remain silent; or the foreign students on a campus in Mississippi in fear of being deported. Others just felt ashamed to speak to a foreigner about the state of affairs in their home country. The staff at America’s great institutions, stemming from an age where communality was promoted, is terrified by the impending cuts of funds or grants: local librarians, park rangers, journalists at National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Corporation are worried about their future and that of their institution. 

There is fear on all sides. Some fear the alleged hordes of South American criminals crossing the border in Texas of California. Others are anxious when Haitian immigrants refurbish the empty shops in the center of a run-down mill town in Pennsylvania. Parents are worried about their children “being indoctrinated” by left-wing or “woke” propaganda at school or university. 

To me, this was an America, which had changed considerably. The patriotism that could be arrogant or generous in the past has given way to a narrow and aggressive nationalism. The dream of social advancement has been replaced by a fear of falling. Disadvantaged members of the dwindling white majority see the world as a zero-sum-game where the decline of their group must be the gain of “the others”. 

Trump’s America is torn between manufacturing nostalgia and fear of Artificial Intelligence. In the Rust Belt and West-Virginia I talked to former industrial workers who were dreaming of a return to coal at a time when the career path of their children is being threatened by AI. Whilst in Washington politicians of both parties don’t have the faintest idea how to deal with the next technological revolution. 

More than once, I felt like the “Uncle from Europe” when pointing out negative side effects of policies my interlocutors had voted for. They were blasé about it as if they had checked out of a life based on details and facts. The mentioning of large-looming issues concerning climate or capitalism seemed to be taboo. One friend called the condition “wilful ignorance”. 

My journey was accompanied by a total disconnect between the dystopic judgments of the liberal commentariat I read every night and the blissful ignorance of conservatives I encountered during the day. Where well known economists and illustrious columnists regularly predicted the collapse of the stock market or the international order most rural inhabitants of middle America just shrugged their shoulders and located the problems elsewhere. Maybe they were just too smart to closely follow Donald Trump’s daily diet of outrageous statements which disturb intellectuals and Democrats who can’t help but believe what somebody said. 

For the voters of Donald Trump contradictions did not matter since the pride to have made a drastic statement at the ballot box seemed to be well worth the cost of suffering later. Some would rather have Medicaid cut than their dental hygiene improved, out of pride not to be dependent on government handouts; as long as these handouts where also denied to others. At times I found it difficult to follow the emotional logic of Trump supporters. I detected traces of self-harm. 

As it has always done, religion helps people to overcome challenges, to ease contradictions and to supplant logic with belief. Listening to white religious politicians in Washington and folks in local churches I found their literal understanding of the Bible yet flexible application of their faith often perplexing. For ultra-conservative Republicans in Congress religion has become the last refuge of the scoundrel. When they run out of answers and arguments in Congressional hearings or TV-interviews these devout defenders of the Trump-Administration often revert to their Christianity and God’s will. And the Christian voters who I met on my way equally applied religion as tool to escape reality with all its annoying contradictions. Thus, Trump’s religious failings, which should have put him in what they thought of as hell, were being excused as actions of a sinner who would soon see the light. 

Language mattered to people in different ways. For conservatives the suggested use of a signalling pronoun was just one word too much leading them into the camp of right-wing culture warriors. For liberals the counterattack on “woke” language was seen one more step on the way to fascism. 

On X I would follow the doom sayers and trolls of the MAGA movement, warning of “invasions”, the “deep state” and the emasculation of men and offering nationalist solutions and revenge. In Main Street I would encounter citizens who were just tired of politics having voted or not. “Flooding the zone with shit”, as MAGA-entrepreneur Steve Bannon had called the ultra-right’s media strategy to usurp power, has clearly worked. It has emboldened the conservative extremists and depoliticized the rest. 

What people told me was often a cheap copy of the prefabricated phrases spit out and repeated ad nauseam on right-wing Fox TV or left-wing MSNBC - strong opinions based on fears or wishful thinking. “Something needed to be done” – “The Democrats were giving all that money away” – “The borders had to be closed” – “Tariffs will make America Great Again”. Or I listened to the liberal broadcasts, lying less but still failing journalistic standards and blaming Trump for everything the Democrats did not manage to do, like getting rid of Joe Biden in time.  

When I set out for America, I was under the illusion I could ask people questions about their life and would then understand why they acted the way they did. But in many cases, they turned the question about what happened to them and their country around: “You tell me”, they answered. There seemed to be a lot of confusion at the bottom of their refusal to reflect. 

When I asked how people felt the most common answer was “being overwhelmed”. Many inhabitants of the back country are overwhelmed by obesity, the sheer size and precarious conditions of their bodies, by the most visible health crisis beyond opioids and loneliness.  

I was also struck by the ever-present signs of addiction, screaming at you from supermarket shelves, restaurant menus, diet programs and TV commercials that promise immediate relief, be it through pills, preachers or the right-wing politics of pride and punishment, of cruelty and redemption, of promise and fantasy. It sometimes felt like travelling through a country on the drip of drugs and political fantasies. 

If there is one book that has helped me understand some of the phenomena I encountered on my journey it’s “Fantasyland” by Kurt Anderson. Written during the election campaign, it explains and encapsulates America’s penchant for magical thinking from its protestant beginnings to today’s “fantasy-industrial complex” with Donald Trump as its “apotheosis” - the reality star who can promise his followers everything without being taken to account. 

Anderson takes the reader to an America “created by true believers and passionate dreamers, by hucksters and their suckers – which over the course of four centuries have made us susceptible to fantasy…” He chronicles this history of make-believe from the Salem Witch Trials to the showman and circus promoter P.T. Barnum, from Hollywood to Scientology, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.  

Anderson’s summary: “Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled”. 

This was a fitting description of the world I travelled through: where the polarization of religion had led to the polarization of politics, with the Grand Old Party has become the party of white Christians; where my interlocutors “voted with their churches”; where students decide what news to believe by consulting influencers online; and where even the debased politics of innuendo and hate have become entertainment. 

On the other side of the political divide the question beckons: What happened to the Democrats? They are shell shocked for sure. They had lost the working class over time by ignoring bread-and-butter-issues, as I heard many times driving through the Rust Belt. With their identity-based politics, moderate Democrats told me, they cut the connection to the life and grievances of voters between the coasts and did not even notice to what extent they had become the party of the elites.  

The Democratic Party misread Obama’s presidencies as a celebration of progress achieved. Because it was and it was not. I talked to white voters for whom Obama was the President who shouldn’t have been. Because, in their words, “it was too early to have a black man in the White House”. And I spoke to black voters for whom Obama was the President who could have been. But he just acted, they said, as any other inhabitant of the White House. Without the issue of “race” and the victories of Barak Obama, many agreed, Trump would not be President today. As a result of this misperception, Democrats took the first Trump Presidency for an aberration. And then, by not telling Joe Biden to go when it was time, they made his Presidency an interlude instead. 

Up to their loss in November 2024 Democrats did not understand the depth of cultural alienation, how their moral righteousness on issues of identity grated with people outside of large cities, how so-called “wokeness” could be seen as a threat to a more traditional understanding of life. Even many conservative Americans had accepted gay marriage and other legal changes on matters of gender. But when it came to the introduction of pronouns into official communication or to trans athletes showing up at their daughter’s sport events the reluctant acceptance of “the other” turned into a furious backlash and a defensive return to a binary world. 

Now there is a deep generational divide among Democrats about the future route their party should take. Every Democrat under the age of 35 I met would argue for a turn to the left, going with a progressive young leader like Alexandria Octavio-Cortez (AOC), the smart, eloquent Congresswomen from New York who in April was pulling leftish crowds touring the country with her “anti-oligarchy campaign”. Whereas middle-aged and older Democrats are still arguing that it would take a moderate like Joe Biden, only younger, to win the next election. Beyond this rift, there is no vision to recapture a solid majority of the population. 

I saw engaged Democrats marching in their city and protesting with their placards against the ultra-right Republican Representative in their small town. But I did not meet one grass root organiser or activist who could formulate what I thought was convincing strategy to win back the working class and independent voters, or even registered Republicans. There is no sign of a Democratic populism that can shift the political ground. I did not talk to one Trump voter who would switch to the Democrats in case the Trump fails with his controversial policies. Such is the abhorrence of Democrats in conservative Middle America. 

Still there is justified hope that the Democrats can win the mid-term elections in 2026 if their party runs better campaigns and candidates and some Republicans stay away. If Trump’s tariffs cause more inflation, if the infighting between the tech oligarchs and the MAGA movement escalates, the Democrats might be able to win back one or even both chambers of Congress. Much of this will depend on what political path Republican Senators and Congressmen/women will take.  

And even if Democrats win back the Senate or the House in November 2026 a lot of institutional and mental damage will have been done. They will have to operate in a country during a painful return to reality where many judicial guardrails have been removed and the lack of empathy has become part of virtual and real life. 

“What happened to America and why”, this was the question I had set out to find answers for. There were many replies, but one typical response by my interlocutors captures the situation better than all factual explanations. “We don’t know, but something had to happen!” This “something” came along in the figure of the well-trained con artist Donald Trump. It was a historic coincidence of a populace deeply unhappy about its falling fortunes in the real-world meeting America’s most talented huckster who was satisfying his ever-growing narcissism in the Internet-driven world of political fantasies.  

Half of America was ready to be hoodwinked by the reality star who promised the world with rebellious gusto but without guaranties. Did his voters know that his promises were not serious but fake? Well, it did not matter. Voting for Trump was like going to a wrestling match: you know it is fake, but you enjoy its simplicity and performed violence anyway. The question remains what happens when the political wrestling match is over? 

What is the scenario for a return to reality? The Trump-Administration will most likely self-destruct. Sooner or later its realm of fantasy will collapse from incompetence, corruption and its own contradictions. The signs could be seen when the charlatans in his cabinet started to appear in front of Congressional committees, when the Trump family moved into the crypto sphere and the rift between the Tech oligarchs and the MAGA crowd started to widen. Yet Donald Trump can always trigger the immigration issue to mobilise the passion of his base and win over a sizeable number of voters. Those might not share most of his policies but would agree to defending the country against what his administration will then call an “insurrection or “the enemy within”. 

Behind these scenarios lies the ultimate question, not only of interest for the US: What happens when right-wing populists fail in a political system in which the rule of law has been weakened, where the public sphere has degenerated into an "information oligarchy" and the distinction between truth and lies has been completely eroded? Will there still be a way back to some form of liberal democracy, or can the chaos of populist failure only be filled with new and possibly fascist illusions? 

Travelling almost 3.000 Miles through the American heartland where a large majority voted for Donald Trump, I met many people driven by fears and fantasies, quite a few with sympathies for a strongman, but nobody who would favour an autocratic system.

Of Academics and Journalists who turned silent

You will have heard about courageous Harvard University withstanding President Trump’s attempt at curtailing the academic freedom that once Made America Great. And you will have read about shameful Columbia University giving in to his censorious orders. But you might not know what effects the Trump Administration’s war on “wokeness” is having on academic institutions, public libraries and local media where there isn’t big money involved, less attention given and little power to resist; that is in small-town-America where the agents from Immigration Patrol (ICE) visit the local college or the place where immigrants hang out – and nobody knows what really happened, with hearsay making its frightening round. This story is about the people wo did not respond to my request for a chat or an interview during my travels through the “flyover country” and about what could have motivated them to remain silent. 

I had met – let’s call her – Anna when working in an East African country a few years ago. She was a young and smart master student of Psychology at one of the best African Universities destined to go places. When I heard that she was doing her PhD at a university in the state of Mississippi, I called her to meet up. But Anna’s first response to my request was unusually guarded. She would think about it and ask if some co-students and lecturers wanted to talk to me. In the end, they would not, and she was afraid to continue our exchange via whatsapp. 

It emerged that Anna’s university had advised students not to leave the country, because they might not be able to come back again; to not talk to journalists or outsiders, because that might get them and the institution into trouble. Among themselves students did no longer communicate important issues via social media but only from person to person since they had heard that there were “spies on campus” informing ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to have them deported. 

Anna is just one of 1.1 million foreign students enrolled in the US today. According to “The Atlantic” they contribute 44 billion Dollars to the US economy supporting 378.000 jobs over the last academic year. But this fear of being deported is also the long-term effect of the now Vice-President JD Vance having called universities “very hostile institutions” in 2021, which needed “to be attacked aggressively”.  

Anna’s fears might have been partly based on rumours, but they served their purpose to cow students and academic staff into silence and submission; as I found out when contacting professors and lecturers of social science at some universities in the American South to talk to me about history, politics, religion and Donald Trump’s education policies. Nobody replied to my email-requests, not even writing back that they were too busy. 

