FUTURE SHOCK

This Is the Sinister Warning About What Comes After Trump

The world is in for a right-wing wave.

Opinion

Saxony-Anhalt is a mid-sized state in Eastern Germany that has not really commanded much international attention since roughly 1517. In that year, on October 31, in Wittenberg, Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the Castle Church door, an act that is considered by many to have triggered the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

Certainly, for Americans, the region has rarely been front of mind since. But on September 6, what happened there matters to all of us and our futures. That is because in elections on that day, the Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) won the state elections, besting the Christian Democrats (CDU), the party led by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, by an almost two-to-one margin.

Merz, after the results were tabulated, told the executive board of his party that the results had shaken the CDU “to its very foundations.” Another senior CDU official characterized the election as “a watershed” for Germany.

Why? Because this is Germany we are talking about here. And the Alternative for Germany party is a hard-right nationalist party of a type that the country has largely tried to steer clear of since its bad experiences with right-wing extremism back in, you know, the last century.

This election is the latest major victory for Europe’s ugly right and for the global ethno-nationalist extremist movement that has been led by Vladimir Putin and other demagogues like Donald Trump, the UK’s Nigel Farage, France’s Marine Le Pen, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, India’s Narendra Modi, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and has included recently defeated but nonetheless highly visible leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

Trump’s reaction to the victory, a win for a party that openly echoes policies that produced some of Europe’s darkest days in the last century, was exultant. He framed it as a victory for the “Populist Party” in Germany and hailed it as a reaction to “absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations which have hurt Germany badly.” Unable to contain his exuberance, he then offered the acronym “MGGA,” which ostensibly stands for Make Germany Great Again.

The Trump administration has made support for the AfD a centerpiece of its European policy, with Vice President J.D. Vance meeting with the party’s co-leader Alice Weidel earlier this year and condemning what he characterized as Germany’s “firewall” against the party. (Policies that date to the post-Cold War years and an effort not to repeat old mistakes.) Secretary of State Marco Rubio also defended the party and attacked the decision by German intelligence to designate the group a “right-wing extremist organization.” Rubio called the action by the German government “tyranny in disguise” and rejected comparisons between the AfD and the Nazis. AfD leaders have subsequently visited the White House and received other expressions of support from the Trump Administration.

Not surprisingly, Trump and MAGA support of AfD has not been popular with officials in the German government. More surprisingly, AfD leaders have sought to downplay it given how hugely unpopular Trump is in Germany.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest racist and therefore one of the most dangerous advocates for the far-right, also celebrated the win on X with the words “Well done!” This is the same Elon Musk who, ostensibly for the same reasons, is reportedly spending $100 million supporting GOP candidates in this coming November’s U.S. midterm elections.

It is the nexus between the backers of Trump and MAGA and parties like the AfD that should be most chilling for Americans. That is because it foreshadows what is likely to come when, as is inevitable, Donald Trump is no longer president of the United States.

Whether Trump disappears because his term runs out or his rapidly failing body finally gives in, there will not be much time to sing “ding dong the witch is dead” when he is little more than an orange puddle with a bad hairpiece floating atop it.

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That is because Musk and other right-wing oligarchs of this world and the American far-right are already planning for a successor regime that embraces their anti-immigrant, white supremacist, misogynistic worldview. This week, for example, the Washington Post ran a story headlined “After Charlie Kirk’s death, Turning Point forges ahead, with eyes on JD Vance.” (You will no doubt remember the long, lingering, rather unseemly hug between Vance and Kirk’s wife Erika at the memorial service for the assassinated founder of the Turning Point organization.)

The thrust of the article is that the group’s objective is getting Kirk’s “close friend” Vance, himself a leading voice of anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. despite his wife’s Indian heritage. Other efforts funded by the business and finance leaders who backed Trump are also turning their attention now to who they can support in 2028 to promote not only their repugnant ideologies but also the warm and cuddly policies toward the super rich that go along with them. (Visit each of the countries that are part of the global anti-democratic right-wing movement, and you will find a happily ensconced oligarchy using demagoguery to win power that enables them to get ever richer. Which is not to say they don’t also have awful values; it’s just that their primary motivation seems to be greed, with institutionalized hate only serving as a kind of secondary benefit of their efforts.)

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The global right-wing movement has suffered setbacks. The loss of Orban, cited earlier, was the most recent. But the win of the AfD and the degree to which it has been embraced by GOP front-runners for 2028 like Vance and Rubio and by those who will bankroll them should make it very clear that the movement continues to seek to move forward.

Expect more signs of solidarity within the movement in the next two months as Trump and his team once again do, as they do every election season, reach out to Putin. We just saw Trump emissaries Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner buttering up Putin nauseatingly during a recent mission. Trump reportedly had a long talk with Putin this week. Kash Patel is planning a trip to Russia. It has been announced that CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who made a not-so-secret mission to Russia a few weeks back, will be re-engaging with the Russians.

This full-court press may ostensibly be linked to trying to find a settlement in Ukraine, but even in that respect, the goal is likely to announce “a breakthrough” on peace talks there (or with Iran) as a pro-Trump October Surprise. Should such a step take place, expect the entire announcement to be just exactly as meaningful as the Iran and Gaza “deals” that never materialized. But, given what we know about Trump’s collaboration with Russians during past election cycles and his history of back-channel conversations with the Kremlin, do not expect the effort to be limited to overt acts of support.

After all, Putin benefits from Trump too and, frankly, given how badly the war with Ukraine is going for him, he can use all the help from the U.S. he can get. And Russian money has gone into many of the right-wing groups in Europe and elsewhere that have been part of the overall movement. And the U.S. has backed those efforts with official policies. And as inroads are made in different countries like Germany, more efforts to strengthen the global movement will occur…which will make it harder to reverse their gains and harder to defeat them in their efforts to undermine democracy, attack the international order, spread hate, and advance goals that were toxic for the world in the mid-20th century and are making a comeback in our own era.

And that is why an election in Germany’s sixth-largest state is of urgent relevance to all of us in the U.S. who already know all too well the consequences of surrendering our government to greed and intolerance-fueled doctrines of many of the worst among us.

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David RothkopfChief Global Affairs Columnist

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