07. Juni 2026

The political success of Donald Trump in the United States and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is not a democratic accident but a stress test that exposes the weak spots of societies in transition. It is the story of countries where economic transformation, rising inequality and cultural upheaval collide with a political class that is increasingly distrusted to keep these conflicts in check – and of actors who systematically turn that collision into political capital. A Shared...

22. Mai 2026

It is a strange document for a party in mortal fear of authoritarianism: a 200‑page exercise in self‑diagnosis that dissects vendor contracts, tech stacks and voter‑file hygiene, while almost studiously averting its gaze from the political earthquakes that actually brought Donald Trump back to the Oval Office. On its face, the DNC’s autopsy reads like the internal report of a large, slightly rattled corporation. It inventories data warehouses, notes the billions of contact attempts in...

18. April 2026

It takes a special kind of piety to mistake a hired killer’s catchphrase for the Word of God and then read it, eyes closed, at a Pentagon prayer service. But here we are. When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently intoned what he presented as a biblical‑sounding prayer, he was not, in fact, quoting Scripture. He was channeling Samuel L. Jackson’s character in “Pulp Fiction” – specifically, the little speech a mob hitman delivers just before he shoots someone in the face. It is the...

03. April 2026

It is tempting to dismiss Donald Trump’s latest outburst on health care as just another off‑the‑cuff provocation. But when a sitting president says the United States “can’t” afford Medicaid, Medicare and daycare because “we’re fighting wars,” and that these “little things” should be left to the states, he is not merely talking about budgeting priorities. He is laying out a brutal reordering of the American social contract. Behind the line is a simple hierarchy:...

25. Februar 2026

Trump’s 2026 State of the Union was not an earnest attempt to stitch a fraying republic back together, but a carefully staged show of force by a president who has turned a constitutional ritual into a campaign rally dressed up in ceremonial garb. It weaponised the language of unity in order to hollow out the very idea of a shared political community. On the surface, the speech dutifully checked the boxes of traditional “unity talk”: invocations of the nation’s 250th anniversary, nods to...

20. Februar 2026

The Supreme Court did more today than strike down a batch of tariffs. It quietly reminded the country that even an “America First” president does not get to turn a perpetual emergency into a one‑man customs office. Donald Trump had treated a 1977 emergency statute as a kind of constitutional Swiss Army knife, flipping it open whenever he needed a new lever of economic coercion. Under the banner of national crisis, he slapped minimum tariffs of 10 percent on imports from much of the world,...

14. Februar 2026

Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy peddles the fear of Europe’s “civilizational erasure” as if it were a sober assessment of global realities; in truth, it is a symptom of a neo‑nationalist project that fuses historical amnesia with identitarian alarmism. Read through the lens of contemporary research on nationalism and civilizational politics, this document – and the performances surrounding it – are less an analysis of the international order than an attempt to...

13. Februar 2026

Donald Trump and his allies claim that “20 million illegal immigrants” entered the United States under Joe Biden. This number is not supported by any serious analysis of the available data; it is a political talking point built on systematic misrepresentation of border statistics and deliberate historical amnesia. From fiscal year 2021 through 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded roughly 8.7 million encounters at the southwest border and about 10.8 million encounters at all...

10. Februar 2026

By now, it is tempting to dismiss Donald Trump’s politics of permanent uproar as a personal quirk — a pathology of temperament rather than a method of rule. That would be a mistake. What looks like chaos from afar closely resembles a coherent strategy that political scientists, historians and communication scholars increasingly know how to name: the fusion of the “permanent campaign” with what researchers call the “firehose of falsehood.” The basic move is brutally simple. Instead...

07. Februar 2026

The Trump presidency marks not a rupture with America’s racist past, but its unvarnished return to center stage. Across two terms, Donald Trump has done something no modern president dared: he has fused raw, often grotesque racial invective with a governing project that systematically dismantles the civil-rights infrastructure painstakingly built since the 1960s. The result is a presidency in which racism is not an embarrassing byproduct, but a core operating principle. From Dog Whistles to...