Trump, McNamara and the price of loyalty

The question how lawmakers, high officials and military leaders react when the President and Commander-in-Chief makes questionable, reckless and seemingly illegal decisions   has been a continuous subtext during the first Trump presidency when some of the so-called “adults in the room” like National Security Advisor MacManus and Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned from their duties. 10 months into the second Trump-Administration it has become one of the central issues of US-politics in its accelerating authoritarian drift. 

This is what the six Members of Congress tried to address in their 90-seconds video when they question the legality of Donald Trump sending US-soldiers into America’s inner-cities to help the Immigration Authorities with arresting and deporting migrants to countries like El Salvador and South Sudan; or bombing the boats of alleged “narco-terrorists” in Latin American waters ignoring Congress and the War Powers Act. These lawmakers are not “calling for an insurrection” as the White House will have it, but they are just restating the law that military and intelligence professionals “can and must refuse illegal orders.” 

Yet only few government officials have hitherto questioned the legality of some of Donald Trump’s “borderline” orders. And apart from a senior judge advocate general (JAG) at the US-Southern Command in Miami, who asked if the 82 deaths from the strikes on Venezuelan and other boats might amount to extrajudicial killings, the higher echelons of power like its Chief of Staff Dan Caine have so far remained mum on the obvious transgressions by the self-declared “Minister of War” Pete Hegseth and the President himself. 

For those high military and civilian officials, the new biography of Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, might be recommended reading. In their book “McNamara at War” (2025) the brothers Philip and William Taubman explain how McNamara kept defending and driving the war in Vietnam for LBJ although he knew early on that it was unwinnable. They describe in detail how “Bob” admitted privately that the messages of success churned out by the Pentagon and the White House throughout the mid-sixties where just deceptions whilst young American soldiers were still being sent into battle.  

Robert McNamara had been one of the “whiz kids” from Harvard Business School who in the late 50ies had turned the troubled Ford Motor Company around. By 1960 he had risen to become its President. A few years later President Robert F. Kennedy asked him to run the Pentagon which he “reformed” as well in true technocratic style. McNamara was a number cruncher, meticulous and unforgiving. Today one would call him a “data guy”. 

Yet he was also overbearing, as his biographers quote a former colleague: “Even when you knew he was wrong he’d plow you under.”  And they describe how McNamara’s well-known unwillingness to admit mistakes lead to an unflinching loyalty to his president which in the end turned this cadre of the “best and brightest” into a tragic American figure. He went on to become the head of the World Bank where he could again practice his mastery at institutional reform, with mixed results. 

When I met Robert McNamara in the early 90ies I was facing man who, I felt, was eager to make good for his past mistakes by publishing essays about the danger of nuclear war. Behind the mahogany table at this office near the Willard Hotel in Washington D.C. sat a broken man who was still eagerly asking for recognition, this time for having turned from a warmonger into an apostle of disarmament. 

It was only in 1995, at the age of 78 when in the preface to his memoir “In Retrospect” Robert McNamara finally admitted that in fanning the fires of the Vietnam War he had been “wrong, terribly wrong”. That was more than most of his critics and aged anti-war activists had expected of him. But even in his expression of guilt, his biographers shared my earlier impression about his search for redemption, that it was self-centred. He was seeking “retrospective mastery over what had eluded him”, they write. But nobody tore into Robert McNamara after his confessional memoir like his fellow sponsor of war Henry Kissinger: “Boohoo, boohoo. He’s still beating his breast”. 

Since the end of the Vietnam War America has fought two more wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And despite crimes against humanity, torture, scandals, enormous hybris and a criminal lack of knowledge about the countries invaded few members of the US-administration and high officials have admitted mistakes, acknowledged wrongdoing or shown any other form of regret. It is as if total abrogation of responsibility and lack of humility has become the prevalent mode of operation among the managers of America’s Empire.  

The admission of wrong judgements or even the expression of guilt seems to be incompatible with the political system in the US and beyond. Just look at the self-serving biography of Kamala Harris (“107 Days) blaming everybody but herself for the election defeat. Not that leaders abroad like Angela Merkel have been any better at admitting past mistakes.  

As a result, today’s Yes-Men (and some women) have few recent role models who might show them the price of misplaced loyalty or the rewards for critically examining the orders they had been given. What will the likes of General Dan Caine, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mc Connell or Foreign Secretary Marco Rubio do when Donald Trump will give an illegal order to bomb Venezuela or make an ill-fated decision about Russia’s war on the Ukraine? How long will they keep their illusion that staying inside the system to prevent the worst might be more reasonable and preferable to open resistance and public resignation? And how long after having remained silent to the bitter end will it take them to admit their mistakes and come to terms with their own guilt?

