![]() Date: 2024-08-16 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00017041 | |||||||||
US Politics | |||||||||
Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | |||||||||
Rethinking America PreviousNext
Will the Germans Take Trump Back?
Here is why the Germans should be receptive to the idea of Trump’s self-deportation to his ancestral land.
Credit: Gage Skidmore www.flickr.com
Takeaways
When Trump says “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” why not take him at his word and suggest that he would do well to apply his suggestion to his own ancestral land? What about the poor Germans? That leaves one question: Will the Germans take Trump back? There are clear doubts. In Germany, confidence in the U.S. president went from 86% in 2016, when Barack Obama was still in the White House, to 10% currently, according to Pew Research. But then there is Angela Merkel. From the moment of Trump’s election, she has it clear that managing the Trump presidency is really a battle over upholding Western values. As she emphatically and courageously stated in her message on Trump’s election as President: Germany and America are bound by common values: democracy, freedom, as well as respect for the rule of law and the dignity of each and every person regardless of their origin, skin color, creed, gender, sexual orientation or political views.For the otherwise ever-cautious German Chancellor, that was a remarkably rare moment of unvarnished truth-telling. Usually, she excels by speaking in hard-to-decipher, deliberately vague phrases into which every listener can preferably read whatever they want to. Merkel’s 2016 declaration of war on Trump Trump must have seen that as a declaration of war. What’s worse, the statement came from the leader of the country that had thwarted his own grandfather’s desire to go back to Germany after making a fortune in the United States. Even worse from insecure Mr. Trump’s perspective, those impertinent words were uttered by a woman! To him, that was truly the height of impertinence. In hindsight, that message from Angela Merkel to Donald Trump, written in November 2016, reads like a clairvoyant, if not spooky prediction of the game plan Trump unfolded for the United States and the world once he seized the reins of power. Will the Germans take him back? Now, the Germans’ penchant for grandiosely expressing noble thoughts in principle is well-known. What is also well known is that, when the moment of truth arrives, they shrink back from following through on their rhetorical courage, even if that were to the benefit of the larger Western — and indeed global — community. On balance, the Germans should be willing to take this Trump back, especially after they denied that favor to Trump’s brothel owner granddad. The Germans’ undeniable historic guilt in Trumpism After all, if the administrators for the King of Bavaria had acted more generously, there would have never been a Donald Trump presidency in the United States, with all the shredding of customary Western values that has come to mean. Germany is a parliamentary democracy and the most that Trump could hope for once he landed in Germany is to take over the right-wing AfD party and equip it with more rhetorical pizzazz. Modern Germany would surely survive such a Trump transfer. For that reason, it should take a bullet for the entire Western community and allow Trump in. Go Back, Donald Trump. Your Ancestral Country Needs You! Why Angela Merkel Should Be Grateful to Donald Trump A Rare Case: Trump Is Right Tags: deportation, Donald Trump, emigration, Germany, latest, United States About Stephan Richter Stephan Richter is the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Globalist. [Berlin/Germany] |