Christoph Scheuermann's Der Spiegel review of President Trump's first year in office — is the most astutely concise that I've read

© 2017 Peter Free

 

10 November 2017

 

 

A German perspective on President Trump

 

Writing about President Trump's first year in office, Der Spiegel's Washington DC correspondent, Christoph Scheuermann, began by illuminating its context:

 

 

Washington is not a place known for humility or modesty. So really, Donald Trump should fit right in. It's a city of gigantic egos and expense accounts, police escorts and armored limos. Everything is about status and power, even when socializing at night.

 

The streets and avenues are too broad, the massive steps to the Capitol are too big, the buildings, statues and monuments too imposing. There's no center, no core. Only expanse, size, symmetry.

 

No other city is hated quite as much by the rest of the country.

 

The White House is now occupied by a man who is constantly triggering a new uproar, a man who is perennially angry, wayward, erratic, a besieged, unstable king . . . .

 

[T]he capital has turned into the set of a reality TV show.

 

Can one man endanger democracy?

 

© 2017 Christoph Scheuermann, Trump's Washington, One Year On, Spiegel Online (08 November 2017) (excerpts)

 

 

Scheuermann's review is notable for hitting high points without being distracted by Trump-adulation or hatred, both of which are point-obscuring booby traps that we Americans have difficulty avoiding.

 

 

The moral? — Scheuermann concludes that our experiment with intentional DC-itis continues

 

He says that:

 

 

This president has contributed to making politics more vulgar, has demeaned the office of the president and has seen to it that Washington increasingly operates like a reality TV show.

 

He has bolstered the far-right nutjobs and neo-Nazis, perhaps the most dangerous impact of his presidency. He has opened the door to kleptocracy by bringing a family to the White House that is profiting from the Trump brand.

 

It has been a terrible year for Washington. The election campaign still hasn't come to an end and the city is trying to eject Trump like a foreign body.

 

Maybe it just has to be patient. After all, it has managed to overcome everyone else.

 

© 2017 Christoph Scheuermann, Trump's Washington, One Year On, Spiegel Online (08 November 2017) (paragraph split)

 

 

Consider a tentative insight inferably contained in that last sentence:

 

 

Devilishly boorish Trump is awful, but our Establishment-controlled American federal government is just as bad in its democracy-rejecting ways.

 

The American Elite governs to its own advantage in both cases.

 

 

This comes from a German (Scheuermann), who with his countrymen, probably thinks that government exists to benefit the populace. What a novel idea.