When I covered the United States in the early 90s nobody refused the interview request of a German correspondent. Everybody wanted to talk to me and proudly explain their country to the foreigner. When I travelled through the back country Europe was far away for most people, but they still asked questions about the world out there, be it about the fall of the Berlin Wall or a crisis in the Middle East. At that time there was some fear that Japan would swamp the country with cheaper computers and better cars, but this did not cloud people’s political judgements at home or poison international relations.

In the spring of 2025, it was different. Trump voters kept explaining to me why some drastic action was needed to lead America back to greatness and confront China. Yet many journalists and academics seemed to have gone underground with their opinions on what has happened to America.  

There was the editor of a West-Virginian newspaper who neither answered the phone nor email requests. The same with the Religion Correspondent of a paper in Nashville or a columnist of a local rag in Georgia. There was the school intendant who eloquently wrote about the disadvantages of home schooling but would not talk to me about education policies.

There were the librarians in America’s wonderful and well-equipped system of public libraries who excused themselves for very understandable reasons, some of them being braver than others. 

Of course, I found members from the professional classes who opened their hearts to me in private conversations tinged by despair or open hostility to Donald Trump and his acolytes. “What”, a friend in Washington D.C. had said to me, “you are travelling to Dumbfuckistan”, when he heard about my planned route through the back country. He had tried to excuse first-time Trump voters in 2016, but for those routing for him again in 2024, he could only feel deep disgust. “I am fucking angry that Trump has been dominating my life for ten years now”, said another friend in Atlanta. But these were people in retirement who could express their opinions and anger freely without fears of retribution.  

And then there were the academics at the “enemy institutions”, the liberal-left administrators of “wokeness” and DEI programs in universities as Republicans would see them. They just did not want to talk to me. I could call, send emails or confront them in the hallways of their departments of history or social science. They had no time, showed no interest, or pretended to have no knowledge when I asked them directly questions about culture and politics. 

Going through the biographies of academic staff of some southern universities I could see the point of conservative critics that accidental expertise about marginal issues seemed to have taken the place of more traditional subjects. It was indeed difficult to find an expert for my more mundane questions - not on Buddhism in Bhutan but on Southern Politics - who then would not answer my call anyway. 

Since I could not ask them about the reasons for their silence I have to speculate. Was it fear to get into trouble with an equally scared leadership of their university? Or shame to discuss what has happened to their country from the perspective of a Democrat-voting liberal, in a place they no longer understood? Has academic life become so hectic and challenging that there is no more time to meet a curious visitor? Or is it the shock about the oldest modern democracy suddenly undergoing an Orwellian Scenario? Are these academics too busy, rereading “1984” and imagining themselves no longer in Tennessee or Mississippi but in “Oceania” trying to figure out what they should do in the role of the novel’s main protagonist Winston Smith?

I don’t know, and I wonder if they do. Yet to me the silence of those academics and journalists serves as a warning. Hence, we should not be looking at fear in America today assuming that a similar scenario couldn’t unfold in Europe tomorrow as well - and again. Would our academics and journalists be more courageous? Maybe it’s us Europeans who should be reading Sinclair Lewis’ dystopian novel “It can’t happen here” in which the American author was warning his countrymen and women in the mid-30s to not copy the European fascisms of the day.

Race, Cruelty and the Death of Shame

Before I left for my trip through the American “hinterland” on April 12th I had sat with Ron and Nick in their living room in Washington, D.C. to discuss the issues of cruelty and race. Ron is a Professor of Psychology and Divinity. And Nick, who is British, has had a long career in international development having seen the world. We talked about the connection between Christianity and the American psyche and about the different American and European experiences on a whole range of cultural issues. Our conversation touched on many phenomena about which I would later hear from the people I met on my journey, issues that also related to what I saw zapping through the TV channels in my hotel room late at night. It might therefore be worthwhile to compare how the more academic analysis of Trump’s America by my Washington friends tallied with the personal encounters on my five-week-long road trip of 2750 miles. 

At the beginning of the American experience stood cruelty and racism. “In Europe,” Nick says, “we could export both through our approach to colonialism – we knew what was happening, but we didn’t have to see it. But here in the US they had to live with it. It’s given us Europeans a legacy of piety and hypocrisy, it’s given the Americans an astonishing tolerance for, maybe enthusiasm for, cruelty.” Cruelty remained endemic in a frontier society, it became a means to expand the nation. Racism was America’s “national sin”, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “deeply rooted in the psyche and traditions of our nation” to quote Martin Luther King. And today, Nick thinks, “race is the glue to all factors that brought on Donald Trump”. 

As a black psychologist Ron can list the key political messages which marked the conservative realignment over more than half a century. There was Richard Nixon’s law and order campaign in 1968 as an antidote to the anti-war protests and the protests and riots stemming from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And, spurred on by the political rhetoric of the Republican party, conservatives increasingly viewed Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” as entitlements to black people. But it really began with Ronald Reagan starting his election campaign of 1982 in Philadelphia, Mississippi where only 18 years earlier three civil rights workers were murdered, and later using the issue of race by referring to black “welfare queens”. The older President Bush followed 1988 with his notorious and decisive “Willy Horton Ad” playing on white fears of black crime. In 1992 the Democratic candidate Bill Clinton copied this winning racial electioneering with his “Sister Souljah” remark, branding himself as a centrist by distancing himself from the controversial comments of a black rapper. 

To Ron this “normalization of racialization” just showed how tenuous the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement had been, “only indemnifying the conscience of white Americans and functioning as a denial mechanism, pretending that we’ve achieved equality.” The resistance to Civil Rights legislation grew with the emergence of the Tea Party in 2008. There was more scapegoating to cover up “the grotesque inequalities after the financial crisis”. With his “permission to be brutal again”, Ron sees Donald Trump not as an aberration but as the symbol for the advancing “desensitization of our culture”. 

And as a minister in a liberal church Ron has watched the parallel rightward shift of white churches from the fundamentalism of Jerry Fallwell in the 80s to now 89% of Evangelicals voting for Trump. His judgement of those voters is harsh and clear: “They are bigots first and Christians second. To them white supremacy is more important than Christian faith.” In those churches the trained psychologist detects “moral injury”, “conscience crippled”, “a lack of empathy”, and “degradation by their commitment to denial, obfuscation and scapegoating.” In this right-wing version of Christianity, he adds, “the social Other has become the sinner who deserves punishment”. 

For both friends, the political effects of the accelerating political-religious turn to the extreme right are clearly visible, and they find the resulting damage deeply worrying. In the world of alternative media “Europe appears as a woke mess.” In Nick’s view, the old continent is threatening to America “because it undercuts the clear God-given binaries of good & bad, male & female, black & white.” With the exception Russia, of course, as that is the one country that has done it right – it has emerged as a white Christian empire that has kept black people out of the nation and its church. While the citizens of “woke Europe” still view social benefits as an achievement of their post-war welfare states, today’s conservative America “sees health care and social benefits as white tax money going to undeserving black people”. 

Social media has harnessed the ability to turn cruelty into a spectator sport, says Nick. “People are being given a constant diet of cruelty, of racism weaponized, of other people’s misery provided for your enjoyment. It is an addiction that always needs to be fed.” So, inflicting misery on immigrants can be a good ploy for months. “But where does it end?” he asks. “Can they do enough cruelty to compensate for cuts to Medicaid?” Five weeks after our conversation Donald Trump’s ‘Big and Beautiful Budget Bill’ with its envisaged cuts in Medicaid suggests that they can. 

On my journey through America’s back country, I have encountered the lack of empathy for certain groups in jokes and innuendos and listened to racist stereotypes if expressed in indirect ways. When the host of the late-night “Gutfeld Show” on Fox TV and his guests “refreshingly” discuss the day’s events the lack of empathy and cruelty towards weak, disabled, migrant or black citizens is palpable in an often mocking or scornful discourse.  When the people I met referred to contested social or demographic dynamics it was never themselves but always their neighbours who acted upon their racial prejudices. “They left town because they felt black people had taken over.” And the parroting of Fox TV lingo by the Donald Trump voters behind counters, at bar tables or in the streets, inevitably ended with the racially loaded sentence that they could not vote for the Democratic Party because “they were giving all our money away.” 

When my two friends in 96-Percent pro-democratic Washington were drawing a picture of America where a psychopath and narcistic leader in the White House knows no rules and offers his followers cruelty instead of quality of life and gives them permission to let loose their own cruelty and racism, it initially sounded quite harsh to me. But after my – always friendly - meetings and chats with voters of Donald Trump in small cities and rural America, I can’t really refute their analysis. 

What are the challenges to overcome racism and white supremacy which lie at the roots of the rise and reign of Donald Trump? Ron has extensively written about this from the perspective of a teaching and practising psychologist. For any progress, he suggests, Americans must address the “denial of racism/white supremacy”, restore the “impaired empathy” and learn “how to deal with shame.” These, he is the first to admit, are not easy tasks for a society which has been regressing in all these fields. The denial of white supremacy is still prevalent; Vice-President JD Vance has recently distanced himself from traditional concepts of compassion and empathy, and Donald Trump has amply shown that he knows no decency or shame.  

At a congressional hearing in 1954, Ron recalls a historic challenge to untrammelled power, the anti-communist and racist Senator Joseph McCarthy had clearly overstepped his brief by incriminating an innocent person. But when he was asked by the courageous chief council of the US army “have you left no sense of decency”, this question, broadcast live on national television, finished the powerful Senator’s political career. Whereas Donald Trump, Ron says, “has built his whole career on the death of shame.”

The Legacy of Racism and the Success of Donald Trump

When you pass from Selma to Montgomery in the state of Alabama it’s all about history, from slavery to Civil Rights, from decayed sharecropper houses to impressive Memorial Sites. You also feel that it is all about racism, from the historic march across Edmund Pettus Bridge in March 1965 to the repeated election victory of Donald Trump in November 2024. What has changed? On this 54-mile-long journey you see the markers of white supremacy and black despair, of black dignity and white fear, you meet African Americans disheartened by recent political changes and hear stories of white resentment feeding the conservative backlash. It reads like a continuous story of two tribes losing. 

In front of “Brown Chapel Church AME” in Selma Reverend Alvin C. Bibbs instructs the two dozen disciples of his guided tour in the rules of their short symbolic march from the church to Edmund Pettus Bridge. “Take water and walk slowly in the sun”. But where the members of this tourist group visiting from Chicago are wearing comfortable sneakers the freedom fighters of 1965 had only their ordinary shoes to leave the church, cross the bridge and walk onwards to Montgomery on their four-day-long march that changed not only Southern history.  

Reverend Alvin Bibbs gathering his visiting group from Chicago for their symbolic March across Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama

On March 7th, 1965, the so called “Bloody Sunday”, the freedom marchers were brutally beaten trying to cross the bridge. But two weeks later Martin Luther King and thousands of his followers could reach their destination under the protection of the National Guard which President Lyndon B. Johnson had ordered into Alabama after the life pictures on national TV had shown racist state troopers beating, teargassing and trampling the would-be marchers supported a vicious white crowd gathering from all over Dallas County. As a result of this outrage the “Voting Rights Act” was passed by Congress in August 1965 and laid the foundation for Civil Rights Legislation in America. 

After his small group’s symbolic crossing of the bridge 60 years on, Reverend Alvin Bibbs is eager to tell us his view of recent history and what it has to do with Donald Trump’s election victory. Born into one of the most crime-infested housing projects on the South Side of Chicago, Alvin’s destiny changed at the age of six, when Martin Luther King on a visit to his local church “stroke his hand over my curly afro head” and gave the young boy his blessing. From then on, Alvin focused on school, won athletes scholarships, played professional basketball in Spain, became a reverend and now heads the “Justice Journey Alliance”, an NGO supporting the cause of civil rights.  

Alvin Bibbs has witnessed a decades-long conservative campaign to install fear into “European Americans” who felt that they were losing economic power, influence and status. “This dynamic of fear”, Alvin says, “has moved into rural white communities all over the country”. “And once you have caught that vision”, the black reverend puts himself into the shoes of white voters, “you believe that you have to take back your country again”. And now Alvin Bibbs is seeing the Trump Administration “demolishing the system of civil rights, discrediting and capturing the history of our movement”. 

You do not have to be black to understand this dynamic. Laura Jansen, the CEO of another nonprofit organization as part of his tour group, finds even harsher words for what is happening: “Many white Americans have lost shit - pardon my language - when the country voted twice for a black president”. And with that shock of 2008 and 2012 she explains Donald Trump’s success. “Deep down it’s racism couched in other terms”. 

