Commentary
Germany’s most widely read news outlets have spent nearly a decade portraying Donald Trump as the most dangerous authoritarian since Adolf Hitler. The distortion is so extreme, and so unchallenged within the German media ecosystem, that it offers a textbook case of how propaganda works when audiences cannot verify what they are being told. For anyone who has watched Western outlets adopt Chinese Communist Party framing on China because their audiences cannot read Chinese, the mechanism will be instantly familiar.
In late 2025, German media reported on the United States’ confrontation with Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in terms that could have come directly from Maduro’s own press office. The coverage framed the situation as an unprovoked American attack and a war crime against a democratically elected president beloved by his people, whose only real offense was presiding over a flourishing social welfare economy. The United States, according to this narrative, wanted Venezuelan oil, and committed war crimes to get it.
This was the clear impression left on anyone watching or reading German coverage of the episode. The framing was so one-sided that it went beyond bias into something more recognizable: propaganda packaged as journalism. And it was entirely consistent with how German outlets have covered Donald Trump since 2016.
Why Germans cannot fact-check their own media on American politics
Most Germans speak limited English. In the eastern part of the country, where the school system taught Russian instead of English for decades, many older Germans speak no English at all. Alongside learning Russian, East Germans absorbed a Cold War curriculum that taught them to view the United States as an exploitative, racist, capitalist power defined by poverty, discrimination, and racial segregation. These stereotypes persist to this day.
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Beyond these inherited biases, most Germans have almost no working knowledge of how American politics actually functions. Germany has hundreds of political parties sharing power in coalition governments; East Germany had exactly one party. The American two-party system, in which roughly half the population supports Republicans and the other half supports Democrats with very little in between, is a foreign concept. Germans do not understand that American media likewise splits along partisan lines, and that at any given moment, one half of the country’s media is demonizing the other half’s political leaders as authoritarians, extremists, and enemies of democracy.
The result is that when German journalists encounter the American left’s harshest rhetoric about a Republican president, they take it at face value. They have no framework for recognizing it as one side of a domestic political argument.
German journalists copied CNN and MSNBC, then made it worse
Germans had never heard of Donald Trump before he ran for president. They had no idea that he had been a prominent, widely liked media personality in the United States for decades, embraced by both liberal and conservative audiences. They did not know that the same media outlets that treated him warmly as a celebrity turned hostile only when he entered the 2016 presidential race, or that this hostility came overwhelmingly from the Democrat-aligned wing of American media, the most powerful and internationally visible wing.
German journalists, whose English was often only adequate for surface-level comprehension, picked up what CNN and MSNBC were putting down and repeated it without questioning the political context behind it. They were largely unaware that a substantial conservative American media ecosystem existed and told a very different story. The message they absorbed, however, was unmistakable: Trump was the most racist, authoritarian leader the world had seen since Hitler. That comparison resonated in Germany more than anywhere else on earth, and German media ran with it.
A cover of Stern, one of Europe’s largest news magazines, captured the tone perfectly: Trump presented as a figure of existential menace, visually and rhetorically equated with the darkest chapter in German history. That cover was representative of virtually all German media coverage of Trump, not an outlier.
What began as copy-pasting escalated into embellishment. German outlets told their audiences that Trump was deporting members of Congress, all Muslims, all Democrats, and anyone who was not white. They reported that he had deployed the National Guard into American cities to enforce racial segregation. These were daily claims, presented as news.
Americans living in Germany learned to stay silent about politics
Many Americans living in Germany stopped talking about politics entirely, even those who opposed Trump. The reason was simple: in the eyes of their German colleagues, friends, and neighbors, no American could ever be sufficiently anti-Trump. Any attempt to provide context, explain how American politics actually works, or offer even mild pushback against the most extreme characterizations risked being interpreted as Trump sympathy.
The social and professional stakes were real. Americans in Germany risked damaging friendships, losing professional standing, and in some cases jeopardizing their visa status by being perceived as anything other than maximally hostile to Trump. There was no alternative employer ecosystem run by Trump supporters, because Trump supporters functionally do not exist in mainstream German society. The only Germans who publicly support Trump are associated with the neo-Nazi fringe, and they are not in the business of employing foreigners.
