The German Elite’s Anti-Americanism

“Trump has no idea of foreign policy.” “Amateur diplomats.” “Trump privatises foreign policy.” These are the phrases echoing through German newsrooms and opinion columns—often accompanied by imagery that goes considerably further: Der Spiegel’s covers depicting Trump as Hitler or as a dictator are only the most prominent examples. The cumulative effect on public opinion has been measurable. A recent Allensbach survey found that German approval for cooperation with and trust in America had fallen dramatically, from 62% in 2020 to just 34%. A full 64% of respondents agreed that “Donald Trump disregards international rules and long-standing alliances, thereby bringing chaos to the world.”

But this framing obscures a longer and more uncomfortable history. Germany’s elite anti-Americanism did not begin with Trump. Blaming America—or exploiting anti-American sentiment for domestic political gain—has been a recurring feature of German political life for decades. Today’s attacks on Trump are, at their core, less a response to specific American policies than an expression of the German establishment’s own deep-seated insecurities and its instinctive hostility towards populism and democratic accountability.

A long history of America-bashing

Germany’s relationship with the United States is long and layered. America was first an occupying power after the war, then a protective one during the Cold War—we remember the Berlin Airlift, Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner,” and George H.W. Bush’s support for reunification against French and British resistance. Yet with the end of the Cold War, anti-Americanism increasingly found its way into respectable establishment discourse. Even Hitler comparisons involving an American president are not new: in 2002, at the height of the Iraq war debate, Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin (SPD) was forced to resign after saying at a trade union gathering, “Bush wants to distract attention from his domestic difficulties. That’s a popular method. Hitler did it too.” That she faced a storm of indignation and had to step down is worth noting—such a forced resignation would be far less certain today.

Her comments came during the chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder (SPD), who secured re-election by positioning himself as the voice of European reason against American recklessness—an opposition to the Iraq War that proved electorally potent. History has judged him harshly: Schröder is now largely remembered as the chancellor who delivered Germany into dependence on Putin’s Russia, having served as chairman of Nord Stream AG’s supervisory board and later working for Rosneft. Yet what is striking is that polling at the time shows a near-identical shift in public sentiment to today’s: positive views of America fell from 78% in 1999/2000 to 61% in 2002, bottoming out at just 25% in 2003. 

Where Schröder exploited pacifism and latent anti-Americanism tactically, today’s German establishment goes further. For them, Trump and American populism represent everything they fear and despise. Their rejection is not directed at any single policy—not tariffs, not Greenland—but at Trump’s entire approach, which they experience as an affront to their ideal of technocratic, process-driven governance insulated from popular pressure. What truly enrages them is not Trump’s interventionism per se, but his unapologetic claim to be pursuing American national interests and implementing the wishes of his voters—and his contemptuous dismissal of the supranational institutions that have become the cornerstone of their own political identity.

Fear of populist spillover

Outrage at America has become a political crutch for an elite that has forfeited the trust of growing numbers of its own citizens. The temptation to blame external forces is powerful—and it goes beyond rhetoric. During Germany’s 2025 general election, anxiety about American interference was voiced repeatedly. It was not entirely without foundation: populist voters, and the AfD in particular, made little secret of the fact that they enjoyed the Trump administration’s implicit endorsement. For the establishment, this was not merely irritating—it was alarming.

Nothing exposed that alarm more sharply than the reaction to JD Vance’s speech at the 2025 Munich Security Conference. What scandalised the German establishment was not his suggestion that America might scale back its military commitments in Europe—uncomfortable as that was. It was his criticism of European governments for restricting free speech. Defence Minister Boris Pistorius’s response—that he was “proud” of Germany’s model of “defensive democracy”—only underlined how the rift with America was also a mirror of the rift within Germany itself: between an establishment committed to managed speech and a growing section of the public that resents it.

That defensiveness was further exposed when a CBS 60 Minutes report turned its cameras on Germany’s hate speech laws—featuring police officers searching homes and confiscating electronics over online comments. Those who had styled themselves as the guardians of democracy suddenly appeared as something rather different.

There is, too, the embarrassment of watching Trump lay bare the EU’s hollowness. The spectacle of a flustered Ursula von der Leyen scrambling to negotiate tariffs with an overpowering American president was widely noted and little flattering. Elite anti-Americanism has consequently acquired a distinctly defensive tone. During the Iraq era, the EU built its self-image around the contrast between sensible “Old Europe” and reckless America. Now the best it can muster is the argument that Trump makes the EU necessary. “If the Union does not become sovereign now, it will become irrelevant,” warns one commentator—a rallying cry that, whatever its intent, doubles as an admission that the project has so far failed to make itself indispensable.

Fear of the people

The charge that America conducts an “amateurish” foreign policy exposes a conviction that runs deep in the German establishment: that critical decisions are too complex and too important to be left to the influence of ordinary voters. This is not a new attitude. Much of the sense of European superiority towards America has long rested on an elitist belief that America is dominated by the wrong kind of voters.

In his 2008 book Anti-Americanism in Europe, Russell A. Berman quotes the German author Klaus Theweleit, who wrote disparagingly during the Iraq crisis: “It is frequently overlooked that Bush could only win the elections with votes from the Bible Belt, the votes of fundamentalist Americans, religious fanatics.” Berman captures the anti-democratic undertone precisely: “Does he mean that Christian voters should be disenfranchised?” The same instinct pervades today’s discourse about Trump—the unspoken conviction that the problem is not merely the president, but the voters who put him there.

Yet the establishment’s self-confidence has developed some telling cracks. Despite its disdain for American “amateurism,” it is the German elite itself that has displayed a remarkable naivety in its own dealings with the world: the shock and unpreparedness at Putin’s invasion of Ukraine; the prolonged appeasement of Iran, which was permitted to establish operational headquarters on German soil; the country’s repeated exposure to Islamist terrorism. Rather than reckon with these failures, the instinct is to point outward. A recent report by the German Economic Institute duly listed “Coronavirus, war and Trump” as the three forces weighing on the German economy since 2020—a framing conspicuously silent on any domestic contribution to the country’s decline.

Anti-Americanism has always been ideologically promiscuous—and there has always been an element of jealousy in it too. The far right once rejected America as a symbol of Jewish modernity and capitalism; the far left dismissed it as the engine of imperialism, and much of today’s German Left continues to recycle what are, at root, Stalinist-era talking points about American global oppression. In the nineteenth century, German Romantics rejected the democratic values of the American Revolution—values Goethe, by contrast, celebrated, famously having a character in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship declare, “Here or nowhere is America,” widely read as an argument that Germany itself needed those values.

Today, elite anti-Trumpism is driven above all by a deep fear of populism—which also explains why it is considerably less prevalent among AfD voters than among supporters of the Greens or the Left, Germany’s most establishment-aligned parties. In this sense, the term “anti-Americanism” may not even be quite right. Germany’s elite does not reject America as such—it still looks to America for cultural and political guidance. But the America it looks to is the America of the progressive coastal establishment: a fact neatly illustrated by the enthusiasm with which Green and Left politicians have celebrated Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory in New York, a campaign built on explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-Western rhetoric.

Every party has both the right and the obligation to articulate its views on American foreign policy. Rational criticism of another country’s policies is not only legitimate—it is necessary.

But the German elite’s anti-Trumpism is something else entirely: a reflexive cultural posture, a vehicle for elite anxiety, and a displacement of domestic failure onto a foreign scapegoat. At its root, it is an anti-democratic sentiment—the conviction that the wrong people (the electorate) keep making the wrong choices, and that something must be done to insulate politics from their influence. The German public would do well to see it for what it is—and reject it.