At the foot of Edmund Pettus Bridge we meet Charles who works as a guide for the trickle of tourist groups visiting this historic location. One just has to mention the name of Donald Trump and Charles spurts out how “desolate and devastated” he feels about the political backlash in the making. For him 21st of March, 1965, “was the best day in his country’s history, and “November 5th, 2024, was the worst”. He now fears “that the achievements of the civil rights era might be taken back”. 

Charles was born here in Selma. He was good in school, going to study law when his daughter was born and “God had another plan for him”. Instead, he worked as a pipe fitter and in warehouses of all kinds. In a state with one of the lowest minimum wages he has witnessed brain drain, white flight, the outsourcing of jobs and local industry dying. According to him it started in 1978 when the nearby army base closed and continues with the shutting down of the Selma AmeriCorps Program just announced a week ago. “We have always been punished for what we did in 1965 and how we have voted since”, he believes, which in November 2024 was 65% for Kamala Harris in Dallas County with its population 70 % black.  

Charles disappointment in life seems all-encompassing: from the tourists in Selma “who only gawk at history, but don’t have skin in it”; to the state of Alabama with one of the lowest teacher salaries nationwide for his wife; to the churches catering for white people “who once threw rocks and tomatoes at us with the bible in the other hand”. Whereas the God he believes in, tells you “to love other human beings”. Still, Charles is manning the folding table next to Edmund Pettus Bridge with the literature about Selma and the Civil Rights Movement every day, explaining its history with knowledge and enthusiasm. 

“The Selma Times Journal” is located just across the street from where Charles offers his services as a guide. And over the last 25 years its editor Brent Maze has watched the same developments if from a different vantage point. The town’s journal faces the typical economic challenges for local newspapers in the country: a loss of population, a dwindling readership and receding advertising revenue. Seven years ago, it had to change from a daily print run to appearing twice a week and reduce its personnel to a full-time staff of five. Brent Maze, who is white, came to Selma from Jackson, Mississippi, his father being involved in the civil rights movement. 

How do they cover race relations? “In daily reporting”, says the editor, “the issue of race is always in the back of your mind. Yet black-on-white crime does no longer automatically make the front page, Brent explains the subtle shift, “unless it is murder”.  

Brent Maze is listing the “firsts” in Selma’s recent history: its first black mayor in the late 2000s, President Obama’s visit at the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” when people lined up as far as two blocks from the bridge; and recently the first black schoolboard, yet with white pupils still escaping to two private schools.  

Yet he has also seen backward steps when around 2008 conservative traditional Democrats moved to the Republicans; “when the Obama’s presidency led to white fears of losing their identity”; when single issues like abortion hit the Democratic Party in Alabama and churches preached that you can’t be a Christian and a Democrat at the same time. “The rise of Donald Trump”, he states, “coincided with those white sentiments”. 

Looking out from his office window Brent Maze can already notice the immediate consequences of these long-term political changes. There are no longer workers on the building site of the “Selma Interpretive Center” since Elon Musk has imposed cuts on the National Parks Service which was to run this latest addition to the Civil Rights Trail for tourists. And last week the mayor had to announce 55 million Dollars in cuts of federal funding which will further damage the town’s plans for the refurbishments of its infrastructure. The black mayor’s slogan for his election “Rebuild together” is likely to ring hollow soon. 

On our one-hour drive from Selma to Alabama we have time to compare what we have heard with what we have read before coming here. For instance, Franz Fanons famous quote “The white man, slave to his superiority” in his book of 1952 “Black Skin, White Masks” where the revolutionary critic of colonialism and psychiatrist writes about white fears of losing a privileged position due to black people’s demands for equality. 

Or take Robert Kagan’s recent book “Rebellion” where the author links the anti-liberal strain in American history to race and religion functioning as continuous foundation of white supremacist attitudes and fear. With the election of Barack Obama, Kagan writes, “an open racism not seen in decades reemerged”. “When Donald Trump ran (for the Presidency, R.P.) in 2016 his identity as a white male supremacist was well established”. 

As in the town of Selma, the center of Montgomery receives you with eerily deserted streets but many Memorial Sites. Those look like modern shells for a dynamic past as if the gritty fight for Civil Rights had been moved to the safe spaces of impressive museums. Yet the city itself with its 200.000 inhabitants and despite some successful urban revitalization projects still looks like a forlorn Southern space, slow and stubborn, with some pretentious neoclassic office towers but lacking contemporary presence and dynamism. 

And the recent changes Dwayne Fatherree notices are not for the better. The veteran journalist who researches and writes for the well-established “Southern Poverty Law Center” (SPLC) has recently been reporting on the local effects of the current decrees by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.  

Because the SPLC and most of the historical sites in Montgomery are privately funded they are not being hit by the cutbacks of diversity programs. But quite a few NGOs and monitoring groups in Alabama will be indirectly affected when, for example, cuts in federal housing grants lead to their offices having to close. And the numerous “hate groups”, which the SPLC has been tracking for decades, says Dwayne, “will feel empowered by these new policies”. In the past conservative politicians had a certain philosophy and discipline, the white journalist continues. “Now they are just out to destroy everything that is not them”.  And how do the different communities react to the attacks by the new administration? Whilst the white community feel encouraged to practice their passive racism, Dwayne surmises, “people in the black community might think that they have seen it all and that things can’t get much worse.”  

Back in the streets of Montgomery, tourist coaches stop briefly at the “Dexter Avenue Memorial Church” where its former pastor Martin Luther King and the Freedom Riders planned the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the march from Selma; then they empty their loads of mostly black visitors at the interactive “Legacy Museum” and the visually haunting “National Memorial for Peace and Justice”. We will follow that trail. 

It is the Sunday morning worship at the “Dexter Avenue Memorial Baptist Church.” The blues-trained organist is hitting the reverberating gospel notes of call and response; the small women choir dressed in white lace sings beautifully and Pastor Allen Sims is preaching emphatically - but all in front of half-empty pews. The history of this engaged church serves no longer as guarantee for contemporary faith. And there are political reasons for that, as Reverend Dr. Allen Sims will point out to us after the service. 

Churches, he explains, have shifted from small to mega, with the small churches having struggled through the epidemics of Aids and Covid. And over the years, the pastor explains, “Evangelicals wanted to have a piece of the pie and moved with the Republican party to the right”. He tells you of his “deep disappointment in white pastors he once respected, “staying silent like the universities” in these troubled political times. But Pastor Sims not only chastises his colleagues at the white mega-churches. He also admonishes African Americans “thinking that Barack Obama was our savior”. The ensuing disillusion and distrust, he says, “led to some African American men to not vote for Kamala Harris”. 

Today Rev. Dr. Allen Sims - in the long line of “political” pastors following Martin Luther King - sees his nation and its churches “at the crossroads”.  Is there hope or no hope? He does not seem to be sure. Given the dedication of those present at the Sunday morning service but also the empty rows in his church, one understands his uncertainty. 

Reverend Dr. Allen Sims at Dexter Avenue Memorial Baptist Church with a freedom marcher from 1965

Onward to the “Legacy Museum” on the site of a former slave market. Its manifold installations document the story of race as America’s original sin with prosecutorial thoroughness: from slavery, through the eras of Reconstruction and Jim Crow up to the continuous incarceration of black men. What is missing, of course, is the most recent twist of that story, racism’s current reincarnation defined as zero-sum game between the felt loss of white status and the imagined gains by the black or brown race. 

Therefore, we ask how some of the visitors link the black experience displayed to today’s political landscape. Given the brutal images of southern history, he has just walked through for two hours, Eddie, a businessman from Atlanta, is angry at “those black brothers who have voted for Donald Trump just for tax relief”. And having passed through the dramatic displays of families ripped apart by slavery, traumatised by lynchings and punished by today’s penal laws his adult daughter believes “that we in the black community will have to focus more on our families”. Together we enter the shuttle bus that brings us to the “National Memorial for Peace and Justice”. 

Anthony and Wendell from North Carolina at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice looking for the slab documenting the lynchings in their home county

Opened in 2018 this most recent addition to the string of beautifully designed Legacy Sites is an open-sided pavilion visualizing more than 4.400 racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. Here among more than 800 hundred slabs of rust-colored Corten steel, some suspended, some standing, we meet Anthony and Wendell, two black visitors from North Carolina. Searching and finding the slab listing the lynchings in Nash County Anthony cannot believe what he reads: that in his home county they had lynched 20 black men on the same day with thousands of white spectators watching, as the engraved entry on the rusty surface states. “That happens if you declare the others different as we do with migrants today”, he says still a little breathless from the shocking discovery about his home county’s cruel history. 

In front of another jarring sculpture in the outside garden overlooking downtown Montgomery we ask Charity, a student at Georgia Tech, how she relates the legacy of the lynchings symbolised by hanging slabs and coffin-like steel boxes on the ground to what is happening to America now.  

Charity has come with her family but among the visiting crowd of black school classes and white tourists from up North she is missing the white people of Georgia or Alabama. “The ones who still haven’t understood what systemic racism is. Because we might have the same rights but still face many different obstacles.” And now with Donald Trump, she says with a bitterness not befitting her age, “the affirmative action and diversity programs to help us overcome these obstacles are on the way out”. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Licence to hate

When your car is winding down the last bends from the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains into the northwest corner of Georgia you would not suspect that the people populating this gentle landscape have voted three times for the most rabid Congresswomen in the US-House of Representatives. When you continue driving into Dalton, which proudly calls itself the “Carpet Capital of the World” you can’t believe that this respectable city and its pleasant surroundings hold enough resentment and anger of their citizens to send a mad conspiracy theorist to Washington D.C. who keeps calling for violent action against Democrats and other opponents of the MAGA movement. This story is about how somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene could emerge victorious from the 14th Congressional District in Georgia between the border to Tennessee and the suburbs of Atlanta - and how she is being seen from a place like the city of Dalton. 

With Marjorie Taylor Greene, short MTG, the traditionally Republican district is now represented by a 50-year-old mother of three whose claim to life achievements was to have inherited a construction firm from her father and to have run the CrossFit gym in nearby Alpharetta before her political career began by stumbling into the far-right blogosphere. Soon she was subscribing to the QAnon conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by a network of satanic paedophiles funded by George Soros. 

Presenting herself on social media as pro-gun, pro-white men, pro-life ultra-Christian, anti-Muslim and antisemitic her political career took off with the support of Trumpian Republicans in the House when she eliminated her moderate rivals in the primaries. Since then she has won Georgia’s 14th District in 2020, 2022 and 2024.  “The Republican base was in the market for Marjorie Taylor Greene – a suburban woman who not only didn’t recoil from Trump but was full-throated MAGA,” explained the magazine “The Atlantic” her political success in 2022. During the last election campaign, she declared: “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they’ve already started the killings.” Today in Washington, D.C., MTG leads the House Subcommittee overseeing Elon Musk’s DOGE unit for government efficiency. She is so MAGA that she will criticize her beloved President from the right if he only gives in an inch on his most outrageous promises. So much for her political career. 

But who were the 243.446 people (64.37%) in this Congressional District and the 25.767 citizens (66 %) of Whitfield County including the city of Dalton who voted last November for such an extremist candidate? Sharon, who works in the educational sector and would better not give her real name, has some ideas. “In this deeply conservative part of Georgia”, she starts, “it is people for whom the world is moving too quickly, who do not want progress or more Hispanics moving in, people who see their own history destroyed when confederate statues are being removed from the city to the battlefield sites”. 

On social media Sharon observes that people find somebody who breaks the status quo “quite entertaining - the shock value feeding their rage”. “It’s like MTG is giving them permission to being openly hateful”. Sharon remembers when the citizens of Dalton were still welcoming Hispanics who during the 90s had been recruited in Mexico to work in the region’s carpet factories. Now on facebook, she sees people from her community “just being incredibly racist”.  

What conservative authors have long decried and what the US Census Bureau has predicted for the year 2044, namely that the non-Hispanic white population in the US would fall below 50%, has already happened in Dalton and Whitfield County. Today 54 % of the city’s 35.000 inhabitants are Hispanics.  

When the carpet producers saw for how little the seasonal labourers from Central America would work in local agriculture they started recruiting Latinos for the floor-covering industry. When today 80% of the world’s flooring is being produced in the 300+ carpet factories of the area, this economic success is mainly due to the import of cheap labor. It has also produced a batch of white billionaires. 

At the banks and in the shopwindows of Dalton you see bilingual signs and when you leave the town center crossing Interstate 52 the auto garages, repair shops and restaurants start carrying Hispanic names. Few people in Dalton dispute that these Latino families of workers, small businesspeople, proud homeowners and lawyers are well integrated. There are no signs of open conflict, but for some citizens this productive influx still seems to have been too much. 