How can smart people like the former Secretary of Defense lead their country into disaster is the question the biographers keep returning to without finding the ultimate answer. All we know from the biography and case study about Robert McNamara is that the price of blind loyalty is high. At least for your country.

From the US-Congress to the BBC: The spineless liberal leadership class

In the US it takes the winning Democratic Party one week to “snatch defeat from its victory” as one cynical observer has called the capitulation of eight Senators to the voracious wishes of Donald Trump. In the United Kingdom two top executives of the public broadcaster BBC resign after a leak about an editorial mishap in 2024 whilst the notorious liar in the White House calls the most trusted news service in the world “worse than fake news”. Welcome to the world of a spineless and helpless liberal leadership class on both sides of the Atlantic! 

So, what has happened inside another tumultuous fortnight? Just when the US-Democrats had registered their first decisive wins at important gubernatorial, mayoral and local elections on November 4, just when the party seemed to have understood that you do not run campaigns on abstract policies and high moral principles but adapt message and messengers to local conditions, after the hitherto helpless opposition seemed to have turned tables on Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, eight Senators left the newly erected Democratic tent and walked over to the Republican swamp by voting for an end of the current government lockdown. 

The federal government shutdown started on October 1st when the Democrats in Congress blocked the funding for the new fiscal year by taking a stand against the proposed cuts to various federal programmes, particular to subsidies which would have increased the health care costs to millions of Americans. As a result of the deadlock, about 800.000 federal employees were furloughed causing social hardship to the middle-class and more recently heavy disruptions in aviation traffic because of staffing shortfalls. Not to mention the termination of the so-called SNAP program of food assistance for 42 million Americans in need on November 1. 

According to most opinion polls, the public have been blaming the ruling Republicans for the disruptions, at least more so than the legislation-blocking Democrats. Somehow most citizens seem to have turned against the Trump-Administration’s reckless and destructive actions of recent weeks: withholding food aid from the poor whilst running sleazy parties in Mar-o-Lago; sending soldiers into America’s inner cities whilst erasing the East Wing of the White House without permission. In the end, the conflict over the shutdown was as much about the social policies of the government as about the growing authoritarian actions of Donald Trump.  

Thus, for the Democrats the tide seemed to have turned one year before the crucial mid-term elections. But into this rosy picture walk seven Democratic Senators and one Independent whose visions do not transcend their district, who do not want to see the context of a country sliding into autocracy, who cite moral reasons to help their troubled constituents but don’t give a damn about the changed political environment. We are talking about eight Senators, almost all beyond retirement age, who have not understood that the present fight is not like the fights of the past. As a result, Donald Trump could end the 43-day long shutdown on Wednesday claiming victory; whereas Democrats are left with nothing but the promise of another vote on health subsidies in two weeks’ time which they are sure to lose. One week after their encouraging election victories the Democrats were back in disarray and back to the old divides. 

The helpless capitulation has divided the party’s generations. Never have young Democrats despaired as much about their gerontocratic leadership as after this defeat in Congress. On social media Millennials and Generation Z called the dissenters “Turncoats”, Chickenshits”, Quislings” and “Fuckers”. And never has the rift between the party’s base of engaged voters and activists and the party’s apparatus and leadership been so obvious to friends and foes. Where Democrats outside of Washington, D.C. expressed their outrage about the defections, the party’s leadership tried to fudge the differences by dressing up the political disaster as a tactical success. No surprise then that the freshly elected centrist governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, defended the dissenters and their short-term tactical reasons. Whilst the future “socialist” Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani rejected those arguments. So much for the week-long unity inside the Democratic tent. 

What has become clear during these tumultuous days is that the Democratic Leadership Class lacks the ruthlessness of their political opponents. It still adopts ordinary methods in extraordinary times. Its members do not seem to understand that in Donald Trump and his acolytes the Democrats are encountering not a regular political opponent but an attempted “counterrevolution”. 

Over to Europe 

Crossing the Atlantic to the United Kingdom you can detect the same lack of combativeness, the same helplessness and blindness in the actions of the leaders at the BBC capitulating to the right-wing attacks on public broadcasting. What has been happening here?  

On November 3 the right-wing Daily Telegraph published a 20 page-long internal memo by the BBC’s editorial advisor Michael Prescott who complained about the broadcaster’s refusal to deal with his list of editorial mishaps, management failures and examples of an allegedly biased coverage: the misleading edit of a Donald Trump speech in the “Panorama” Programme of October 2024; “worrying systemic issues with the BBC”; and other problems the author had with the BBC’s coverage on the issues of Gaza, gender and racial diversity. 

Indeed, BBC journalists had cut Trump’s “fight like hell”-speech the morning before the storming of Congress by his MAGA followers on January 6, 2021, in a way that made the President sound as if he was literally inciting the crowd to violence, which he was not. Yet the general gist of the program that Trump was encouraging the crowd to protest the election results if not directly storm the US-Congress, was correct. The insurrectionists knew what he had meant between the lines. 

