In which insane German delusions about the near-certainty of a Harris presidency are dashed on the rocks of Trump's decisive victory

Every now and then, reality emerges from the shadows to crush the hollow propaganda of the press and the hallucinations of our politicians. We must enjoy these times.

As everybody knows, Donald J. Trump won. It was not even close. As I write this, the once and future president of the United States maintains a lead of five million in the popular vote. He swept every swing state, and he is on track to secure an electoral college victory of 312 against Kamala Harris’s 226.

His party has also won a clear majority in the Senate and is all but certain to achieve narrow control over the House of Representatives too. This was a total red wave. Kamala Harris and her weird numale sidekick Tim Walz have been sent straight into the dustbin of history, and with luck we’ll never hear much from either of these overpromoted nonentities ever again.

All of that media nonsense about a tight race was, well, just nonsense. There was never any popular movement of the joyously coconut-pilled driving the Democratic candidate to victory. In the end, Harris performed about as well as you’d expect the last-minute diversity hire substitute for a dementia patient to perform. Joe Biden commanded more enthusiasm in 2020. That is what a nothing fail candidate Harris turned out to be.

The American press got this one monumentally wrong, but the German press got it even wronger. As I wrote back in October, their coverage was so distorted that they had 72% of Germans believing a Harris victory was all but certain. In a just world, journalistic malpractice on this scale would inspire government investigations, but in the Federal Republic it is only anonymous internet bloggers who are under scrutiny for propagating “disinformation.”

On the day of the election, Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland – a news conglomerate with affiliates that reach millions of readers – ran a long piece by their founding editor-in-chief, Matthias Koch, telling us why Harris was likely to win. “Trump has jumped the shark,” Koch screamed, showing off his knowledge of English idiom to establish himself as an expert on Anglosphere politics. Among Trump’s latest missteps, Koch told us, were his McDonald’s and garbage truck photo-ops. Yes, that is how little our self-appointed understander of things American understands American culture and the American electorate:

The garbage truck ride was a hopelessly over-the-top reaction to a remark by Joe Biden that not everyone had even heard. The guest work in a McDonald’s branch that had been closed down for security reasons was supposed to show that he is closer to the people than Harris. Both went wrong. Trump’s poll numbers continued to drop towards the election.

Trump should have campaigned with Nikki Haley, Koch said; in fact, he should’ve made Haley his running mate, but he opted instead to alienate female voters and this would cost him the election. Koch went on to tell us that Trump was losing the black vote and the Latino vote in addition to the woman vote, and claimed that that last-minute trash Iowa poll was inspiring “quiet panic … among Republicans.” On all these matters Koch was totally, egregiously wrong: Trump did better with women than he did in 2020, he saw strong gains among both Latinos and blacks and the Selzer poll understated Trump’s easy win in that state by at least 16 percentage points.

This magnum opus was merely the last in a long line of articles from Koch that read like they were written by Harris’s campaign. On 4 November Koch was writing about Trump’s alleged “dementia,” on 31 October he was lecturing the Americans about their political polarisation and on 21 October he was going after Elon Musk for his attacks on Harris. He loved few things as much as complaining about Trump’s lies, and he praised Tim Walz for his catastrophic debate performance against J.D. Vance. Koch just served up article after article after article like this – an unending torrent of confused and ass-backwards reporting from a sad German man who cannot distinguish between campaign press releases and information. I highlight Koch’s execrable work here not because the man is a major leader of opinion or even all that important, but because he is entirely typical. This was the tenor of mainstream, ordinary, middle-of the-road German coverage, and it was completely wrong, from top to bottom.

You could fill a book with this stuff. As late as Monday, the Berliner Morgenpost were telling oblivious Germans all about Harris’s “deep roots in the black community.” Back in July, the centrist and market-liberal Handelsblatt were writing that “Harris is officially ‘brat,’” which (they explained) is what the kids call someone who is “cool” and “hip” and “also a bit messy.” (This is a direct summary, I could not devise this kind of parody even if I wanted to.) They even brought in a “US expert” named Laura von Daniels from some German think-tank to tell us that “the ‘Kamala is brat’ trend has come at the right time” because “the meme culture was threatening to become the sole domain of Donald Trump.” Other signs that things were looking up for Harris, according to our Handelsblatt America understanders, included the fact that she gained a lot of followers on X and Instagram upon announcing her candidacy and these new followers were posting a lot of coconut imagery.

