In 2019, one Germany’s leading policymakers Thomas Bagger laid all this out in an essay detailing the consequences of Trump 1.0 more vividly than anyone had before. He juxtaposed countries like France, with its traditions and strong sense of national interest, and Germany, which has nothing but its post-war principles to fall back on. And suddenly, all the democratic gains that started with the fall of the Berlin Wall were up for grabs.
“The Trump challenge goes much deeper than just policy disagreements — his approach pulls the rug from under the feet of German foreign policy thinking since the foundation of modern Germany in the late 1940s,” he wrote.
That was three years into a first term that saw Trump display an ostentatious loathing for then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He hadn’t gotten over the fact that Merkel, supremely popular as she was during her peak in the mid-2010s, was named TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year.” He found her deliberative form of politics anathema, while her refusal to disengage from Russian gas and call off the Nord Stream II pipeline, or to bring military spending up to the agreed 2 percent NATO target incurred his wrath — as did her embrace of more than one million migrants.
But that’s all over now. Merkel is no more — largely repudiated by her own Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and its leader Friedrich Merz, who is almost certain to become the next chancellor. But will that be enough to protect Germany from the havoc Trump 2.0 is likely to wreak?
Even amid a domestic election campaign, German media is fixated with all things Trump. Newspaper headlines follow his every step and each presidential decree, with commentaries ranging from nervousness and self-criticism to alarm and warnings of Armageddon. Then, as if they needed any convincing of the gravity of the situation, came tech billionaire Elon Musk’s (Nazi?) salute.
Meanwhile, the country’s politicians from across the political spectrum acknowledge that the only thing they can control is their own response to forces beyond their control — and yet, they’ve been unable to agree on what that should be.