The wrong edit was a mistake that everybody who ever worked in a newsroom knows can happen, particularly at a broadcaster reaching almost half a billion people every week and in a news section which has been cut by 30 % over the last few years. But instead of apologising for this mistake and confidently responding to the complicated question of “impartiality” on contested subjects in a continuous culture war, the leadership of the BBC prevaricated. The director of news had prepared a response, but the board did not agree. When BBC chair Samir Shah did not speak out in time director-general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness decided to stand down. As happened with the eight US-Senators, these two leaders of the Britain’s Public Broadcaster capitulated and handed a victory to their attackers from the right. 

Taking a closer look at the mechanism behind the self-inflicted crisis at the BBC two things become clear. Firstly, like the double-Presidency of Donald Trump the turmoil at the BBC has not been accidental but is the result of continuous and systematic attacks on state agencies and public bodies – if you like, of a 40-year right wing march through those institutions. The critique of so-called political correctness and biased reporting have been practiced by the political right for decades and has become part of traditional politics and media criticism in the US and the UK. What has changed by 2025 is the new media environment which easily lifts local politics to the national, even global level, which escalates every political conflict into a crisis of culture, and which has been exploited so adroitly by right-wing populists like UK’s Ex-Premier Boris Johnson, the de-facto opposition leader Nigel Farage - and by an US-President who knows no legal, moral, democratic or even national bounds. 

Looking at the personnel featuring in the BBC’s most recent crisis you notice a cabal of conservatives. Michael Prescott, the author of the leaked memo, is a Tory and friend of board member Sir Robby Gibb, a man appointed to the board by Boris Johnson and known for his conservative crusade against “wokeness” at the BBC. Featuring in the saga and driving its dynamic have been several board or standard committee members who had changed from journalism into public relations under 14 years of conservative rule. Today proper journalists have become a minority on the bodies running the public broadcaster. Professional journalists have been replaced but by professional turncoats to the political right who are trying to establish their own understanding of “impartiality” at the BBC. No matter if 80 % of experts agree on the existence of climate change, you’ll only have one of them and one climate change denier appearing on your “impartial” programme. No matter that 90% of veritable economists thought Brexit was a bad idea, in your talk show it will always have to be one on one. 

Secondly, the editors and liberals left in the management of those weakened and undermined bodies seem to have no guts to fight back and defend those institutions against the steady and orchestrated attacks. Instead of the journalist responsible for the editorial mistake two management figures resigned after the affair had been blown out of proportion by the now-columnist Boris Johnson and Reform Party boss Nigel Farage - and finally by Donald Trump’s threat to sue the BBC for 1 billion Dollars plus. Instead of going on the offensive the BBC’s chair hesitated and its director general, exhausted by too many “scandals”, just gave up. Only belatedly BBC Chair Samir Shah has now stood up against Donald Trump’s threat of litigation. 

It would be an interesting question if the leadership of German centrist parties or of the public broadcaster with its even more complex federal management structure would be better placed to withstand similar right-wing assaults. The recently successful campaign against the appointment of a supposedly too leftist candidate for the constitutional court suggests otherwise. 

One can read the chronology of the crisis at the BBC as something close to a conservative “coup” as the editor of Prospect Magazine, Alan Rusbridger, is insinuating in “The Observer”. But it would be much more useful to distinguish the ideological part of the memo’s analysis of the inner workings at the BBC from its more sobering parts where Prescott describes the structural flaws in the BBC’s independence, the tardiness and the tepid management style without which the whole affair would not have blown up at all. A (self-)critical study of the memo, a quick excuse for the wrong edit, and a confident refutation of its politically motivated accusations could have saved the BBC a lot of damage. Belatedly, at least, the BBC chair has now stood up against Donald Trump’s threat of litigation. 

Be it in the US-Congress or at the top of the BBC – if the risk-averse, prevaricating, defensive and cowardly members of the liberal leadership class don’t know how to fight self-described “counterrevolutionaries” then right-wing populists will move into the vacuum of the long undermined and weakened democratic institutions. I guess that is what Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of Labour Robert Reich, himself an avowed “liberal”, meant when he was tweeting about “the disappearance of the leadership class”. 

No Kings! But what kind of candidates?

US-Democrats have no time left. A year ago, the party lost the Presidency for the second time to Donald Trump. On this November 4 they will have to win some important gubernatorial and mayoral races decisively to get back into political shape and contention. In November 2026 they need to win at least the House of Representatives to overcome the de-facto one-party state the US have become under Donald Trump. And by November 2028 they must present a Presidential candidate who can take over the reign of what, by then, will be left of America’s democracy. But taking a closer look at the state of the Democratic Party today you wouldn’t know all of this. 

