The nation that used to think Adolf Hitler was a great guy now believes that Donald Trump is a greater danger to the world than Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, and China’s President Xi Jinping.
The German people, like many people in Europe, are informed by a far-left media that hates America to begin with and hates Trump with a passion that only liberals with assassination dreams can muster.
The YouGov poll shows the frightening extent to which the media controls perceptions — even if those perceptions are politically biased.
41% of those surveyed responded that Trump is the most dangerous of the five. 17% picked Kim, 8% chose Khamenei, another 8% chose Putin and 7% selected Xi.
A similar poll was conducted in 2018 that asked Germans to identify the most dangerous world leader out of a selection of three: Trump, Kim and Putin. 48% of respondents chose Trump in that survey according to DW, a German state-owned media outlet.
How many of those poll respondents were actually brain dead?
The Jerusalem Post pointed out how Germans ranked Trump as more dangerous than leaders who starve their own people such as in the case of North Korea, shoot protesting citizens in the case of China and Iran, and take children away from homosexual couples, in the case of Russia.
Taking kids away from gays is among Putin’s minor transgressions. Does anyone care that he annexed the Crimea and invaded Eastern Ukraine? His dream is to make Russia as powerful and threatening as it was under communism and he is threatening to reconquer former satellite states in Eastern Europe.
But I guess Trump is more dangerous because he says stupid, mean things about European leaders.
There’s an underlying dynamic in German-American affairs that might offer some explanation for what appears to be a collective madness in Germany.
Germany, like many other European countries, has seen a surge of far-right populism in 2019 that has reshaped domestic political priorities. After the U.K. embarked on a lone quest to depart from the European Union, anti-Euroskeptics have looked to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron as the two pillars holding together the fraying coalition of 28 (soon to be 27) states.
Another survey, from the company Kantar, found that Germans’ confidence in their own leader is shaky. Germans were more likely to say they trusted Macron than Merkel.
Moreover, Germans appear to see the U.S. in a much different light than Americans see Germans.
Skepticism of Trump among Germans may also be the result of a broader mismatch between American attitudes toward Germans and vice versa. The Pew Research Center found in 2018 that about two-thirds of Americans thought relations with Germany were good, while just 42 percent of Germans thought so.
Moreover, Pew reported that “German attitudes toward the U.S. have turned sharply negative in the Trump era.” After Trump’s election in 2016, Germans’ favorable views toward the U.S. and confidence in the U.S. president plummeted.
Throw in anti-Trump media hysteria and fear-mongering from left-wing politicians and we can get some idea why Trump is seen as a bigger threat than a leader like Putin who has a thousand nukes pointed at Western Europe and the U.S.
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