A few days ago, some important Twitter personalities noticed that Germans vastly overestimate Kamala Harris’s chances of winning the U.S. presidency:
“Who will win the US presidential election?” ask ZDF’s Politbarometer
According to that very same poll, 83% of Germans believe that a Trump victory would be “rather bad” for Germany:
Pollsters periodically ask Germans which American presidential candidate they would support, were they in a position to vote. Last July, 79% said they would vote for Kamala Harris; only 13% would vote for Donald Trump. The numbers are typical: Barack Obama claimed 71% support in a similar poll from 2008 and Hillary Clinton enjoyed 82% support in 2016. Right now, Green voters split 99% for Harris, Social Democrat voters 92%, nominally centre-right CDU/CSU voters 89%, market-liberal FDP voters 85%, and voters for the old-school leftist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht party 52%. Across the entire German political landscape, only Alternative für Deutschland voters would support Trump by a thin majority of 51%. Even here, one-in-four are undecided, and the remaining one-in-four would vote for Harris.
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You might be tempted to argue that differing national interests explain this, but I don’t think that argument works. It’s far from obvious that a Harris administration would further the interests of the German people. The war in Ukraine and the associated bombing of Nord Stream, for example, were both enthusiastically supported by Joe Biden specifically, and they proved catastrophic for the Federal Republic. What is really going on here is much subtler: Many Germans know English, but consuming foreign-language material is a pain and relatively few have any direct contact with Trump’s debates, his speeches or sympathetic English-language reporting. We learn about American presidential campaigns primarily through our media, and Germany has a vast state-adjacent media industrial complex in much the same way that the United States has a vast state-adjacent military industrial complex.
And: The German media industrial complex is truly fanatical when it comes to hating Trump. We are basically conducting a real-world experiment to determine how much media manipulation can achieve when deployed en masse against a low-information, credulous population. My American readers will say that their own media is heavily biased, but German media is vastly, vastly more extreme.
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NiUS sums up the tenor of German political coverage well: The German press have openly favoured Democratic Party presidential candidates for decades; they are invariably portrayed as wise, forward-looking beacons (if not bacons) of hope for the future. Republican candidates since Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, are ridiculed as dangerous, incompetent and stupid. Trump merely added new hysteria and urgency to these old, long-standing tropes. A 2017 paper by Thomas Patterson at Harvard University looked at European coverage of Trump’s first 100 days in office in the BBC, the Financial Times and the ARD – Germany’s oldest public media broadcaster. The BBC covered Trump negatively 75% of the time and the Financial Times covered him negatively 86% of the time, but the ARD were by far the most extreme, directing fully 98% of their Trump stories against the forty-fifth president. In their absolute anti-Trumpism, ARD outpaced even American media like CNN and NBC (92% negative), to say nothing of more “serious” press like the New York Times and the Washington Post (87% and 83% negative, respectively).
Even that is only a partial picture, because you have to remember that there is no major opposition media in Germany at all. The newsweekly Junge Freiheit, for example – which covers Trump about as sympathetically as Fox News – has a circulation of less than 30,000. It is all wall-to-wall anti-Trump screeching all the time here in the Federal Republic.