Of course, there have been the large “No Kings” demonstrations of October 18th when between four and seven million protesters peacefully gathered at 2.650 location across the country. But that was just a repetition of similar countrywide protests in April and June: massive, patriotic and good-spirited. Or in the word of a cynical observer: “Large anti-Trump rallies attended exclusively by NPR listeners in blue cities do not impress rural voters”. Indeed, looking at the crowds and their placards of protests there were few sightings of new recruits with “buyer’s remorse” after having voted for Donald Trump; and no cohorts of citizens coming back from political absenteeism. In short, the mass demonstrations served to uplift the already converted, but those voters the Democratic Party needs for new political gains must still be convinced to sign up for the opposition. 

Why is that after all the dramatic, dangerous, outrageous, scandalous, harmful, illegal, vile, vicious and anti-democratic acts the Trump-Administration has unleashed on the population over the last year? It is because the Democratic Party is still in shock and has been showing few signs of reinventing itself. Yet with two promising women candidates running for Governor in New Jersey and Virginia and the young upstart Zohran Mamdani destined to become mayor of New York there are at least some stirrings of change.  

Both women candidates, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, were elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 where they have established themselves as moderates. As a former CIA officer and as a helicopter pilot both have, in their resumes, a security background. The Financial Times labels them “pugnacious centrists” and, indeed, words like “defund the police” or “democratic socialism” have never crossed their lips. Together with two other women in the US-Congress they have been called the “mod squad (for moderate)”; as opposed to “the squad” of four progressive women representatives in the House who have been prominent voices in all left political causes from LGBTQ to Gaza.  

But when Spanberger and Sherrill were being asked in townhall meetings if transgender girls should play on girls’ sports teams, they have struggled with their answers. They do not want to offend anybody or get a shitstorm from the progressive wing of their party. Still, with Elon Musk’s DOGE-Operation, which has sacked many federal employees in Virginia and Donald Trump cancelling a new commuter tunnel in New Jersey their chances of winning in their states on Tuesday are pretty good. 

And there is the 34-year-old Uganda-born Muslim candidate Zohran Mamdani who came out of nowhere to win the primaries in the very democratic city of New York against two compromised candidates of his own party. The state assembly man from Queens has done everything the Democrats failed to do at the last election: he excites young and new voters, he communicates well, he comes across as dynamic, risk-taking, optimistic and authentic; and he focusses on the affordability issues of housing and childcare in an exorbitantly expensive city.  

The son of prominent Ugandan-Indian parents calls himself openly a “democratic Socialist” promising a rent freeze, free childcare, free buses, tax increases for the rich and a few city-run groceries for the poor. He has also dared to speak out for Palestinians in a 12% Muslim and 20% Jewish city. The TikTok videos about him meeting New Yorkers from all walks of life have become legendary. His media campaign has been brilliant, called exemplary by his party’s strategists and grudgingly acknowledged as decisive by his adversaries.  

With a poll lead of almost 10 % the charismatic and tireless Zohran Mamdani is likely to be the new mayor of America’s largest city, with a workforce of almost 300.000 and a budget of $ 115 Billion. And that without any administrative experience. He is the darling of progressive Democrats who will see his victory as a powerful argument for moving their party to the left; and “a gift” to Trump’s Republicans who will build him up as a “commie” and democratic bogey man in their future election campaigns. “100 communist lunatic”, Donald Trump has called him. 

The gubernatorial and mayoral elections of November 4 will test the enthusiasm of the MAGA electorate, of those who came out of political hiding in 2016 and 2024 or felt betrayed and neglected by the Democratic Party. But it will also be a test run for the democratic brand. 

How the US-Democrats will deal with the voting results will determine their future at the mid-term elections and beyond. And here, given the total lack of leadership and the history of the party, they are running the risk of falling back into the old controversies shaped by binary political thinking: between those who favour semi-conservative candidates leaning to the right on issues like immigration, security and abortion and those on the party’s left who argue for radical representatives focussing on more daring economic policies. As if only one of those avenues could lead to a political realignment. 

Looking at the leadership of the Democratic Party today one should not be too optimistic. Neither the large demonstrations nor the emergence of some attractive candidates have been due to strategic thinking, professional organizing or well-managed recruiting of candidates. Rather the opposite. Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy was initially fought tooth and nail by a gerontocratic party establishment beholden to donor billionaires and corporate lobbyists, advised by a self-serving army of consultants and communicating via legacy media. 