What could the local members of Whitfield County Democratic Party do to regain this Congressional seat? To answer this question Mary, Sheryl, Debbie and Dan have agreed to meet at Dalton’s modern Arts Guild Center center next to the spacious and well stocked Public Library. They regularly protest with their Anti-Trump billboards in front of MTG’s local office against the hate and violence their political opponent spews out.  

Dan who works as a manager for a recycling company can explain well what has happened nationally to the Republican Party over the years. He tells you how since the times of Ronald Reagan “the “architects of the great Southern Strategy captured the religious sentiment”; that “God has become an automaton and is no longer the loving god”; that abortion played a big role; and that a black President made things worse for the Democrats and let people’s minds finally flip. “So racist democrats became racist Republicans”. They feel they government has bypassed them and that the trickle-down economy has not worked since the cost of buying a house has gone through the roof. In Marjory Taylor Green, Dan says, “they have found a leader who hates the people they hate”. 

But Mary and Sheryl still don’t really understand what has happened to their local community. The vote for MTG, Mary says, “does not fit in with the way we live and the people we meet at social gatherings”. But the conservative messaging about the Democrats as been consistently bad, Dan throws in, and people believe that narrative. “We Democrats”, says one of them, “have become part of ‘The Other’”. 

Just the week we meet the regular poll of the “Atlanta Journal Constitution” shows just 35% of registered Georgia voters have a favorable view of the Democratic Party after Trump swept the state in his return to power. Even one-third of liberal voters have a negative perception of the party. “A rebellion from the very people expected to champion its vision”, the paper comments the Democrat’s worst poll results ever. 

What can Democratic activists do at the local level against the national trend and the political dynamics in their state? They list many things: focus on municipal elections; recruit better candidates for the public service commission and school boards; raise money for re-election of the Democratic Senator in 2026. Engage in voter protection and safeguard the election process against Republican manipulation; look for the people who didn’t vote; and finally, reach out to the Latino population. 

If my own attempts to speak to Hispanics in Dalton is any guide, the latter will be a difficult task, because I tried and mostly failed. The three Hispanic youths in the city center have just arrived from California a few months ago and have never heard of Marjorie Taylor Greene. Carla who is serving sausages at a barbeque stand of a Hispanic Law firm promising immigration advice will not really say if she knows what MTG is about, after having come here from El Salvador 17 years ago.  

Finally, at the local baseball ground in Rollins Park we find the diverse and integrated setting our Democratic activists had talked about. White, black and Latino kids playing baseball in front of their onlooking parents in a totally peaceful and casual atmosphere. The scene looks like an advert for the dreamscape of a multicultural America. Only that nobody from the Hispanic side wants to talk about Trump, MTG or politics. It seems that the price for successful integration is total absenteeism from the political sphere. As long as this holds the Democrats in Dalton have no chance whatsoever. 

Later that evening in the “Dalton Brewery” we meet an old white guy ready to talk about politics and Marjorie Taylor Greene. He is retired but still has to work three days a week to make ends meet. With the small draft beer in front of him at 6.45 Dollars you understand why. And MTG? “She is batshit crazy” he says, “but I voted for her.” And when you ask him why, his answer is probably the most resonating message of Donald Trump’s decade-long domination of the media sphere: “Because the Democrats were giving all that money away”.  Any Trump voter will know what he means.

America’s Veterans and the Demise of Patriotism

When I drove through America during the first Gulf War of 1991 there was pride in the country’s soldiers and veterans everywhere. People celebrated the 43 days of “Operation Desert Storm” as redemption for the loss in Vietnam. There were “Support Our Troops”-Signs” on every front lawn and victory parades in every town. Yet by 2015 Donald Trump could call war heroes or war dead “losers” and “suckers” and still be elected with almost 2/3 of American veterans consistently voting for him ever since. As a “thank you” the recent cuts declared by Elon Musk’s government efficiency unit (DOGE) hit veterans disproportionally since they make up one third of the federal workforce. And Donald Trump just announced that he would rename “Veterans Day” into “Victory Day for WW I”? How could such a winner-takes-it-all- and narrow nationalism replace the heartfelt patriotism of glorified times past? 

A good place to find out about those changes and contradictions seems to be Tuskegee, Alabama, home to the “Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site”. Here in the old hangars of an airfield the history of the first African Americans to be trained as Army Corps pilots in World War II is vividly displayed, showing the scandal of their mistreatment and the pride of their achievements; plus, their return from victorious combat abroad to remaining second class citizens at home after 1945. 

Meet Eric Walker, his sister Sharon and their nephew Blair, who are looking at the multiple presentations of racism and patriotism in a museum sadly lacking in visitors. They call themselves “a proud military family”. Their uncle Robert was a Tuskegee Airman for whom, as they recount, the discrimination he suffered was as traumatic as the flying above enemy terrain. Eric has served in the army in Asia for 15 years and Sharon has been with the reserves. They brought their nephew “to learn about our history”. 

So, where has this patriotism gone and why? “People have no memory, no interest in history or things outside their narrow lives”, Eric says, “and a very short attention span.” The picture he uses to describe the current mixture of memory loss and innocence is that of Rip van Winkle, the hero in a popular children’s story who wakes up bewildered after a deep 20-year-long sleep whilst the United States have turned from being a British colony into an independent country. “People are overwhelmed by all this other stuff”. 

The Gift Shop at the Central Alabama Veteran Affairs Medical Center in Tuskegee, Alabama

Tuskegee also houses the “Central Alabama Veteran Affairs Medical Centre” with numerous facilities outside of the town. Answering your question one of the medical staff will tell you “the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have turned people against patriotism. They feel fucked by the military-industrial complex”. And now he observes many of his patients in the medical unit being worried that the services and special programs will be cut by Elon Musk and his team. People like James, 64, who we meet in the canteen. He served with the California Cannoneers and is now fighting for a new hearing aid. He might still get it, and he is sure that they can’t touch his future 35.000 Dollar-pension, but the program that treated his drug abuse and saved him from homelessness, that is another thing. “This might not be there for others after I have left”, he says. 

The census of 2023 counted almost 16 million veterans living in America of whom 66.000 still fought in WW II. That amounts to roughly 6 % of the total population down from 18% in 1980. In 2024 the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) had a budget of 129 billion dollars and was providing for lifelong care and benefits for nine million veterans with a staff of about 400.000 employees. Yet the so called “Project 2025”, the blueprint for many policies of the Trump Administration, would cut benefits for disabled veterans and replace VA hospitals with privatized outpatient clinics. An internal memo from March 2025 spoke of 80.000 job cuts at VA starting in June.  

So far nobody knows how many workers at VA have already gotten their leave letters and some have been fired and reinstated shortly afterwards. Sharon at the Tuskegee Airmen Museum explains that its funding had been cut to only be restored after strong protests from the black community. Nationwide many veterans’ groups object the “chaos” those orders and confusing actions have been creating. 

But why target government bureaucracy where it serves the weakest and the disabled? An article in “The Atlantic” of September 2020 lists a whole litany of Donald Trump’s contemptuous comments about heroes, war victims and military service. The sources quoted here paint a picture of a person, who avoids a military graveyard because “it’s filled with losers”; who does not understand concepts such as patriotism, service and sacrifice because they are “non-transactional life-choices”; of a President who is “deeply anxious about dying or being disfigured, and this worry manifests itself as disgust for those who have suffered.” 

In Montgomery, not far from Tuskegee, I meet the veteran journalist Dwayne Fatherree who translates the President’s psychopathology into political terms. “With Donald Trump we see a shift in the concept of success and the concept of white patriotism. “Success is only what serves you and American patriots of today are a narrow band for whom world politics are no longer an issue. “For them outside is The Other”. 

But how did this happen in a Republican Party which historically has long been on the side of veterans and the armed forces? It all began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 when the Republican Party lost its ideological orientation. After the initial attempt at “putting America First” in the mid-90s ended in a defeat to President Bill Clinton and after the Bush years produced “forever wars”, a financial crisis and gave way to Barack Obama as the first black President in 2008 the Republican Party finally found a new enemy within. By then there was enough resentment and racism resurging to feed the new propaganda. 

With the help of powerful right-wing media, the proponents of a new white nationalism christened the liberal and “woke” democratic left as the new “communists” at home. And it worked. By November 2016 ideologues like Steve Bannon, courtesy of Fox TV, had prepared the ground for an egotistic entertainer usurping the White House by presenting a Christian nationalism without any morale but fought for in battles which are only about yourself. And it speaks to the power of Trump’s performance that this long gestating project even resonates with people hurt by it. 

Because when you travel around America and talk to vets here and there, many will stick to their President whatever his policies do to them. Men like Bubba whom we meet at Post 3016 of the “Veteran of Foreign War” Selma, Alabama. Bubba has not fought in any foreign wars. He only served with the National Guard from 1970 to 1976 “to avoid the Vietnam War”. But he likes to come here for the camaraderie and to have a beer in the late afternoon.  

Did he vote for Donald Trump? “Yes, of course, and no regrets”. And what about the President’s open contempt for veterans? “I had no choice”, he says, because Kamala Harris would have kept the borders open. He tells me that many whites have left Selma “because they think black people have taken over”. For him Donald Trump “will stop the federal money going to all kind of places, but to me”. For Bubba that seems to be more important than honoring the “Veterans of Foreign Wars”. And many in the country’s few thousand VFW-posts would probably still agree with him. 

After having left the impressive airmen museum at Tuskegee Eric Walker from the “proud black family with a long history of fighting for freedom” sends me an email adding to his comments from before. “I am ashamed of my country with Trump and his band of fools. But what gets to me is the sheer number of people who voted for him”. 

One wonders what will have to happen to America for this kind of pride to be honored again. 

Christian Faith and Political Agnosticism

Religion and Southern identity are closely intertwined. You can’t travel through the American South without feeling that religion is universal even if church attendance is receding as everywhere else. And where could the identity of the South be better studied than with the Southern Baptists, the predominant denomination with its biblical literalism. Where Donald Trump wants “America back” the Southern Baptists want to go “back to God”. Yet close to four out of five Southern Baptists will have voted for the current not so religious president. How does this go together? To find out we are in Nashville, Tennessee, the capital of country music which some have also called the “buckle of the bible belt”. And there, in the well-to-do southern suburb of Brentwood we find “Brentford Baptist”, a huge church, or better, a modern bible reading religious complex.  

It is lunchtime at the “Surefire Café” as big as a German University canteen and Catherine, Leila and Derrick from the church’s communication department are discussing their daily work. All in their early 30s they are from religious families although Catherine’s father came from Syria. But after reading the bible, his daughter explains, he changed from “shame based” Islam to “transparent” Baptist Christianity and became a pastor in Tennessee “to teach the gospel to everybody”. They would admit that Church membership and attendance is going down everywhere, but they say that the new recruits of Generation “Z” to the Baptist cause are more serious and more “authentic” in their search for God because of the “hardships they are suffering”. 

Still, Brentwood Baptist on 7777 Concord Road had more than 6.000 believers attending the Easter services, the preschool has 500 kids under five and the church caters for all kind of persons including those with special needs. In Pastor Jay Strother it has a compelling speaker whose sermons you can watch on the church’s website, as you can download the “Bible Reading Plan” from the app. 

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the umbrella organisation of, however, independent Southern Baptist Churches, has gone with the times. Since its relatively liberal phase in the 70s it has undergone a “conservative resurgence” and has been steadily moving to the right. In recent times it has been riveted by internal fights about women pastors and the acceptance of “critical race theory” leading to breakaways and some churches leaving the SBC. It seems that the Southern Baptists, founded in 1845 to safeguard the institution of slavery, have still not overcome their roots in racism. 

At Brentwood Baptist, Catherine explains, “the pastor would never preach anything political from the stage”. Here they focus “on the gospel and their identity through Jesus”, she adds. For Derrick the current political controversy about DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion programs) is a culturally based issue. “Jesus does not see it that way.” 

Yet what does the bible have to say about real life issues, concerning policies and Executive Orders from the White House. “You pray for the President” says Catherine, “but it is clear that we are all sinners, so we do not put faith in our political leaders because they all will fail”. 

In his wonderful and evocative travelogue “Hunting Mr. Heartbreak” the late British novelist Jonathan Raban, writes about the history of this strain of thinking in the American South: “The Confederacy embraced predestination as a political necessity, …the slaveowner became the custodian of the Divine will. Conservatives were defending God’s own intended order against the blasphemous depredations of the godless armies of the North”. After having lost the civil war the segregationists still cited “God’s order” for shoving “negroes” to the back end of the bus. Do the rabid denunciations of diversity programs or the silent acceptance of unlawful deportations in the name of the gospel not smack of a similar kind of thinking? 

