The best way to understand your own country can be to experience it from afar, which I recently had the chance to do while traveling in Germany, the Netherlands, England and Wales. The topic of politics, specifically the current situation in the United States, consumed most of the many hours I spent talking with lifelong friends, colleagues and even strangers.
What I heard was truly alarming and made it clear that it will take years, maybe a generation, to repair the damage done to our country’s standing in the world since President Donald Trump took office again last year.
Having lived in western Europe on two separate occasions during the Cold War, I’m no stranger to experiencing criticism of the United States. My experience this time was entirely different. I saw genuine fear, disbelief, and horror at what had occurred both domestically and abroad in just the first year of the second Trump administration.
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Our counterparts overseas have seen the terror unleashed in our cities by paramilitary groups operating outside the law, something usually reserved for failed states. They are very aware, given the global impact, of the promotion of anti-intellectualism and destructive pseudo-science at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
They’re rightly terrified at our newfound military adventurism based largely on the president’s whims or obsessions on a particular day, which have even extended to threatened attacks on other NATO countries. Against that backdrop, more than one person asked if the United States had learned anything from Europe’s own terrible history of Nazism, fascism and authoritarianism. I didn’t have a great answer.
The line of inquiry I found most depressing was about how, after everything Americans had seen with their own eyes, so many of my fellow citizens had voted for Trump (yet again) in 2024, and how his support among voters never seems to be in danger of collapsing. I attempted to explain the inexplicable — that despite the cruelty, chaos and authoritarianism unleashed by Trump and his enablers, over 40% of American voters still support the president (as shown repeatedly in national polling data), and they always will.
For evidence of this, we need only point to the fact that the president’s approval rating has so far taken no meaningful hit from his shambolic war of choice against Iran, despite it representing the breaking of a key, almost sacred, promise he made to his supporters.
Europeans have their own far-right, xenophobic political movements to contend with. What sets the U.S. apart, and what people in other countries do not fully appreciate, is that we are almost alone in the liberal democratic world in having such an all-encompassing right-wing media ecosystem supporting these ideologies.
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I explained to people that a number of my fellow citizens who continue to support Trump spend large portions of their waking hours watching, listening to, or reading Fox News, conservative talk radio, or extreme online content, and that this has come to shape their entire “Weltanschauung,” a German word that can be loosely translated as “world view” but which has a much more profound meaning, essentially describing a particular individual’s philosophy of life. This cannot be changed easily, no matter how disastrous the resulting decisions (like voting for Trump multiple times) prove to be.
A bright spot amid these otherwise dismal conversations was the reaction I got when telling people I’m from Minnesota, a place most people in Europe likely couldn’t have found on a map several months ago but which is now globally famous for its resistance to Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, with one of the major German dailies, Die Zeit, even running a headline designating Minneapolis as “The City That Trump Cannot Break.”
If our country is to reclaim its place as the leader of the free world, we’d better hope that the rest of the country finds the courage to follow our state’s example. The whole world really is watching.
Ted Sherman, of St. Paul, is a global trade and supply chain professional. He studied history and German at the University of Notre Dame and business at the University of Chicago. He’s lived in Europe, speaks German and has traveled to and conducted business in dozens of countries over the years.
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