A 2020 poll found 41 percent of Germans considered Trump the biggest threat to world peace
The depth of German media distortion showed up clearly in polling. A widely circulated survey found that 41 percent of Germans identified Donald Trump as the greatest threat to world peace. Only 8 percent named Vladimir Putin. The poll was conducted around 2020, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but its results reflected a public opinion environment so warped by one-sided coverage that a democratically elected American president was considered five times more dangerous than the leader of a nuclear-armed authoritarian state that had already annexed Crimea and was waging a proxy war in eastern Ukraine.
Putin’s numbers in German opinion surveys have likely risen since 2022, but even this shift probably owes less to a reassessment of the original distortion than to the difficulty of ignoring a land war in Europe. And among a significant segment of the German public, the suspicion persists that Putin’s real crime is his alleged alliance with Trump.
Americans exposed the media distortion by listening to Trump directly
Many Americans who became Trump supporters did so after a simple exercise: they listened to his actual speeches and compared what he said to what the media claimed he had said. The gap was so wide that it shifted their political allegiance.
Germans could not perform this exercise. Their English was insufficient to follow an American political speech with enough comprehension to catch distortions, and their knowledge of American political institutions, culture, and rhetorical traditions was too thin to provide the necessary context. German media could tell its audience almost anything about Trump, and most people had no realistic way to verify it. Before the age of AI translation tools, the language barrier was nearly absolute. Even now, AI-generated translations are unreliable enough that they do not fully solve the problem.
Trump actually deported a European neo-Nazi leader
One of the ironies lost in German media coverage is that Trump’s administration took concrete action against genuine extremism that Germany’s media narrative would suggest he encouraged. Martin Sellner, the well-known Austrian neo-Nazi leader who sought to establish a political movement in the United States, was deported under Trump-era policies that mandated the deportation of extremists. This is the kind of fact that never penetrates the German media bubble, because it contradicts the governing narrative.
The United States, unlike Germany, does not have a significant organized Nazi political movement. The American Nazi Party consists of a handful of individuals with zero political power. Germany, by contrast, has real far-right parties with seats in parliament and genuine political influence. The projection of Nazi anxieties onto American politics tells us far more about Germany’s unresolved relationship with its own history than it does about the reality of American conservatism.
The propaganda lesson: language barriers let media distortion flourish unchecked
The German media’s treatment of Trump offers a case study with implications far beyond the transatlantic relationship. The mechanism is straightforward: when an audience cannot access primary sources in the original language, media institutions can construct virtually any narrative they choose, and that narrative becomes unchallengeable within the information ecosystem.
This same dynamic plays out in Western coverage of China. Most Western journalists and audiences cannot read Chinese, do not understand the Chinese Communist Party’s internal political dynamics, and rely on a small number of English-language intermediaries whose framing goes largely unquestioned. The CCP has exploited this language barrier for decades, feeding Western media narratives that legitimize Party rule, obscure atrocities, and marginalize dissident voices. Overseas Chinese dissident publications exist precisely because someone has to bridge that gap and provide the unfiltered picture that mainstream Western outlets either cannot or will not deliver.
The German case proves the principle in reverse. American politics is conducted in the world’s most widely spoken second language, is covered by an enormous and ideologically diverse domestic press corps, and is the subject of more international reporting than any other country’s politics. And still, German media managed to construct a caricature so extreme that nearly half the German public considered a sitting American president a greater threat than Vladimir Putin. If that level of distortion is possible with American politics, imagine what is possible with Chinese politics, where the language barrier is higher, the source material is censored, and the regime actively works to shape the foreign narrative.
The bottom line is that Americans across both parties are, by and large, open-minded, tolerant, diverse, and freedom-loving people. Trump supporters are not Nazis. Germans are decent people trapped inside a broken information environment. The lesson for everyone is the same: if you cannot read the primary sources yourself, be very skeptical of anyone who claims to tell you what they say.
By Emmanuel Goldstein