The image of the Democratic Party is still shaped by the Clintons, Obamas, and the hapless leaders of Congress whose risk-averse culture of premanufactured talking points and elaborated policy proposals is totally out of place in today’s attention economy, which is so well understood und driven by President Trump. And there is the reckless loser Kamala Harris whose self-serving memoirs, titled “107 Days”, and her recent announcement to consider another run for the Presidency in 2028 are more damaging to the democratic brand than any Republican manoeuvre. With leaders like this you do not need political enemies. The current Democratic leadership of figures from the past has not realized how deep their party has fallen, given or not given the effects of Donald Trump. The rot had started in the 1980s when Democrats began to draw as much money from corporate Political Action Committees as Republicans. It was followed by the electorally successful 90ies when President Bill Clinton preached and practiced free trade policies which would soon lead to the loss of manufacturing jobs. Then followed the financial crisis of 2008. 

As a result, between 2009 and today the class alignment of both parties has changed: it is now wealthier Americans with above-average incomes who vote mostly for Democrats. Even the leftist Zohran Mamdani in New York got more rich than poor citizens routing for him at the primaries. Today, the Republican Party represents more districts in middle-class and poor regions of the country than the Democrats. “If Democrats don’t reverse the course”, writes the investigative reporter Brody Mullins in the New York Times, “they may soon find themselves unable to win presidential elections.” That is because in the electoral college system of the US rural votes are more significant than those of the numerically fewer high-income urban voters concentrated in coastal states. 

According to a Gallup Poll from July the Democratic Party’s favorability rating has dropped to 34%, the lowest since the firm started measuring this category in 1992; with unfavorability at 60 percent and negative ratings among both men and women, whites and Hispanics and among every age and income group. The negative comparison to the G.O.P extends to some issues like the economy, immigration, and crime. 

This correlates to what the researcher and pollster Jared Abbot calls “the double-digit Democratic penalty”, which he has measured as the difference between the actual political platform and its association with the Democratic Party. Which means that among working class voters in the Rust Belt the image of the party is much worse than the merit of some of its actual policies proposed. Abbot is writing about those people who told me on my journey that they would never ever again vote Democrat, no matter what. And there were many of them. 

What would be needed to start changing this negative image? And how could Democrats build on their prospective victories in Virginia, New Jersey and New York? By not claiming victory for your camp inside the party but by analysing which candidate has won where and why. There might be little the party can learn from Mamdani’s unique situation in New York, but how to run a successful media campaign is surely one of the lessons. 

By allowing more “heterodoxy”, argues Adam Jentleson of the new think tank “Searchlight Institute”, and by running more candidates who sound more like political independents than coming from the democratic establishment. And by not immediately calling it “betrayal” of rightful causes if they take more conservative positions.  

Because not all Republicans are racist fundamentalists. They will not agree to President Bidens indeed negligent border policies, but many are also against sending troops to the cities to arrest immigrants. Most opinion surveys over time suggest that Republicans voters have also been moving to the left, just not as fast as Democrats, even if the impression from the respective media bubbles suggest otherwise. On some issues the country is less polarized than it seems. 

What would that mean for the Democrats? It would mean that during their campaigns candidates like Spanberger and Sherill should have answered what they really think about transgender girls in sports – being authentic instead of evasive. But would it also mean to put up pro-life candidates in very conservative districts, as some have argued? Probably not. “Trump’s genius is to keep pushing Democrats into reactive conservatism”, writes the columnist Ed Luce in the Financial Times. The genius of the Democratic Party should be to turn the reaction into something different and of their own. 

A functioning democratic leadership could provide some guidance about the fine line between political expediency and moral values. But to be less ideological and more pragmatic would be a good place to start. Because it can’t and shouldn’t be that whilst Donald Trump is dismantling the American democracy populist democratic candidates must be afraid to be pragmatic, authentic and controversial. The prominent political comedian Jon Stewart has put down the success of Donald Trump to being able to channel people’s grievances and “reading the room”. That is what Democrats have to learn, to read the room of their district and the political environment. 

This points to the basic flaw in Democratic thinking: that there are still normal rules of engagement, that they can run against Donald Trump without a narrative and vision of their own and win. The last decade shows that they can’t and won’t. The new attention economy, the alternative media system, economic shifts and a changed class structure, the electoral geography and the archaic constitutional system are all up against a normal and natural change of power.  

The old political order is gone, and the Grand Old Party has – over the last 40 years – mutated into a MAGA-movement which must be fought with new tools and means. Even conservative thinkers have understood that the times have been changing, when the Republican stalwart Bill Kristol is routing for Zohran Mamdani and the conservative columnist David Brooks writes that “America needs a Mass Movement” and “counterculture” against MAGA. Yet the Democratic Party is still working along within a system that is broken. Instead, it would need to defend what is left of the political order without being seen as part of its establishment. A tall order indeed. 

Just hoping to win the mid-term elections next year with a crop of carefully vetted contenders is illusionary. And putting up a presidential candidate from the Californian party establishment like Kamala Harris or Gary Newsom in 2028 will be suicidal for a party which to this day steadfastly refuses to come to grips with the new social, economic, political and media realities. 