How do these youn believers judge the current deportations of migrants? “It’s a tough one for us”, admits Leila, “it is the sad reality we live in until the day Jesus returns.” Is that all? “Just pray”, she adds, “and do to people crossing our path what you think is right”. 

Belmont University Campus, Nashville, Tennessee

With those words we leave “Brentwood Baptist” and enter “Belmont University” just 12 miles towards the center of Nashville to find out what other students whose religious identity is still Christian but less fixated on the words of the bible think about current politics. Belmont University describes itself as a “christian-centered institution” which “welcomes students from a wide array of faith traditions”. In its grandiose neoclassical buildings it harbours almost 9.000 students in 138 undergraduate and 38 master programs. The yearly fee is about 45.000 Dollars, although half of the students will study with a grant. 

On the lawn in front of the Jack C. Massey Center we find students playing baseball and Trayson, Rachel and Savannah preparing for their last class of the semester. They are freshmen/women in Business Studies and all come from conservative Christian families, although Trayson stresses that in his family they hold mixed political sympathies. “I do not like this political polarization”. So how do the students of Belmont University talk about the Trump Administration’s policies such as the ongoing deportations without due process? “We do not discuss politics among ourselves” says Rachel. “It does not affect people here in Tennessee as it does people in California or closer to the border”, Trayson explains. 

When the visitor tells them about the outraged reaction in Europe to Trump’s antics on the international stage and describes in detail how the New York Times is critizising his Exexutive Orders, they seem visibly surprised. How do they get their news, I ask them? “We do not read newspapers” Savannah says, “we get our information from social media”. And how do they separate truth from fiction there? “When that becomes difficult we ask around among friends”. 

You obviously don’t need to literally stick to the bible to become agnostic towards politics. 

Among Rednecks & Others at the NASCAR Race

Sitting in section ME, row 22, seat 14 at the Taladega Superspeedway Racing Track I am supposed to be in the middle of Redneck culture. At least so goes the stereotype: among conservative white beer drinking men and southern racists who hate everything associated with black culture, feminists, LGBTQ activists and sober coastal elites. When I look around, I see indeed many white men of a certain unkempt description, but also middle-class families, small groups of African Americans and some people who could easily be on the board of some medium-sized company, all enjoying themselves together under the already blazing Alabama sun. NASCAR racing has been described as a battlefield of class and culture wars where Confederate flags are flying, and Republican politicians visit to show their real or fake Southern conservatism. We will see. 

The recurrent and infernal noise when the highly tuned pack of stock cars passes the audience on the 2.66 Miles long oval track at a speed of 180 Miles an hour makes any conversation difficult. But at his return to a NASCAR race after 30-something years, John Schleicher to my right seems to be a bit disappointed and nostalgic. This race is not like it used to be, he says. The crowd is smaller, the cars are too sleek and uniform, the young drivers come from California or somewhere far and couldn’t even fix their own cars anymore, as could their forerunners when he was here last time. 

Indeed, stockcar racing and the NASCAR organisation have undergone many changes, particularly since the sport’s most revered hero Dale Earnhardt died crashing into the outer wall of the banked oval at the Daytona Speedway track at the hight of his sport’s popularity in 2001. What had started with bootleggers trying to evade police and the taxman during and after prohibition, what later became an expression of Southern pro-segregationist pride has been turned into another highly commercialised American sport when “the suits came in”, as the magazine “Politico” described it. They changed the cars and the rules, closed small racing tracks in the Southeast and angered the traditional fanbase. 

This fanbase in the southern states of the former Confederacy resides predominantly in regions which were hard hit by globalization. Where factories were closing the local racetracks often suffered the same fate under a NASCAR management in search of profits and new markets with a higher-income clientele. But it is still difficult to find somebody at Taladega Superspeedway who voted Democrat at the last election. 

“I guess 9 to 1 for Trump”, says Sheriff Shawn McBride from Shelby County when you ask him about the political affiliation of the spectators at this race.  “We are the South”. But he and his colleagues have also seen better days at the race track when none of the 100.000 seats was empty and tens of thousands more camped inside and outside the oval. Still there are about three million viewers watching the Talladega races on TV this afternoon. And there are those who have also come for the big party with country music tonight. 

Pals like Mike, Steven and Richard drinking beer behind the pickup on the grassy parking lot. Two of them are with the army which has strong links to NASCAR culture and in the past has co-sponsored the races. One of their friends has already passed out in his director’s chair. The ensuing conversation about politics and voting is zigzagging between the lines of logic like the Chevrolets, Fords and Toyotas did earlier on the racing track. Some intellectual crashes here, too.  

Mike, who works in IT, has checked out of politics. “It’s all about money. You have no say. It fucking doesn’t matter what you think and do. Everything is rigged”. His friend Steven starts with the beauty of Trump’s tariffs and ends with the badness of communism which he knows about since he was stationed in Germany in a town whose name he can’t remember. It’s not quite clear, what this has to do with Joe Biden, but the arguments are wild, to say the least. For all three of them the Democrats are just hell, although Richard is still in favour of both sides talking to each other. And off they go to find some “chicks” by which they seem to mean the young ladies in bikini tops, short skirts and high cowboy boots who are easy to find among the Taladega crowd.  

So how much Southern conservatism is left in the NASCAR crowd? Well, there was the long prayer asking God to safely steer the drivers all the way to the checkered flag when everybody lifted the baseball cap before the national anthem. Yet we also heard the positive reaction of the crowd when Catherine Legge was declared the first woman driver who ever held a lead position at the sport’s largest racetrack here at Taladega, if only for one round. She was mostly feted by “soccer moms” who have joined the “NASCAR dads” over the last years in a new mingling of cultural stereotypes. And yes, we also saw the occasional Confederate flag being driven around outside of the gates because they have been forbidden on NASCAR grounds since 2015.

But we also met Charles who has come from Charleston where he works for Boeing. Charles and his black friends will tell you “the three months of hell with the idiot in the White House who doesn’t know what he is doing are bad for Boeing and bad for America.” And how do they feel as African Americans among the crowd of alleged rednecks at this stock car race? Charles has been coming here for years “giving a shit about the confederate flags”. He was born here in Alabama. “Those people are idiots”, he says jauntily, “but we are having a good time at the races, and I just don’t care”. 

“The Nostalgia for a Sacralised World”

The pope is dead, but not everybody at the “Eternal World Television Network” in Irondale, Alabama, is shedding tears. For the moment the heated attacks on Pope Francis have made way to an adulatory coverage of his funeral. But with the conclave coming the ideological battle for the soul of Catholicism will surely return to the airwaves of EWTN, the world’s largest religious media network. The story of this Catholic TV network aligns with the political developments of the Republican Party and the American Right. It marks a challenge to the traditionally more liberal Catholic Church in den US. And all of it started with Mother Angelica, an ordinary nun whose extraordinary career from being cloistered to becoming a revered TV-Evangelist encapsulates the developments and changes in US-media, religion and politics over the last 40 years.

When you enter the modern studio buildings of EWTN attached to the old monastery, which Mother Angelica built in the 60s, you get the story of the remarkable Franciscan nun through a video presentation followed by the gentle guidance of Steven Lynsford.  

Born in 1923 Mother Angelica had a calling to open a monastery for recruiting black nuns in the still segregated American South, a goal, however, that was soon to be forgotten. Instead, Mother Angelica published spiritual books, which Steven’s father printed and moved on to recorded talks and appearances on religious TV-networks. In the video you can see her standing in a Chicago TV-studio in 1980 saying: “I want one of this”. And so, it was being done.  

Daily broadcasts started in 1987; the first satellite transmissions began ten years later via the huge dish in the back of the EWTN building called “Gabriel” which makes for a nice story. “When Mother Angelica could not pay the 300.000 Dollars for the massive dish, a millionaire called from afar and transferred the money right away. For Steven, who kept stressing that everything was funded from viewers contributions, it is no problem to dress up the co-financing by a cadre of wealthy conservative donors and political operatives as a miracle, a gift of God. 

Today Mother Angelica’s catholic complex with a staff of 400 comprises the EWTN network, which broadcasts daily to a potential audience of 400 million viewers worldwide, the combative “Catholic Register” as a rival publication to the tame “Catholic News Service” of the US-Conference of Catholic Bishops - and the impressive “Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament” an hour’s drive north from Irondale. 

From the EWTN studios they’ve also broadcast attacks on the progressive ideology of Pope Francis who in return has called those “the work of the devil”. Mother Angelica’s turn to a “true Catholicism” and against the teaching of the Second Vatican Council started at the World Youth Day in Denver in 1993 when a woman was chosen to play Jesus. “Your whole purpose is to destroy” she harangued the liberal Catholic Church on “Mother Angelica Live”. As the TV critic James Martin wrote in 1995: “EWTN became a reliable place where anger at the “liberal church” was regularly broadcast”. 

Despite a heavy stroke in 2001 Mother Angelica continued her live appearances despite her disfigured face, but her second haemorrhage confined Mother Angelica in the cloister where she had come from and where she died in 2016. 

Since then, her biographer Raymond Arroyo has become Mother Angelica’s placeholder as anchor on EWTN and frequent guest in America’s conservative media, on FOX News and elsewhere. Thus, the story of EWTN seems less of a miracle as one of systematic support of conservative media by a few dozen Christian inspired ultra-rich. Arroyo has asked people like the MAGA-ideologue Steve Bannon on his show to express his populist position against liberal teaching. If you ask Steven Lynsford about who was first to turn more conservative during his time at EWTN, the flock or the donors, he won’t give you an answer. 

On a Friday afternoon at the “Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament” we find no flock but a rather yawning emptiness. The Shrine is made up of an impressive church, a fake “Castle” modelled after a 13th century temple and a wide array of other buildings. The story goes that when Mother Angelica visited the catholic shrine of “El Nino” in Columbia, she said again: “I want one of this”. And so, it was being done. This time the miracle consisted of five rich millionaires in northern Alabama granting her the land near Hanceville to build her shrine. 

The whole scene feels a bit like Lourdes before the crowds come. Some visitors leaving the church after the 12 o’clock mass are heading for the “Gift Shop of El Nino”. One of them is Chris with his family, voluntary “refugees” from the hustle of California to the quietness of Alabama. From here Chris does an online course in Psychology and Christian counselling at “Mercy University”, Virginia, and he is sure that there will be a lot of work to do in rural Alabama.  

Chris missed the election in November but would have voted for Donald Trump because of his faith. “Trump is pro-life and trying to rectify things”. But being a Filipino, does he not worry about the illegal deportations? Not at all, because President Biden just went too far in opening the borders. And despite being catholic, Chris adds, the democratic contender “did not represent my faith well”. 

How do you square “true Catholicism” with voting for Donald Trump? Kim, who works at the shrine has no problem with this seeming contradiction. Yes, Trump’s life “has been a trainwreck, partying and leading a playboy life”. But some saints have been the greatest sinners before they found God, haven’t they. And Donald Trump, “has had his conversion”. “Okay”, she adds, “he could do with a bit more.” But he rallied the conservative base and appealed to her pro-life values. 

Kim came from Texas to northern Alabama and to the shrine after she had become unsatisfied with her career in business, after her father had died and “after women’s lib empowering women had all backfired on the family”. So, she stayed home raising her five children. Catholics are a small minority of 7% in the state, but here German immigrants brought their faith to this area where it has germinated since. Living in a small town nearby, called Berlin, Kim praises her surroundings: people are religious, have a good work ethic and good manners. Many parents in her community have turned to home schooling and “do not want their kids to go to university, where they get only confused and indoctrinated”. At the age of 52 Kim can revel in the beauty of community life, motherhood and of morning mass at the shrine. “Mother Angelica”, she says, “was all about the family”.  

In a way, the battle over culture and mindset of the Catholic Church at the world’s largest religious TV-network on the globe has pre-empted the ideological confrontations at the conclave in Rom. Yet at EWTN and the Shrine of Mother Angelica culture-war Catholicism, which Pope Francis had once criticized as “the nostalgia for a sacralised world”, has clearly won.   

On the Right Side of American History

You visit the “Farmington Historic Plantation” at the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, to learn about history. At least that is the idea. It is here that President Abraham Lincoln had his first personal encounter with slavery when he visited his slave-owning friend Joshua Speed in 1841 to overcome the depression and despair he had fallen into as a young politician at the time. Today David Green leads the visitors around the 550-acre plantation grounds. And he often wonders how he can best explain the experience of slavery and its role in Southern history to his often- unsuspecting tourists; when he as a history teacher himself “does not get” what has happened to his country over the last generation. 

