Based on the current public opinion surveys, President Trump may be on his way out as president of the United States. But he has substantial support here that is not likely to dissipate if he is defeated in the November 3 election and he also appears to have a following among nationalist, nativist, populist movements elsewhere―nowhere more anomalously than in Germany, where many of his policies are widely unpopular among the general public but where he reportedly has become an icon for the far right.
Interesting piece in the New York Times yesterday by the paper's Berlin bureau chief,
Katrin Bennhold, on Trump as a cult figure.
BERLIN — Just before hundreds of far-right activists recently tried to storm the German Parliament, one of their leaders revved up the crowd by conjuring President Trump.
“Trump is in Berlin!” the woman shouted from a small stage, as if to dedicate the imminent charge to him.
She was so convincing that several groups of far-right activists later showed up at the American Embassy and demanded an audience with Mr. Trump. “We know he’s in there!” they insisted.
Mr. Trump was neither in the embassy nor in Germany that day — and yet there he was. His face was emblazoned on banners, T-shirts and even on Germany’s pre-1918 imperial flag, popular with neo-Nazis in the crowd of 50,000 who had come to protest Germany’s pandemic restrictions. His name was invoked by many with messianic zeal.
It was only the latest evidence that Mr. Trump is emerging as a kind of cult figure in Germany’s increasingly varied far-right scene.