However, November 5, 2025, could be a start, IF…

Dead or Alive? What can Democrats do?

Even six months into the second Presidency of Donald Trump most polls agree that the decline of his ratings does not translate into support for the Democratic Party. This tallies with what Republican voters told me during my travels through rural America this spring. They could imagine being disappointed by Donald Trump in a couple of years’ time - and by now some might be already. But they could not imagine voting for the Democrats in the foreseeable future: “not for the party of “woke” which did nothing but gave money to others than us”. There are many concurrent and contradictory explanations of why the Democrats lost the presidential election in November 2024. And the party has been discussing its many failures since then. But there is still no real understanding where this deeply felt distrust and abhorrence of the Democrats even among moderate Republicans and independent voters is coming from. 

At first there was a debate if the defeat of Kamala Harris was due to the late exit of President Joe Biden from the race and the mismanagement of her belated election campaign or due to a structural “vibe shift” in American politics. Today we can safely say that it was both. With a Joe Biden twenty years younger or a different candidate right from the start of the campaign the Democrats could have won. But at the same time the underpinnings of American politics have been changing for quite a while, and most of those changes are to the detriment of the Democratic Party. 

Yes, the Democrats might have won in 2024 if Kamala Harris would have distanced herself more from Biden’s policies, particularly on the issue of Gaza. In that case they would have gained more support from young voters and Arab Americans. Democrats also missed to declare themselves the anti-war party leaving that mantle to Donald Trump. They might have won by choosing a candidate who had not been a second choice for Vice-President, a lawyer from California who thought she could make it with the support of Beyonce and Taylor Swift. They could have won if they had not taken the African American and Latino vote for granted. And they would have won if they’d better explained their economic policies and addressed the inflation issue early.  

But that is water under the bridge. What the Democratic Party must address now are those structural shifts affecting the outcome of future elections which seem to favour any populist candidate and government; that is, to address what some call “The end of old politics”. Because the Democrats are lagging far behind in understanding the new political environment and in finding the means to adapt to it. 

If you look at the Democratic Party today it is still arguing about the loss of 2024 instead of preparing for the mid-term elections of 2026. Its structure and funding are still elite driven, its internal bodies seem unprepared, many of its representatives are uninspiring, its congressional leadership looks hapless and lost. And the drive of the large demonstrations in April and June came from civil society not from the Democratic Party itself. 

The loss of 2024 has widened the generational divide between younger voters who think the party needs to move to the left and older Democrats who think that less of identity politics and more of the same Bidenism with another candidate will just do. Yet there are few Democrats on the national level working towards a new narrative that tries to combine elements of both strands into a positive vision of what the party stands for; and present its new image in a well-communicated election campaign. 

Over a long period of time, Democrats “have lost the working class” as the saying goes. They did not react to the results of the financial crisis of 2008 when President Obama bailed out the bankers and left ordinary households with their mortgages and pension plans in the cold. They did not reckon with the long-term grievances of people who saw their money spent on questionable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq when they had to tighten their belts at home. They did not feel that the ground was shifting when a radicalizing Republican Party turned traditional political competition into a culture war: from the first attacks on political correctness during the 90s to the anger expressed by the Tea Party in 2008, to the hatred stoked by the Maga crowd in 2015 and encouraged by Donald Trump. They did not perceive to what extent they themselves were being seen as a party of the well-educated cultural elites which had lost the connection to ordinary voters, particularly to young men without college degrees. And finally, they did not understand how the changed media environment of the “attention economy” put them at a disadvantage compared to a political right which had nurtured an alternative media sector with talk show jocks and influencers topped by a president whose relentless performance of boasts and lies turned America into a no-truth society. 

With about 450 days until the midterm elections for the party to work out its identity crisis there is no lack of advice from politicians and pollsters. Ex-President Obama, not exactly known for risk-taking and political courage, has criticized his party “for failing to speak out” and now tells it to “toughen up”. The Democratic National Committee promises to change the tone of its social media strategies from carefully scripted and poll-tested language to swearing like Republicans, saying sh… and f… , to show more “authenticity”. And Antonio Delgado, the lieutenant governor of New York, calls for state and local governments to counteract the Republican cuts to the social safety net by raising local taxes on the rich.  

The surprising success of Zohran Mamdani at the recent democratic primary for the Mayorship in New York with his energetic, original and social media driven campaign has probably become the most analysed victory in the recent election history of the Democratic Party. The 33-year-old, affable and witty Uganda-born New York State assembly member of Indian descent had beaten the favoured candidates of the Democratic establishment by taking the issue of “affordability” straight to the voters by crisscrossing New Yorks neighborhoods and documenting his discussions in Kebab shops and on street corners on TikTok and Instagram. Young New Yorkers voted for him in droves.  

