Just a week ago, Chancellor Friedrich Merz was fawning over President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, and the German press praised him for getting along so well with the far-right bully in the White House. Since then, it has become undeniable that Trump is not merely a politician with fascist tendencies but is actively working to establish a military dictatorship under his personal control.
That is the significance of Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard and military units to Los Angeles and other American cities to carry out mass deportations of migrants and brutally suppress any protests. As the WSWS has explained, Trump is deliberately engineering a far-reaching coup to construct a new dictatorial framework for capitalist class rule.
Yet despite this creeping coup unfolding in plain sight, not a single leading German politician has spoken out or even raised a warning. The same politicians who constantly justify their war offensive against Russia in the name of “freedom,” “democracy,” and a “rules-based order” remain silent as democracy is dismantled in the United States.
Many harbour secret or even open sympathies for Trump. They may fear his trade war policies and the potential withdrawal from NATO, but they view his brutal crackdown on migrants and political opponents with quiet admiration and envy. This becomes especially clear when reading the commentaries of journalists who live in Berlin’s political bubble, closely entwined with leading politicians.
Some understand very well what is happening in Washington. Veteran Süddeutsche Zeitung journalist and historian Joachim Käppner writes that America’s democracy has “withstood authoritarian temptations for over two and a half centuries,” but each passing week diminishes the certainty “that democracy won’t be permanently weakened by an unfettered executive.” The US president is showing “he will stop at nothing in the authoritarian transformation of society that his opponents rightly fear.”
In a lead article by its New York correspondent Marc Pitzke, Der Spiegel also describes Trump’s actions as “a calculated move towards authoritarian rule.” Trump’s goal, it says, is “a dramatic staging of his claim to absolute power, which he is asserting in every domain.” The next steps could include activating the Insurrection Act and “declaring a state of emergency to suspend elections.”
Yet neither author draws any real conclusions. They do not even ask why no one is initiating impeachment proceedings against the would-be Führer in the White House—proceedings that were pursued against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton for far less. To pose such questions would mean confronting the Democratic Party, which—aside from a few hollow words—offers no resistance to Trump. The Democrats fear the emerging mass movement far more than they fear an authoritarian dictatorship, as they represent the same financial oligarchy as Trump.
Nor do they criticize the German government, which continues to cultivate close ties with Trump. After all, Käppner’s longtime colleague Stefan Kornelius, who spent 37 years writing for Süddeutsche Zeitung, most recently as head of its political desk, now serves as spokesperson for the federal government and is responsible for selling Merz’s policies to the public.
Other journalists make no effort to hide their sympathy for Trump. Most striking is Nikolas Busse, foreign affairs editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the mouthpiece of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
Busse calls for a “differentiated” view of Trump. One must distinguish between his “neo-isolationist foreign policy,” which challenges Europe’s security framework to its core, and his handling of “irregular migration.” On the latter, Trump pursues “a fundamental approach that is also gaining traction in Europe—both in individual countries and within the EU.” That Trump got along so well with Merz, Busse writes, “was due in no small part to the shift in asylum policy the chancellor intends to implement.”
In language reminiscent of the far-right Alternative for Germany, he writes that at its core “it is a question of how much migration Western countries can tolerate.” The idea that anyone in the world has the right to settle anywhere “was once a leftist utopia,” he claims. Now it had become reality in many Western states—“a situation that could not go well indefinitely.” Unfortunately, he continues, the “traditional governing parties in the West resisted this insight for too long.”
Die Zeit argues along similar lines, even if it does not openly support Trump’s persecution of migrants the way Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung does. Instead, it blames both Trump’s voters and the protesters opposing his Gestapo-style tactics for the attempted coup.
“Trump was elected by a majority for his promise to deport undocumented criminals,” claims Zeit editor Sascha Chaimowicz. He accuses Trump’s opponents—based on isolated, exaggerated incidents of violence—of driving more people into Trump’s arms.
“The images of violence coming out of Los Angeles these days are to many people not just news but an emotional attack on their sense of security,” writes Chaimowicz. “When Democratic politicians rhetorically dismiss these images and instead focus on the debate about whether Trump is abolishing democracy, they risk overlooking a central point: that many people are voting not because of constitutional issues, but because of concrete fears.”
We have heard this kind of argument before: Not the industrialists who funded Hitler, not the politicians who brought him into government, and not the parties that voted for the Enabling Act in 1933 were responsible for his rise—but rather the workers who resisted the Nazis and stirred fear among the property-owning classes and petty bourgeoisie.
The Nazi grandees—captains of industry, judges, professors, police chiefs, and generals—who secured Hitler’s rule and then continued their careers in postwar West Germany, all excused themselves by claiming that “the people” supported Hitler and they had merely been following orders—a vile historical lie.
Both in the US and internationally, there is rapidly growing resistance to Trump and the declining capitalist system he represents.
Trump and other far-right figures have only achieved electoral success because the Democrats, Social Democrats, and so-called left parties—together with the trade unions—have orchestrated decades of social redistribution in favour of the rich. As a result, they are deeply despised. Unlike Mussolini or Hitler, Trump and his ilk are not leading mass fascist movements of war veterans and down-and-out petty bourgeois. Trump’s real power base is an oligarchy of multi-billionaires that has arisen from the systematic plundering of the working class.
This is precisely why German politicians and media either support Trump or seek to make arrangements with him. They too fear that the escalating capitalist crisis will trigger fierce class struggles. Just like in the 1930s, their response is dictatorship and war. The Merz government, like Trump, is cracking down on migrants in order to attack the democratic rights of the entire working class. It is rearming on a scale not seen since Hitler, aiming to deflect growing social tensions outward and pursue wars of conquest. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) plays a leading role in this.
Resistance is growing—and will continue to grow. The decisive task is to arm this resistance with a socialist perspective that unites the international working class in the fight against capitalism and for a socialist society.