On his first visit to Europe as vice president, JD Vance gave a speech to a gathering of European leaders in Munich, Germany this week that should fill every decent American with shame, revulsion, and rage. Channeling Russian talking points and illuminating the hyper-nationalism at the heart of the MAGA movement, Vance told his audience that the continent is threatened not by Russia, but by “the enemy within”: an ominous embrace of fascistic rhetoric from the darkest days of the twentieth century. And echoing the Great Replacement theory that has come to dominate MAGA, he suggested that immigration to Europe amounted to an invasion more dangerous than Russia’s actual bombs-and-bullets invasion of Ukraine.
Perhaps most shockingly, he offered a tacit endorsement of Germany’s Nazi-inspired party, Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), considered so extreme and dangerous by German authorities that there have been serious efforts to ban it as being in violation of Germany’s Basic Law, which holds that, “Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behavior of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.” And as the Center for American Progress recounts, “Germany’s own domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, has declared that [AfD’s] youth wing, Die Junge Alternative, engages in frequent far-right hate speech, classifying it as an extremist organization and recently placing it under state surveillance. So radical is the AfD that in May 2024 it was expelled from the Identity and Democracy group in the European Parliament, which includes Marine Le Pen’s National Rally from France and Matteo Salvini’s Lega from Italy.” Moreover, it’s a party that’s avowedly anti-American, with its leader stating, “The security interests of the Federal Republic of Germany are diametrically opposed to those of the United States.” And an AfD politician was even arrested a few years ago for his part in a plot to literally overthrow the German government. Despite all this, the AfD is polling in second place in Germany’s upcoming elections.
Yet, as the New York Times describes in a well-contextualized account of his speech that, as of this writing, has distressingly not merited top billing in the eyes of the paper’s editors, Vance told German leaders “to drop their objections to working with a party that has often reveled in banned Nazi slogans and has been shunned from government as a result.” This, despite the fact that lockstep efforts by a broad range of German parties, from left to right, to stop Nazi-adjacent parties from gaining power were long seen as common sense by any credible American politician. And so, eighty years after the end of World War II, we finally have a presidential administration bold enough to ask the question that the rest of us were apparently too lily-livered to ponder: Were the Nazis really all that bad? But it’s even worse than this, as the Trump administration is actually promoting their spiritual inheritors’ takeover of the German government. Witnessing a far-right German party that scapegoats immigrants, engages in political violence, and threatens to undermine a key American ally, Trump and Vance are enticed rather than instinctively repelled.
Vance’s speech didn’t come out of nowhere. Trump and his MAGA allies have long celebrated illiberal European leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and of course Russia’s Vladimir Putin. But by offering an open hand to parties that trace their lineage to forces that literally blew up Europe, slaughtered millions, and challenged our very conceptions of civilized society, Trump and Vance are implicating the American public in a political vision that should make us sick to our stomachs. They are lending the weight of American power and prestige to forces whose values are directly opposed to the values held by most Americans. Parties who see nationality and citizenship as rooted in blood and soil, and who promote the denigration and dehumanization of those of other ethnicities. Parties who stoke reservations about recent waves of immigration into hateful division and incitement to violence, while promoting an atavistic, reactionary vision for European society. In offering parties like the AfD a stamp of approval, Trump and Vance abuse their positions of power, offering comfort to adversaries of the United States.
It’s also notable that Vance used his speech to dismiss European concerns and efforts to combat Russian disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining democracies and promoting right-wing parties (not coincidentally, the AfD is sympathetic to Russian authoritarianism and stands against the defense of Ukraine). Alongside his efforts to downplay Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its expansionist threats against U.S. allies like the Baltic nations, Vance showed that there is little, if any, daylight between Russian propaganda and core MAGA beliefs. The disparagement of democracy; the promotion of ties not to democratic allies but to fellow authoritarians; and the emphasis on extreme nationalism over international solidarity: Vance and Trump would be doing little different if they were actual agents of Moscow, yet it is becoming clear that this rancid world view is also simply basic to MAGA.
If there’s a silver lining here, it’s the illumination that Vance’s insane speech casts on what MAGA has become, and perhaps alway was. It has been hard for Americans to fully grasp how far-right Trump and his movement have tended, given their takeover and colonization of the Republican Party, and its associations with a certain conservative tradition. But on that European stage, Vance showed us that on the spectrum of left and right, MAGA fits snugly among the shittiest parties that Europe has to offer, the Nazi apologists of the AfD and the fascist admirers of Italian prime minister Meloni. MAGA occupies a political space that most Americans at one time were wise enough to revile; in his self-incriminating European debut, Vance left no doubt that MAGA has evolved to a point where it’s indistinguishable from parties we once collectively understood to be barbaric, and America’s enemies.
But that’s the limit to the good news here. The reality is this: through his speech, Vance shit on the U.S.’s role in defeating European fascism and fostering the re-birth of European democracies after World War II. Few would claim that the American role in Europe over the decades has been anything close to perfect, or was free from self-interest. Yet Trump and Vance’s alignment of American foreign policy with the worst of the European worst marks the start of a chapter far darker than we’ve seen before. Coddling neo-Nazis, cozying up to Russian autocracy, Trump II is intent on transforming the United States into a malign actor on the international stage, an enemy of democracy, freedom, and human rights.
There is certainly a basic reality that Americans are skeptical of foreign aid and international commitments. Surely any openness has been greatly abused over the last couple decades by the Republican-launched forever war on terror and insane occupation of two Middle Eastern countries for no sane strategic end. It is not at all crazy for an ordinary American to want to turn away from the world, and put America first. Not crazy — but also not right, as JD Vance has helped to make clear what it means when Americans don’t care enough about what’s going on in other countries, and how terrible things that happen far from our shores can find their way to harm us. It should be intuitively clear to all but the truly lost that empowering neo-Nazis who hate America can’t possibly turn out well for the United States. Similarly, it should be intuitively clear that a presidential administration that gives its stamp of approval to a German political party that celebrates Nazi rhetoric, echoes that party’s animus towards outsiders, and literally opposes the United States has either lost its fucking mind or doesn’t understand a single damned thing about what makes America actually great.
What I am getting at is that, in the taxonomy of low-hanging political fruit, this is literally a golden apple hovering a centimeter off the ground. JD Vance has just told Europe that the Trump administration, and by extension the American people, want neo-Nazis to rule Germany. The Democratic Party cannot stay silent. Ordinary Americans cannot stay silent. The Trump administration has crossed a red line that must be defended and re-inscribed. It is unacceptable for an American president to disgrace the American public by putting our country on the side of a party inspired by actual Nazis. Democratic politicians need to ignore the pollsters who say that Americans don’t care about foreign affairs; they need to listen to their gut when it tells them that it’s beyond fucked up to put America prestige behind America’s neo-fascist enemies. The American majority needs to distance itself from this evil act as quickly and powerfully as is humanly possible, and to make Trump and his MAGA enablers pay dearly for defiling our World War II dead, our invested treasure, our most basic common ties of humanity and decency to the peoples of Europe.