With his good chances to become the mayor in the traditionally democratic city of New York in the November election Mamdani has become the poster child for progressive Democrats who think his leftist policy proposals and his media skills are the way forward. As a foreign-born Muslim socialist, he also serves as the ideal hate figure for the Republicans. But whatever you think about his policy proposals and the applicability of his campaign techniques to Congressional or Presidential politics, Mamdani is the first Democrat who has shown the establishment of his party how to campaign in the new media environment. 

So, what can Democrats do to overcome the deep distrust that has built up against them over the years? If you follow the columnist Thomas B. Edsall, who has been interpreting poll results and expert advice for the New York Times for decades, and who has seen a fundamental shift in the political landscape “from group think” to individual “needs and grievances”, Democrats should not put their hopes on an automatic anti-incumbency effect. They need to widen their outreach after they have lost the votes of unionists whilst the Republicans have gained with the churches. They should distance themselves from political correctness, cultural liberalism and become more tolerant in accepting ideological diversity. They should no longer put up candidates that fit the liberal litmus test of party activists but will then fail the concrete expectations of a wider audience.  

There are some examples where Democratic politicians have managed to succeed in states and districts won by Donald Trump. There are Democrats who will master an appearance on the influencer circuit of conservative talk shows like the former Transport Minister Pete Buttigieg; or Senator Elissa Slotkin (Michigan) who can address voters in a plain language; or Senator Chris Murphy (Connecticut) who, with his statements on the economy, sounds like a progressive populist. But in general, the image of the party is still shaped by those who despite being no harbingers of the future do not want to leave the Democrat’s stage: the Bidens, the Clinton’s, the Pelosi’s and Obama’s - and Kamala Harris who last week did not preclude running again in 2028.  

Yet there is little time to get rid of the old guard and promote the new generation of hopeful outsiders in the party before the crucial midterm elections in 2026. Winning back at least one chamber of the US-Congress won’t be an easy task. It is unlikely that Democrats can flip the necessary four seats to win over the Senate. They will have a better chance in the House of Representatives where about 20 congressional districts are up for grabs and where the current Republican majority is 219 to 212. 

But there are sizeable obstacles. Democrats are already far behind the Republicans in fundraising for those Congress and State elections. In states like Texas Republicans are currently trying hard to create more save Republican seats by changing the borders of voting districts through the state legislature they already control. And the America-wide population movement from blue states like California to red states governed by Republicans like Florida and Texas disadvantages the Democrats further; not to mention the threatening Democratic collapse in rural states. In short, long-term election prospects do not favour Democrats either. 

All the more important it becomes for the Democratic Party to work on their selection of more diverse candidates and to develop campaigns which are less ideological and more pragmatic, less policy-driven but tailor-made for the state or district to attract a wider array of voters than just the Democratic base. And those campaigns must be run across all social media channels marrying messenger and message. It’s a tall order. 

But to veto the increasingly radical Republican agenda a Democratic majority at least in the House of Representatives will be crucial. Because with a craven Republican Party, the Supreme Court clearly on the side of Donald Trump, with corporate America following its self-interest and conservatives winning the media war for attention there will be no other checks and balances on the Trump-Administration during its remaining two years in power, if it remains only two years. “We are running out of bulwarks” as the New York Times columnist Frank Bruni puts it. If the Democrats fail again in 2026 there won’t be much resistance left to the further dismantling of the American democracy. 

Constitution & Culture War

At a time when the politicization of the judiciary has reached Germany it might be useful to look to the United States to see what it can lead to. Of course, the judicial systems on both sides of the Atlantic vary, but recent developments are showing certain similarities due to the way social media frame the political discourse. The algorithmic logic of media platforms enables well organized right-wing minorities to use issues like abortion to politicize the selection of judges and court verdicts. Without his election promise to Evangelicals and conservative voters to stack the Supreme Court with “pro-life” judges in 2016 Donald Trump could not have won his first presidency; and without the conservative judges he has appointed since then the country’s current drift into autocracy would not be possible. 

Looking back at the history of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) there have always been political fights about its interpretation of the constitution. When the Supreme Court blocked some of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal laws, he threatened to increase the number of judges to further his political agenda. Later the court ignored the obvious violation of the constitution through the continuing segregation practices in southern states for years before it was pushed to underpin the political reforms of the Civil Rights legislation between the late 50s and the late 60s.  

Two traditional patterns emerged. Firstly, the judges’ appointment for life creates a time lag so that liberal or conservative jurisprudence is continuing long after the respective politics might have changed. And secondly, the court reacts often belatedly and reluctantly to changes brought on by civil society, by ordinary people fighting for their rights in lower courts and by liberal litigators suing state agencies for the violation of citizens constitutional rights. 

