From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2025 by Uwe Bahr

Trump’s inaugural speech was full of pathos and untruths. It reminded me a bit of my younger years in the former GDR – often incorrectly referred to in the USA as the former “Communist East Germany”. There, too, facts were usually turned upside down by those politically responsible. The only difference to Trump’s speech was that we didn’t fall for the nonsense. After all, the peaceful revolution with its protests and hundreds of thousands of people on the streets in the fall of 1989 would not have been possible otherwise. Anyone who has ever been exposed to dull propaganda will immediately smell a rat.

The misrepresentations are also concerning, especially as we are used to them from Trump, but he was still elected by more than 70 million people. To name just one example of the drivel he spouted: He claimed that the USA had defeated fascism and communism in the Second World War. What?

Are there really so many people in the USA who are so uneducated and unfamiliar with the history of their own country that they applaud Trump’s palaver?

For the USA could not defeat communism because it was allied with it: The Bolshevik-Communist Soviet Union was the American brother-in-arms in World War II, after the Soviets had first been allied with Hitler.

But many – far too many – US voters are falling for the newly elected president. What do they really care about their country? It can’t be much if they entrust it to such a con man and legally convicted felon.