J.D. Vance's visit to Germany last week hasn't generated the "shock and revulsion" it should have, argued a columnist.
The vice president gave a speech at the Munch Security Conference that New Republic editor Michael Tomasky called shocking and immoral and meting with the leader of the fascist party Alternative fur Deutschland, or AfD, which has been shunned by the nation's other parties, but shunned a meeting with chancellor Olaf Scholz.
"This is not remotely normal," Tomasky wrote, conceding that the U.S. had aligned with some autocratic regimes, especially as a bulwark against communism during the Cold War. "Vance’s meeting — and Elon Musk’s earlier one, since he, too, is a member of our government, however shadily — is something much different. It’s ideologically motivated. Vance and Musk, and by extension their boss, President Donald Trump, like what AfD stands for, and they want the world to know they like it."
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AfD is currently polling behind the conservative Christian Democrats, but the chance that the far-right party might overcome its 8-point deficit to win control of Germany's government should be chilling.
"Combine this with what we already know about Ukraine," Tomasky wrote. "The Trump administration is going to give Putin whatever he wants. What exactly this is, we don’t yet know. But when Saudi Arabia is hosting talks that include the U.S. and Russia only, and not Ukraine or the other nations of Europe, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to smell the fix that’s in."
Trump wants Ukraine to hand over much of its wealth to him and suggested they "may be Russian one day" if they did not, and Tomasky said he barely recognizes what the U.S. government has already become four weeks into his second presidency.
"It’s a horrifying thing to watch," the columnist wrote. "The transformation is happening domestically, too, of course; even more pronouncedly than in the realm of foreign affairs. Musk’s DOGE power-grab, the firings of civil servants, the attacks on the press like the barring of The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One, the hideous cuts to scientific research — these and other moves, like the coming assault on Medicaid and all the many services it provides to both poor and middle-class people, all carried out by unilateral edict, are the acts of a government making its contempt for democratic norms clear every day. Several times a day."
"But somehow, while foreign policy doesn’t matter as much in Americans’ day-to-day lives, it tells the rest of the world what kind of nation we have become," Tomasky added. "Step by step, the United States of America is becoming part of a global fascist network. Do we care yet?"