What concept of history, I ask him, do his visitors bring with them to Farmington with its antebellum villa and the grounds where the Speed family had 57 slaves working? What kind of knowledge do they have and what historical baggage do they carry around with them? Well, he says, they are arriving with what they have been taught at school. “Slavery was wrong, but the South fought for a noble cause which was tragic and suicidal”. David can provide some real background to this myth of the so-called “lost cause”: In 1840 more than a quarter of people in Kentucky owned slaves, most had only 2 or 3, so Farmington was unusual for the “Bluegrass state” in having so many slaves working in the hemp fields and the orchards behind the main house. And later in the Civil War Kentucky joined the Union merely for tactical, not for moral reasons. So “noble” might not be exactly the fitting adjective for the cause the Confederacy fought for in the Civil War. 

School knowledge also states that after the war, explains David, “we all got back together again, yet with blacks staying behind in their place throughout the Jim Crow era”. But then came the Civil Rights legislation and Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech”, David paraphrases what the visitors know, “and we are all equal now”. 

Sometimes David Green wonders what impact his tours can have on the people visiting “Farmington Plantation” when it becomes clear that they just want to know how the white planters lived. But the retired history teacher does continue to tell “history as it is, even if that sounds quite harsh to some people”. 

American history has always been more of a celebration than an interrogation, but you understand what he means when later that day the visitors can hardly answer my questions why they came here. “Because I wanted to take my friend from England somewhere” or because we just wanted to have a look”. 

David Green grew up in a fundamentalist church but later changed to the Presbyterian denomination. When he was young and rebellious in the then staunchly Democratic state of Kentucky he had to vote for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But “seeing the light teaching history” he has since become a staunch Democrat, now living in a still liberal city yet in a state that has turned conservative after Bill Clinton left office in the year 2000. And on April 5th David was one in the crowd of about 2.000 Louisville citizens in front of the Metro Hall protesting the attacks against state institutions and social services by the Trump-Administration. He is now hoping that the court cases against deportations and the standing-up of Harvard University against Trump’s orders will rekindle more public resistance.  

David is just reading the memoirs of the well-known historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in which she describes the enthusiasm and idealism of her husband Dick who worked as a speechwriter and advisor for Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy. And he wonders “how we lost that concept of the Great Society, that there is room for immigrants of all kinds.” 

When you ask the history teacher, the Christian and Democrat David Green when things did go wrong with America, he first answers: “I don’t know”.  When you ask how the patriotic American public once so proud of its soldiers during the Gulf Wars would now tolerate a President ridiculing the late war hero and Senator John McCain and cutting funds for the veterans, he is only shaking his head. “People’s grandparents fought in the World War II, and now? I don’t get it.” 

And then David starts musing about when and where his country lost its way: In the 60s people were talking about opportunities and human rights. But then, through the 70s to the 90s we became self-congratulating and self-consumed. “After more than 40 years of that”, he thinks, “we must seriously ask ourselves if we answered the call”. David does not blame the kids of today. “We didn’t educate them properly”. And maybe, he wonders, “things are not bad enough that it hurts”. 

And the Democrats? In his view they are too technical in their approach. They would need the passion Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Martin Luther King showed, David says. Not MAGA he says, but “Make Americans Remember who they are”. They would need to commit themselves to the ideal of democracy with religious fervour. Then people would respond. “Obama could do that, and people did respond”.  

But is today’s success of right-wing politics not also a late revenge of those people who think that the country was not ready for a black President? “Yes, he says, racism has much to do with it.” 

In any case, David Green is a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. He will continue doing his part to make people understand their own history by guiding them through the grounds of “Farmington Plantation”, the place where Abraham Lincoln first encountered slavery. And he will go on demonstrating if more immigrants are going to be deported from his country to be on the right side of history. 

(The photograph shows David Green standing in the formal dining room of the Main House at Farmington Plantation, where Abraham Lincoln dined with members of the Speed family in 1841.)

The Peace and Quiet in Munfordville

If in the world outside Democracy is dying and the international world order collapsing, you would not know that spending a few days in Munfordville, Kentucky. Because this small town with its 1686 inhabitants and 776 housing units at Interstate 65 halfway between Louisville and Nashville has everything you would need if you like the peace and quiet as everybody here does; those who have always lived here and those who came here from one of America’s big cities. But there are a few faint worries creeping in. 

As the seat of Hart County Munfordville has everything you need in life: a Dollar Store and Pizzahut, ACE Autoparts and Sweet Farming Equipment, a friendly “Welcome Center” and a wonderful Public Library with the jail right behind it; enough churches, a medical center and a lovely sporting ground next to the Green River, a Buffalo Crossing, a prim looking German American Bank, doctors and dentists, a drug store, law firms and a clothing store for motorbike enthusiasts with a mobile coffee shop next to it – plus Mexicans.

Let’s start with the escapees from urban life. There are Harry and Larry sitting next to the “Open Road Leather” shop. Harry came from Wisconsin via Texas to Munfordville and runs the shop plus coffee bar, and Larry from Michigan runs the gorgeous and gleaming 1700 ccm “Triumph” bike parked in front of him.  

Harry’s story is that one day not too long ago he was driving along on a Houston highway when gang members started shooting at each other from their racing cars right in front of him. “That was the day my wife and I decided to move to a quiet place”. Here in Munfordville, he can take out one of the three Harley Davidsons from his garage and ride undisturbed through a beautiful rural scenery. “If somebody shoots you here, you know that it was intentional” he laughs with a wide grin behind his impressive white beard.  

Larry can also add a few more stories about crime in Michigan. They both voted for Donald Trump and no regrets whatsoever. “Trump is only doing what we needed,” says Larry, “abolishing the IRS and living on tariffs”. And clearing out the fraud in government. He’d just heard on the news that Elon Musk’s DOGE-people in Washington “have found eight hundred 150-year-olds in the social security register.” No, you won’t find that kind of behaviour in a place like Munfordville. 

Before this encounter the lady in the “Welcome Center” had briefed me well. From here she doesn’t need to drive to Louisville to do her shopping. “Too many cars and lanes on the motorways”. For her the 18-mile ride to Elizabethtown will do. That’s why people come here, she says, because it is comfortable and peaceful. “Yes, it’s all conservative, that’s who we are”. Of course, she has voted for Trump as 80 % of the voters in Hart County have. “What’s wrong with it?” Her being so helpful to me it seems to be absurd and unfair to ask her what she thinks about Trump ignoring the Supreme Court or cutting federal funds for elite universities since she just wants a quiet life. 

Here, she explains, churches are very strong. The largest denomination in this area are the Southern Baptists, followed by the Methodists and others. And, yes, there are also the Amish communities who have only moved here in the early 1990s from Ohio and elsewhere. “Very nice people with their own schools and some of them conservative”.  

From the “Welcome Center” to Wikipedia. The population of Hart County is 87.33 % white and 11.45 % black, the per capita income is 11.447 Dollar, that makes it the 20th lowest median household income in the US. More than a quarter of households are below the poverty line.

Mexicans hardly figure in those statistics, but they run two successful restaurants, and you can find them on the soccer ground on Saturday morning forming two teams with some spectators, people like Eric whose team has just won the game. What does he think about the political situation? He doesn’t want to say. Did he vote? No, he could have but didn’t. Why not? “Politics, technology and all that stuff is just too much for me”. Eric has chosen “to stay out of this”. He can’t be worried about Venezuelans being deported to Salvadorian jails, because he “does not follow that.”  

His wife Jennifer sometimes watches the news and is concerned that Donald Trump is not following the law. “It should be due process at least”. But what can she do “if most people here just follow the churches.”  

Then we meet John who as a “self-declared leftist” did definitely not vote for the Republicans. Can he explain why people don’t mind the democratic damage Donald Trump seems to have caused during the first three month of his presidency? He calls it “wilful ignorance”.  

For John people in rural Kentucky live in a different world. “They think their tax money goes to fat African American ladies in the cities who will have another child to get more benefits.” Where in fact, as he explains, a lot of that money goes to their aunts and grandmothers who are on Medicare.  

John says most people in his county are “one issue voters”, the issue being abortion, alcohol or guns. But he calls them “racist” because they knew that they voted for a man who’s first act in his first presidency was to ban Muslims from coming to America. John knows about racism and reality. His wife is a Filipino lady, so his kids grew up being of a minority in Louisville when he worked there as a teacher.  

But how does a solitary leftist cope in such an archconservative environment? Well, for a while John stopped talking to the Trump voters in his family but that didn’t really help. Thus, he has recently started doing work for the Abbey of Gethsemane, a Trappist monastery not far from Munfordville, as John sees himself in the tradition of the catholic peace-activists Daniel Berrigan and Thomas Merton from the 1960s. Fleeing from one religious environment  to another one John hopes to find the personal balance you need as a loner among the people of Hart County who, for him, seem to have lost touch with reality. 

Yet slowly the reality of Trump 2.0 has started to impinge on Munfordville. “Kentucky libraries could lose $ 2.7M”, is the headline of the “Courier Journal” on April 21st. And: “Granting institute hit by Trump order to halt work”, the subheading reads. So, people like Trish, the main librarian, are worried about the future. But they are just not saying it out loud, “to not overwhelm people even more”. Trish will choose the institutional path taking her concerns to her republican Senators or to Governor Beshear in Louisville who happens to be a Democrat and is being talked about as potential Presidential candidate in 2028. Mary sees the new reality coming for Munfordville and her county. “They are starting at the top”, she says, “before coming to us”. 

Autoworkers win, Democrats lose

If you want to meet somebody whose biography encapsulates the recent developments in places like Lordstown and Youngstown in the former industrial heartland of Northeast Ohio, you couldn’t do much better than talking to George Goranitis, the young president of Local 1112 of the United Automobile Workers (UAW). At 35 years his is still a rather short but nevertheless interesting biography at the centre of the region’s recent history between hope and despair, between high minded political promises and deep private disappointments. It also shows the trade union of the automobile workers caught between electric and gas-guzzling vehicles and between Democrats and Republicans. 

George Goranitis has just 25 minutes for the visitor before going into his next Zoom meeting with workers who want their company to unionize. So, we must be quick. His life so far: Graduated in 2008 and hired straight away as an operator for the large General Motors plant at an hourly wage of 29 Dollars. By 2017 the future of the plant was in jeopardy but in came Donald Trump telling workers like George in July 2017 that they should not sell their houses and move away because he was going to save their jobs. But in early 2019 General Motors closed the massive Lordstown plant with a workforce of roughly 4.000. The President’s pitch as the saviour of Trumbull County seemed to be ruined. 

Because George did not want to work in jobs that only paid half his former salary, he took up the offer by General Motors to transfer to the sister plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, where GM was producing the Cadillac SUV. “But being Greek and missing my close family”, George Goranitis says, “when I heard of GM starting a battery plant for electric vehicles in Lordstown I went back.” This was already the second attempt of GM to prepare for an electric future of the industry. The first start-up called “Lordstown Motors” had been touted by the Trump Administration during the election campaign of 2020, but General Motors destroyed the President’s repeated promises again and closed the experiment down shortly after. 

With Joe Biden winning the presidency in November 2020 and with his Executive Order and to mandate that by 2035 half of the cars produced in the US should be electric, the new battery plant called “Ultium Cells” jolted into life. I had seen the impressive, brand-new facility on my way to George’s office at Local 1112. Here the life of the trade unionist George Goranitis took a new turn. 

George thought that the 2.200 workers producing battery cells should be unionized as had been his colleagues in the old GM plant. George is an energetic and lively person, and you can imagine how he convinced his co-workers of his mission, how he even got a call to strike out of his UAW-Boss Shawn Fain; how George and his colleagues then negotiated a unionizing agreement with the company’s CEO Mary Barra. “She probably regrets it now” he says beaming with pride about his achievement. Today “Ultium Cells” is the first unionized electric vehicle cell manufacturing facility in the US. The agreement covers all the safety mechanisms of great importance to him and safeguards the payment of 35 $ per hour until 2028. Following all that George was overwhelmingly voted President of Local 1112 UAW. 

So, the story of “Ultium Cells” is a ray of hope in a region battered by plant closures and the export of jobs. It is a rare success for a trade union movement with just 7% of American wage and salary workers in the private sector being unionized. But it also pinpoints the precarious position of the UAW between the political fronts. And it shows that Donald Trump can break all his promises and still beat the Democrats as the traditional party of the working class at the election. How come? 

Just take the unenviable position of Shawn Fain, President of the UAW, representing almost 400.000 active members, most of them employed by the dwindling auto industry. During the election campaign of 2024 he strongly spoke out for the Democrats and still opposes many of Trump’s stances on union labour. But in early April 2025 Fain supported the first set of tariffs imposed by Donald Trump. 

