After the Farewell

Obama gave his farewell address on a Tuesday night, and it felt—the way good speeches sometimes do—like a door closing on something specific and irreplaceable. Less than twenty-four hours later, Donald Trump held a press conference that felt like someone had kicked that door off its hinges and was using the pieces for kindling.

He ignored CNN’s correspondent mid-question and pointed to a reporter from Breitbart instead, the far-right website that had served as his campaign’s unofficial propaganda arm. He acknowledged Russian election hacking in the same breath he used to make clear it basically didn’t matter. Then he compared the United States intelligence community—the people who’d briefed him on that hacking—to Nazi Germany. Not a dog whistle. A full, extended comparison. In front of the press corps. Days before his inauguration. It’s all on record.

I know Trump has real admirers in Germany too—people who respect that he says what he thinks, who find political correctness exhausting, who believe a politician who actually follows through on his promises is something genuinely new. That’s not an irrational position in the abstract. What I don’t understand is how those same people will feel in two years, when the promises he keeps turn out to be the ones that cost them something: their money, their freedom, someone they know being deported. The entertainment value of a wrecking ball diminishes once it hits your block.

Maybe none of it crosses the ocean. Maybe it stays contained, a spectacular American problem, good television from a safe distance. But I’m sitting here with a thousand kilometers between me and whatever is coming, and I’m still genuinely frightened. That distance used to feel like enough. It doesn’t anymore.