There is something almost touching about the speed with which European leaders rediscover nationalism the moment their poll numbers begin to sag. One week they are lecturing voters about the dangers of emotional politics and the next they are standing before microphones, grim-faced, warning citizens about the moral contamination of crossing borders. Germany’s Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has now entered this familiar phase of political improvisation with a flourish dramatic enough to deserve its own stage lighting.
“I would not advise my children today to go to the U.S.,” Merz told students this week, citing the supposedly dangerous “social climate” under President Donald Trump. America, in this telling, has become too polarized, too volatile, too ideologically combustible for civilized Europeans to comfortably inhabit. One could almost picture terrified German exchange students fleeing Manhattan coffee shops while constitutional crises erupt beside the pastry counter.
The remark was not merely clumsy. It was revealing. Europe’s political establishment has spent nearly a decade constructing Trump as a kind of roaming atmospheric condition, a democratic hurricane permanently threatening Western civilization. Every disagreement becomes existential. Every election becomes “the most important in modern history.” And every politician struggling at home eventually discovers that criticizing America is a convenient substitute for solving domestic problems.
Merz appears to have noticed what Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, already understands instinctively: anti-Trump rhetoric still performs remarkably well among elite audiences. There is a reliable applause line available in almost every university hall, newsroom, and transatlantic conference room. Mention Trump with sufficient alarm and one immediately acquires the aura of democratic heroism without the inconvenience of actual political courage.
But imitation is difficult when the original performance is already beginning to wear thin. The irony is impossible to ignore. Germany itself is hardly radiating social stability. The country is wrestling with economic stagnation, rising political fragmentation, energy anxieties, immigration tensions, and a widening disconnect between governing elites and ordinary voters. Across Europe, governments increasingly confront electorates that no longer trust institutions speaking in the language of moral superiority. Yet instead of addressing those fractures directly, leaders often externalize the anxiety. America becomes the symbolic villain onto which broader Western unease can be projected.
It is a curious form of dependency: Europe simultaneously condemns and obsesses over the United States. Trump, especially, functions less as a foreign leader than as a psychological weather system for Europe’s governing class. He is discussed with the intensity once reserved for invading armies or theological schisms. Entire political identities are now built around opposition to a single American politician.
Meanwhile, millions of Europeans continue visiting, studying, working, investing, and vacationing in the United States without incident. American universities remain magnets for global talent. American companies still dominate sectors Europeans struggle to compete in. New York, Boston, Austin, and San Francisco have not descended into dystopian collapse despite the feverish rhetoric of international commentators.
What makes Merz’s comments particularly unfortunate is the underlying paternalism. Young Germans do not require political guardians warning them away from democratic societies because elections produced undesirable outcomes. The implication that America is somehow culturally unsafe because its politics are contentious, reveals a remarkably fragile understanding of democracy itself. Democracies are noisy. They are argumentative. They are occasionally vulgar. That is not evidence of collapse. Often it is evidence they are still alive.
There is also something strategically foolish in Europe’s increasingly fashionable habit of publicly sneering at its most important ally. Alliances survive on interests, certainly, but also on cultural goodwill. Leaders who casually encourage distrust toward America may discover later that contempt, once normalized, rarely remains selective.
Merz likely intended his comments as moral seriousness. Instead they sounded like continental performance art: elite anxiety disguised as parental concern, delivered at precisely the moment his own political standing appears increasingly uncertain. Europe’s voters have seen this play before. The scenery changes. The villain remains Trump. And the applause grows slightly weaker every season.