Georg Goranitis behind his desk at Local 1112 feels equally torn. He just had a telephone call with the progressive Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna from California about Trump’s revocation of Bidens EV-mandate. And they both agreed that they did not know yet if that was going to be good or a bad for US industry as things are changing every day. “Whatever you think about tariffs”, George says, “the federal workers whose contracts Trump is just ripping off are our brothers.” 

Since George graduated at the time of the financial crisis his home state of Ohio has become a hotly contested territory. For decades the state was a Democratic stronghold. President Obama still won Ohio convincingly in 2012. Yet by 2016 Donald Trump’s bold promises to bring manufacturing jobs back to America found favour with many white blue-collar workers in the state and beyond. Even in 2020 when Joe Biden won back some of those workers in the industrial Midwest, Trump took Ohio and Trumbull County handily, a feat he repeated against Kamala Harris with an even bigger margin of 12 %. “An EV plant bolstered by Biden’s climate law sparks hope in Northeast Ohio – but not a revival of Democratic roots”, a CNN headline from September 2024 summarizes the bitter experience of the Democratic Party. Auto workers win, Democrats lose, that seems to be the new environment George Goranitis is organizing in today. 

He has been steering his union troops careful through the political minefield. George had indicated to his colleagues that he thought Kamala Harris to be the better choice, but he knows that most of his co-workers at “Ultium Cells” have voted for Donald Trump.

And he is optimistic that at least some of the outsourced manufacturing can come back. “We have the workforce we just need the jobs”. There are already some discussions, he says hopeful, about a new assembly plant. 

But now our time is up because George Goranitis has a Zoom-meeting with workers from a company that is recycling the used battery cells from “Ultium Cells”. “They also want to unionise and learn how we did it at our plant.” 

Two Views on Charleroi

Driving 30 miles south from Pittsburgh and entering the old mill town of Charleroi you think the place is totally deserted. Most of the shops in Main Street are boarded up. There is hardly anybody around. The traffic lights along the dozen blocks of the town are dangling uselessly in the wind with hardly any traffic flowing. The day before I arrived the local newspaper reported the “Final whistle at the Corelle plant”, the closure of one of the last factories in the once proud city “after 132 years of glassmaking”. Another few hundred jobs lost. And another small chapter in this 50-year-long decline of the American Rust Belt ending. Yet, the news the city recently made has been all about invading Haitians. 

It was, of course, Donald Trump, who brought it up during his election campaign last September. About Charleroi he said at a rally in Arizona: “What a beautiful name, but it’s not so beautiful now. It has experienced a 2.000 percent increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris…This flood of illegal aliens is bringing massive crime to the town and every place near it”. For Trump this was only the sequel to his invented story about the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs. For Charleroi this was another blow below the belt. 

The thing behind Trump’s inflammatory statement is the fact that about 2.000 Haitians had arrived in Charleroi over the last few years in the search for low-paying jobs and cheap housing. Walking down Main Street you can see how they have rehabilitated some of the empty buildings selling groceries and their wares. There is Queen’s Market between a remaining nail shop and Chang Fat Mini Market, and there is ria money transfer right opposite the Charleroi Fire Department. In short, the incoming immigrants have lifted a population that had halved from 8.100 people in 1960. Not every citizen of Charleroi agrees that this is a good thing. 

“Charleroi was the Magic City” reminisces Chris, who is just about leaving the local library in his pickup. In his 35-years with the police force he has patrolled the centre of town during the 70s. On Saturday nights all bars, restaurants and four movie theatres were full of people until the early hours. He also remembers fondly the boats travelling up the Monogahela River and docking at the other end of town to unload the coal which used to fuel the steel mills in the vicinity. 

During his last years before retirement Chris has seen the “good military discipline” at police force go; and “Generation X, or what you call it, only coming in for the money and good life”. Times have changed. Now in his early 70s Chris is watching those changes with concern – and not only by watching right-wing TV. He shows me his varied news sources on his cell phone, from National Network Channels to the local Mon Valley Independent.  

Yet still, certain questionable stories stuck with him, like “whites being refused entry into an immigrant-owned grocery store”. As the reporter of the “New Yorker” magazine had already debunked this story last September, it was a misunderstanding or a wilful exaggeration. There never was such a sign refusing entry, but white citizens had taken offense at “Queen’s” grocery store for only advertising food from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean while omitting American food. According to the “New Yorker” the owner made good for her lapsus by displaying a Trump election poster behind the counter. 

And then Chris comes up with the story that the owner of Fourth Streets Barbeque hired Haitians illegally and drove them back and forth to work in his restaurants. And he links this rumour to his suspicion that the new and very costly set of traffic lights might have been “financed by Borough officials and local politicians through taking a cut from letting the Haitians in”. Quite a conspiracy theory that is, but it has obviously been circulating around town. “I don’t mind them being here", says Chris before he gets into his pickup truck and leaves for his home outside of town, “but we are not a sanctuary city”. The 62.2 % of Trump-voters in Washington County would probably agree with his views. 

On to Adriana in the ria money transfer shop. She is Mexican, her father came to the US in 1985, first working on the fields in Florida before moving to Pittsburgh and opening a restaurant there. Adriana and her husband have six kids, some of them graduated already, the youngest one lounges with his cell phone next to his mother behind the counter.

Her family came here, explains Adriana “because Charleroi is cheaper than Pittsburgh and has less crime and addiction”. For Adriana the stories about Haitian crime in Charleroi are all untrue, peddled by people “who just don’t like us. I know how Haitians live; I am married to one”. In her business she can see how hard immigrants work sending money home all the time and she must ask them for valid visa and or residence permits before they can transfer funds. 

She is talking about people like Exilien who has only recently arrived from Haiti and who, waiting for his transfer, is holding on to his fresh visa application since his working permit is running out by the end of this month. The lankly 30-year-old is happy to be working at a barbeque restaurant but speaks hardly any English. He looks hopelessly hopeful that they will process his application in time. But it is not clear if Exilien really knows about the danger he is in from the recent Executive Order by Donald Trump, which has already caused a first raid against Haitians in Charleroi by the increasingly ruthless agency for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It is also not clear how many Haitians the ICE unit has taken away and what is happening to them. But this the kind of action which Chris is in favour and Adrianna in fear of. 

In Main Street, which is correctly called Fallowfield Avenue, I also meet Linda, who does not want to give her real name because she works in education. Asked if she supported Donald Trump and his immigration policy she spurts out: “Yes, Trump is an idiot, but I voted for him”. And why? “Because we can’t keep giving away all this money, writing all those cheques”. But which money does she mean, the money for the defence of Europe or for Medicare? Here she does not want to be specific. “Things just couldn’t go on that way”. Do her neighbours think the same? She and her husband just don’t talk to their neighbours any longer about politics. “It is all a big mess”. 

Washington D.C. - a City in Fear

In the good old times, whenever these might have been, one could always talk to people, even in Washington, D.C.. They’d be incredibly busy but would then tell the inquisitive journalist more than he ever wanted to know in the first hour of us meeting up. That has changed, at least in the capital, which the Executive Orders of Donald Trump and have turned into a city in fear. 

Nobody working for the federal government or its agencies wants to give their name for fear of negative repercussions. Friends tell you about their precarious lives between the oscillating emails from Elon Musk’s Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE) that tell them one thing today and another one tomorrow; that you got fired, or maybe not. That is why nobody in this blogpost is called by his or her real name. And there has not been one conversation with friends and people affected which ended without the adjectives “incredulous”, “chaotic” and “chilling”. 

Some of their bosses have taken the generous offer of early retirement leaving a demoralized staff defending the institution against further attacks. Other superiors have accepted the new regime with slavish fervour. The smartest leaders of departments, I hear, play it both ways. No public resistance even to the mostly ridiculous orders but trying to save what is possible by not implementing them. 

Friends of friends are not calling you back, but you hear that they are not in the position to talk being overwhelmed by the sudden storm that blew into their sheltered middle-class life. Most affected in D.C.  by Elon Musk’s systemic madness seems to be the medical sector with the “National Institute of Health” (NIH) as “the crown jewel of American science”. 

According to the “Washington Post” there are 6.000 scientists working at the NIH Campus with 75 buildings in Washington’s Northern suburb of Bethesda. Nobody would deny that this medical complex did not deserve some cuts, but it was here that the human genetic code was deciphered and important research for the development of drugs to treat AIDS, COVID and now obesity originated from this institution. Firing many and then rehiring a few researchers in the middle of clinical trials left not only those working in Washington stunned. The “Washington Post” has made one of its local reporters a kind of agony aunt, to whom they can explain themselves into online spaces: “how are your job insecurity and economic instability impacting you?” Or “what recent changes to your lifestyle did you have to make?” 

Fear is everywhere. If you ask the staff at the wonderful new “National Museum of African American History” what they make of their boss going for an “indeterminate leave” they will not say anything. If you ask the staff at the old and venerated “National Portrait Gallery” about the chances that its critical references to the role of slavery in American History will survive this Trump Administration, they will only shrug their shoulders.  

After all, this is a city with about 43% of its population black in which the contested “Diversity, Equality and Inclusion”-Programs (DEI) came into force rather belatedly. But these are exactly the so-called “woke” references for promoting equality on the Republican’s hitlist for institutions from the Kennedy Center of Arts to the Pentagon across the river to be purged from their programs, websites and communications. “Museums in our nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn – not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history” reads Donald Trump’s Executive Order about the Orwellian takeover of America’s history. 

Washington’s black mayor, Muriel Bowser who – with her Democrats getting 93.5% of last November’s vote - finds her whole city under attack by the Trump Administration. The legal and financial situation of the city is precarious. Congress which is planning to cut one billion Dollars from its budget could abolish the barely 50-year-old odd entity of the District of Columbia with a simple law. Given this double dependency of her city on its endangered federal institutions and the US-Congress, the mayor has not exactly practiced full resistance. Some of her critics in the Democratic party call this “appeasement. But a friend who works for a local councillor, thinks this is “a bit unfair”. Because who is currently n o t appeasing the attacks by Trump and Musk: Congress, the Supreme Court, most elite universities? All seem to be in shock and driven by fear. 

Thus, the state just caves in to its own dismantling. All in all, there are 2.4 million federal workers in the US, 30% of them war veterans. By last week 56.000 job cuts had been confirmed and further reductions of 17.000 were being planned. 75.000 federal employees chose generally generous buyouts. US-Aid and the Voice of America are completely gone, the Education Department’s workforce will be cut by 46%, at Health and Human Services by 24%. With many of those jobs in the capital it will thin the city’s tax base and demoralize its citizens, of whom only 21.076 have voted for Donald Trump. 

So why are middle-class Washingtonians not out in the streets? The shock, the helplessness, the need to sort out your life in this sudden turn of events. There might be the hope that there will be another email reinstating you and there definitely is the fear of exposing yourself to the unpredictable powers of the new regime. “Compared to Europe there is no historic legacy”, one friend remarks, “Americans did not have to overcome fascism.” Yet they once had a President whose first inaugural address in 1933 included the famous line which every schoolkid has heard: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. It seems that the well-to-do civil servants must still learn to own this phrase. 

But there have been some tenths of thousands of protesters on the Nation’s Mall on April the 5th. Yet my rather anecdotal survey of the demonstrating crowd at the Washington Memorial showed many visitors from further outside of the Washington area, many grey-haired pensioners and very few participants who looked like recent recruits to civic protest with its shouting of slogans and showing off homemade banners. It was, of course, difficult to tell how many fired and fearful civil servants were among the crowd.  

Well, there were Linda and Brian, both federal workers, recently engaged and then both sacked at the beginning of April. But they had no time to tell their story to the visitor. They had just briefly come to the demonstration to make their statement. Now they had to hurry back home to work out how to unfreeze their savings intended for their wedding to now be used for a new job search they never bargained for. 

The Thing about Tariffs

I have long known Alan Tonelson as a friendly, courteous and very helpful person who knew everything about trade figures and economic dependencies between countries. And he always had this thing about tariffs, even in the early 1990s when they were the antidote to Bill Clinton’s controversial North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) - and when no one could imagine in his wildest dreams that a shady property developer in New York and host of a TV Reality Show would become President of the United States.  

Now in his early seventies and writing the blog RealityChek Alan Tonelson has seen the thing about tariffs come around, from the left of the Democratic Party to the Right of Republicans and straight to the White House. And sticking to his protectionist beliefs Alan Tonelson has gone along with Donald Trump, if not all the way. In short, unlike many others in US-politics and economics Alan has been consistent in his arguments about trade. 