Not to be outdone by this cavalcade of disinformation masquerading as analysis, Marc Etzold at Stern published a long piece on Tuesday outlining “ten reasons that Kamala Harris will win the election.” These reasons?

1. The economy is doing better than Trump claims

2. Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden

3. Unlike Donald Trump, Harris is a centrist

4. She is the queen of fundraising

5. Harris has women on her side

6. Elon Musk is full of hot air

7. Harris stands for women’s rights

8. After almost 250 years, the country is ready for a woman

9. Harris has high-ranking Republicans behind her

10. She offers better policies

It is little wonder that such a thoroughly deluded magazine was tweeting that “Kamala Harris still has a clear path to victory” on Wednesday morning at 6:30am CET – long after Trump’s impending victory had become obvious.

The good Mr Etzold has been having a hard time since he turned out to be a total retard who is also wrong about everything. “Who elected this man?” he asked from the depths of his shock and confusion after the dust had settled. Hours later he co-authored a piece on “who will have to tremble before [Trump] now,” and yesterday he decided that Harris “failed not because of herself, but because of Joe Biden.”

I know that my American readers are going to tell me that American media, too, is biased, and that is true, but as I explained earlier, our press is much more uniform and extreme. For the space of the entire American presidential campaign, our reporters and pundits constructed a skewed simulacrum of American politics that owed very little to reality. In this simulacrum, Trump was all but certain to lose, neglecting as he was the political sensibilities of our Green-voting reporters and the middle-aged right-thinking urbanite Germans who consume their nonsense. The fact that none of these people or their moral convictions have the slightest relevance for American elections escaped them entirely.

This simulacrum was not just a minor propagandistic construction for the ignorant masses. Amazingly, our elites themselves believed it, and for that reason it proved to be both stupid and dangerous. For a long time, leading politicians in the Scholz government have been saying very unwise and undiplomatic things about Trump in their shameless eagerness to curry favour with the Biden-Harris administration and their delusion that their hated orange nemesis had only minimal chances of reattaining presidential office.

Thus in March, our Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck, while visiting the United States, openly hoped for Biden’s re-election and deplored Trump as a man who had “basically destroyed” trans-Atlantic cooperation in matters like trade relations and climate policy. In September, our Foreign Office – under the leadership of our Green Foreign Minister and world-renowned dumb person Annalena Baerbock –arrogated to itself the responsibility of fact-checking Trump’s debate statements from their official X account with a cheeky (and embarrassingly mistaken) Tweet. And on the night before the election our dentally challenged SPD Health Minister Karl Lauterbach denounced Elon Musk and Trump as “the right-wing propaganda dream duo” and wished them “an unforgettable night, in which a successful, intelligent and likeable woman of colour will step onto the world stage.” Those are extremely foolish things for a sitting German cabinet minister to say about anyone who is very likely to become the next President of the United States – particularly when the next major communiqué from the government of the Federal Republic ends up being this one:¹

The people who rule us play farsighted, smart and intelligent statesmen on television. In fact they are a lot of histrionic, uptight and anally retentive ninnies who have developed a bizarre moral panic about political populism and anything perceived to be “on the right.” This started out as a cynical political strategy to delegitimise and perhaps even outlaw the populist opposition in the Federal Republic, but in the course of just a few years it has become a fully developed and totally official system of political hysteria. There aren’t any adults in the room anymore – just a lot of overgrown and emotionally incontinent children who feel that things should be a certain way, and for that reason alone are totally incapable of perceiving the way that things actually are. On Tuesday night reality kicked them all right in the teeth, and man does that feel good.

1. In this case, the diplomatic damage is mitigated, because (as I will discuss more thoroughly tomorrow) the German traffic light coalition collapsed suddenly and unceremoniously on the day after Trump’s victory. It turns out the Zombie Traffic Light is killable after all, and all these people will be out of office by March at the latest.