After a post-war period, when Democrats appointed conservative judges and Republicans liberal ones, after Chief Justice Earl Warren, himself a Republican, oversaw a series of historic progressive decisions, the polarization of the judiciary started in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. With this new crop of Republican judges, “originalism” - the judicial theory that the text of the constitution must be read like the white men of 1788 understood and ratified it - was used by the court as a tool to establish conservative orthodoxies. The dismantling of voting rights legislation (2013) and of environmental legislation (2022) were only some of the contested judgments in this long-term conservative shift of the court. 

But the decisive event for enabling a takeover of the US-Supreme Court by right-wing ideologues was political. After the death of the arch-originalist judge Antonin Scalia in February 2016 the Republican Leader in the US-Senate Mitch McConnell promised to block any replacement by the Democratic Administration “until we have a new President”; thus, linking the appointment process to the presidential election nine month later.  

This unprecedented and populist decision by the Republicans in the US-Congress conflated Constitutional Law and politics. It ensured that Donald Trump could canvas among Evangelicals and conservatives with the promise to appoint judges who would then overturn the historic Roe-versus-Wade judgement of 1973 granting American women the right to choose. And so, he did - by publishing a list with “pro-life” judges he would consider for Supreme Court vacancies; and so, he won – with 80 % of evangelical Christians voting for him. 

Donald Trump did not stop there with the politicization of SCOTUS. Once president he appointed two socially conservative male judges. And when the liberal icon on the court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died, Trump replaced her with Amy Coney Barrett, pushing her appointment through a Republican dominated Congress only five weeks before the 2020 election. No mentioning then of “giving the American people a voice in her selection”, as Republicans had argued four years earlier. 

The promised overturn of Roe v. Wade duly happened on June 24, 2022, with the Supreme Court ruling in the “Dobbs” decision that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion and by returning the authority to make laws concerning abortion to the states. The promise of the Democratic Party to bring back women’s right to choose helped them winning more votes than expected at the mid-term elections of the same year. But it did not help Democrats to prevent a second Presidency of Donald Trump in November 2024. 

Today, the results of the long-term politicization of the judiciary leading to a Supreme Court stacked with ideologues and yes-men/women are clearly visible. With its 6:3 conservative majority the Trump-Court has taken away women’s right over their bodies but has given almost complete immunity to the scoundrl in the White House; it is now endangering the rights of migrants and their families but provides new powers to the “mad king” as President. It is waving people’s rights and condoning the bypassing of Congress by the Executive.  

For the US-Supreme Court to fulfil its function in protecting citizens against government overreach it takes two things: an executive bound by a fair process of appointing judges and a Senate to commit itself to their confirmation. Both preconditions for a functional division of power have been abandoned over the last decade. As a result, American citizens are losing trust in one of  the country’s once most venerated institution. 

In the past Supreme Court judges where still looking for some basic consensus in drafting their different opinions. That consensual practice has gone with the Trump years. And recently the politicisation has even reached the inner workings of the court itself. After the Supreme Court has given Trump further leeway in implementing his controversial Executive Orders on birthright and immigrant rights even the three-women strong liberal minority on the court has started splitting in their judicial response. And under the pressure of crude attacks on social media the disagreements between the judges have become personal. 

It is the 54-year-old Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first black women and newest member on the court who wrote the most scathing opinion calling Donald Trump’s contested Executive Order on birthright “an existential threat to the rule of law”. Even her two liberal colleagues did not go that far in their dissent with the 6:3 majority decision to let the President question the traditional and constitutional right of anybody born on American soil to US-citizenship.  

In turn her conservative colleague Amy Coney Barrett accused Jackson of “leaving conventional legal terrain” when she writes that the President’s Executive orders “are creating a zone of lawlessness”. And indeed, with democracy in peril, Jackson’s recent opinions suggest that in her view judicial resistance must become more political.  

Both female justices have been under enormous pressure built up via social media. As the New York Times reports “Justice Barrett was the target of ugly criticism from the right for minor deviations from Mr. Trump’s legal agenda, with some of his allies calling her a DEI hire, suggesting that she had been only chosen for her gender.” The same critics are now celebrating her pointed criticism of Justice Jackson believing that their earlier attacks on the conservative justice has succeeded in bringing her into line with the President’s directives. 

What has started as the long-term polarization of the judicial system, what - induced by the abortion issue - has accelerated into the dramatic politicization of the US-Supreme Court, has now led to personal fights between judges about the fundamental question: what to do when the orders of the courts are defied. And this judicial spectacle is playing out in the arena of a vicious platform-based discourse where the appointments and opinions of constitutional judges have become part of the ongoing culture war. Any lessons to be learned?  

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.”