A historian by trade Alan honed his economic nationalism by working for Ronald Reagan’s former trade negotiator Clyde Prestowiz whose influential book “Trading Places” (1990) expressed American fears of being outtraded by Japan. At that time Alan also prescribed to the “Paul Kennedy Theory of Overstretch being worried that “not taking care of our domestic economic situation would affect our foreign policy”.  

In his book “Race to the Bottom” (2002) Alan would later formulate his own theory about how uncontrolled free trade was costing American jobs and sinking workers’ living standards. Even then, he says now, “nobody saw the China threat coming”. So today, he is a “China Hawk”, as are many in both political parties. 

But what differentiates him and Donald Trump from the Biden-Administration which had also imposed sanctions and export controls on the Chinese? Then why, he retorts, does NVIDIA still sends its second-best chips to China, why has a company like INTEL still venture capital invested in China? For him the Biden-Administration just didn’t do enough. And that is because two categories of academic China experts got it wrong. One group because they never questioned the free trade economics they learned at school. “The other because they are paid for what they write”, says Alan, and complains about the lack of transparency in the funding of the US-think tank industry. He applauds Trump for being “much more antagonistic here”. 

Because for Alan, the Chinese regime “is the closest thing to Nazi-Germany: a dangerous adversary”. Just imagine he says, what would happen to warfare if China controlled AI-technology. For him the problem in negotiating with China is that “with our legalistic culture we first have to prove Chinese subsidies, but they are not writing anything down”. 

And what is his problem with Europe? Well, for 40 years the Europeans have taken the US for a ride. Why the nuclear umbrella, why keep being dependent on the US for defense? Alan has written about this untenable and unfair relationship already in the 90s. He holds it with John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, who had stated in the 50s: “If the French don’t let Germans rearm, we are out of here”. Yet, it never happened. For Alan, we are back to the so called “hegemon’s dilemma” (Robert Triffin): “if you provide too many public expenses to other nations, America’s power will finally erode”. 

And why, Alan asks, should Germany be so dependent on exports? “It is their choice. They are sovereign, but we are worrying about the restrictions put on our tech companies.” So, what happens if two economic nationalisms clash? “It will be decided by who has more leverage”. And in his reading the winner is going to be America because “it will be easier for the US to recapture the home market it lost than for the EU do find new export markets”.  

So much for the reasons which make Alan Tonelson support the tariff policies of the Trump-Administration. He would, however, argue for a 20 % general tariff in combination with a sensible industrial policy and a sizeable reduction of the corporate income tax for companies that make their products in America. And, of course, much higher tariffs for the Chinese. He would also want to have mechanisms which control whatever is being negotiated with foreign countries. Rather give them a few months before imposing the tariffs, to get these safeguards into place. Which is exactly what Donald Trump did during our conversation over lunch! 

But how does it feel to be arguing for a drastic tariff regime against a phalanx of 16 Nobel laureates and the complete liberal commentariat from the “New Yorker” to the “Financial Times”. “You mean the people who did not see the rise of China coming, nor the financial crisis, who stuck with the “Washington Consensus” that deregulated markets promote prosperity for all? For Alan “not exactly an impressive record”. He liked to fight it out with the long-time columnist of the “New York Times”, Paul Krugman, who called him an “economic ignoramus”. What Krugman and many mainstream economists don’t get, Alan retaliates, is “that you can’t impose sanctions or tariffs on China alone. It’s more complex than that.” 

But is Alan Tonelson not worried about the other features of Trump’s policies? 

Take DOGE, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency tasked to streamline the government bureaucracy. “Good idea”, says Alan, “but Musk is just not very good at it”.

Or what about the autocratic tendencies with Trump’s executive orders? Well, “the imperial presidency problem has been with us for a long time”. After all, President Biden too cancelled the repayment of student loans without asking Congress for permission. And for Alan both parties have been engaging in politicizing the law and criminalizing their political opponents. As he sees it, blaming Donald Trump for all long-standing and bipartisan problems is just “the Trump derangement syndrome of the left”. 

Tonelson’s concerns are risks of different nature: that Trump caves in or that his tariff policies won’t be lasting long enough, to make America’s endangered economy viable again; or political failure to bring manufacturing back; if not necessarily all the old manufacturing jobs because many tasks brought home again, like producing face masks and respirators, will be performed by automation. Still, he is optimistic because the so called “manufacturing jobs multiplier” estimates that one manufacturing job will create three others in services, logistics and R & D. 

Alan is not naïve. He understands that “Americans are not ready to take sacrifices”, that the political cycle is too short for the impact of reform measures to be felt in time, as Joe Biden can attest to with his defeat in November. But Alan hopes that the MAGA base will hold, that moderate Republicans will be afraid to speak out against their president. Of course, the Democrats will always complain. “But what can they run on at the next election?” 

He doesn’t deny the possibility of a recession which for Trump and him would be a dose of medicine for an illness that has been festering for too long. In the end, Alan believes that with the country over 35 trillion Dollars in debt, with probably millions of jobs lost to globalization, with America as the military saviour and golden goose of its allies, and with its economy as the market of last resort, politics as usual are no longer possible. 

For Alan Tonelson that is exactly what President Trump is saying: “Things just couldn’t go on”.

Trump’s Psychopathology

„Liberation Day“, when Donald Trump declared reciprocal tariffs to the astonished world on April 4, was a turning point. It was not only the day the global economic order was shaken to its core. It was also the day when some liberal commentators changed course. So far, they had still been trying to explain his erratic, emotional and contradictory announcements with an underlying logic, be it shreds of a policy idea, remnants of economic theory or just a cheap gift to his MAGA base. But now they moved to explanations more personal: the guy was just mad and deranged. “Donald Trump’s Ego melts the Global Economy”, writes Susan Glasser in the “New Yorker” and laments our long-lasting “misunderstanding of Trump’s psychology”. And Derek Thompson analyses in “The Atlantic” an “all-of-government metastasis of Trump’s personality” and calls it “grandiosity as strategy”. 

Given that many political analysts and economic experts got Trump 2.0 wrong, what would be more fitting than asking somebody who has interviewed Donald Trump more often about his psyche than others. Enter Marc Fisher, co-author of “Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th president” from 2017. A reporter and editor across various news sections of the “Washington Post” for 37 years, Marc is currently the paper’s columnist for Washington D.C. and its suburbs. We met at a Washington café. 

To start with, Marc is not surprised about the general turn of events over the first 75 days of Trump’s second presidency. “The basic charade, the disrespect for victims, the hyperbole, the vengeance and the desire for chaos, all of this is consistent and has always been there”. But what is new this time, the biographer says, is that it is now being performed in “overdrive” to get everything done at once for fear of becoming a lame duck.  

At the same time Trump is diminished because of his age which is only masked by Elon Musk’s energy. The perfect picture for this was the scene with Elon and his four-year old son upstaging him in the Oval Office. “The Donald Trump of 2017 would have never tolerated such a scene”, says Fisher, “he just sat there like being defeated.” 

As a son Donald Trump watched his father’s cognitive impairment and his mother’s slow decline. As a father he saw his daughter Ivanka, “the only person he respects” leaving his side, and what she called “the dark world” of politics in 2022. And as a 78-year-old man he is now without supervision and with few or no friends left. When the biographers contacted the people Trump had described to them as his close friends, three out of four were surprised to be called that.  

Today, Trump lives in the White House alone, without his wife Melania, tweeting through the night and maybe still watching the History Channel’s documentaries as he did in his 20s, and from where he seems to have picked up his fascination with the strongmen of the past. There have been no political rallies for him in 2025 where he could bask in adoration, just the weekly trip to his court at Mar-a-Lago from Thursday to Sunday where he reigns as part-time King of a once rebel nation. 

So, there we have the 47. President of the United States with his increasing loneliness and long-festering anger about having never been accepted by the establishment, neither in New York nor in Washington. The perfect picture for that was his threatening visit to the Kennedy Center, the capital’s bastion of the cultural establishment, “the kind of people who have laughed at him all his life.” 

This social rejection might also explain his adulation for the tech bros of Silicon Valley with whom he shares the narcissism, the total lack of empathy, and as Fisher says, “the child-like desires”. These men were the only figures of the establishment left who were fully prepared to go along with his designs – if only for their own gain and probably not for long. 

What Elon Musk and the Tech Industry want from Donald Trump is clear: new contracts when the government services will be further cut and outsourced to their private companies. These company quarters are all lined up along the new Metro Line from Dulles Airport to downtown. And in the woods behind, Fisher says, you can spot the mansions of the Tech-Managers, built from the profits of the last round of privatisation. And you do not even want to know what happens once Elon Musk will be controlling the new computer systems for the government, this time running on his version of Artificial Intelligence. 

But why did so many average Americans fall for Trump? “Because he has always been a good salesman with a binary pitch now perfect for social media”. Put this against how Democrats keep presenting themselves “as masters of nuance”. Of the last Democratic presidents, Fisher says, almost all have been lawyers, men inclined to follow rules. Unlike the Republicans who put up businessmen or a cowboy like Ronald Reagan for President. So, that’s where we are today. “It is civil rights versus the violation of law”, as Fisher describes the current competition between the two parties - and the ambivalence of American history. With Donald Trump the renegade element of that history has clearly won. 

“Trump has a fabulous instinct for seeing the important behind the trivial”, says Marc about his appeal. Yet, what will he do with his political success? It is obvious that given his personality and family history, his overblown ego and growing loneliness, Donald Trump must somehow fear that this Presidency might be the last important act of his life. “And this undermining of his basic expectation of life”, wonders the biographer, “might become disturbing enough to freak him out.” 

Is this, I wonder, what we are already seeing this week with Donald Trump escalating the tariff war?

Heading to America…

I was warned before travelling to the United States. “It must be an act of masochism to drive through America’s heartland in these dark times” a former Washington Correspondent told me before I left Berlin. “It is hard to keep up your spirits here” a current and disenchanted resident wrote to me from the capital before I arrived. 

Yet I was curious to find out what has happened to America over the last 30 years, after my six-year-stint as a US-correspondent had ended in early 1995. 

Thus, this blog has a history. It started in the summer of 1989 when the Reagan Administration was fading fast and I would soon feel journalistically misplaced in Washington, D.C. with the Iron Curtain coming down in Europe; the gipper’s last hurrah. What followed were years of fascinating encounters and insights into the psyche of a nation between hybris and self-doubt. Torn between admiration and disbelief I had a great time. My history with the US ended when Forrest Gump won the Academy Awards, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, O.J. Simpson was on trial and soon after the Republicans had gained the majority in both chambers of Congress, the first time in 40 years. 

At that time, in early 1995, the new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, was leading a fresh and aggressive charge against the globalists of the Clinton- Administration with his new batch of Republicans proud to hold no passports because for them travelling to foreign countries was no longer needed. After the Berlin Wall had fallen and Francis Fukuyama had proudly declared “The End of History” engaging in the world went against their adopted stance of “America First”, a slogan rediscovered and tested by the paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan in his unsuccessful presidential candidacy only two years before. But economic liberalism and neoconservative nation-building were still to spread America’s proclaimed virtues around the world for another decade.

Yet after the scandal-prone end to the Clinton-Presidency in 2000, after the questionable anti-terror wars of George W. Bush, following the financial crisis of 2007 and the foreign policy blunders during the Obama-years “America First” has come roaring back again: in 2016, as a campaign issue and a modestly inflated trial balloon, but now - after the badly handled Biden-interlude - with a vengeance and in autocratic garb.

Still, one should not forget, that almost half of the 140 million voters did not vote for the revenge-prone Donald Trump who exercises the systematic humiliation of his enemies and allies alike - and live from the White House as he did once in his former TV-Show “The Apprentice”.

Thus, I will set out to understand what has happened to America over the span of the last generation. How did people’s lives change? And I don’t mean just the price of eggs. What is different now about their neighbourhood, the schools and universities, they are sending their kids to, the town meeting about local issues? What about race then and now, about old and new immigrants? In what ways did their media and news consumption change? And how do citizens feel today about their job, the welfare system and the role of the state in their lives? 

My questions are not so much about what a narcissistic and unscrupulous president does, but more about why his performance and promises could find such a receptive audience, and why his actions since January 20th have met so little resistance.

“Bowling alone”, “What happened to Kansas”, “The Unwinding”, “Fantasyland” “Strangers in their own country”, “Wildland”, “Hillbilly Elegies”, “When the Clock Broke”, “Stolen Pride”, “History has begun” - all those books provide excellent explorations and explanations of what has made the United States into the country that it is today - polarized, resentful and angry. But maybe that is only one side of the current state of the States. There must be a lot of life as usual, too, of friendliness, solidarity, and optimism, attitudes and feelings not reported in legacy or alternative media. I just wanted to know.

So here we go, starting with the elites in DC. And then moving through the heartland all the way down south.