“Leaving America” is the last blogpost about my journey through the American Heartland in April and May 2025. It has been a journey into my personal past and into the country’s present, and I hope you enjoyed accompanying me on my trip or on parts of it. 

I am planning to continue this America blog at irregular intervals with columns, analysis and commentary written from Europe. And I would appreciate if you continued your subscription of the newsletter informing you about the next blog post of “what happened to America and why?”

Thanks, and so long.

Rolf Paasch

You will have heard about courageous Harvard University withstanding President Trump’s attempt at curtailing the academic freedom that once Made America Great. And you will have read about shameful Columbia University giving in to his censorious orders. But you might not know what effects the Trump Administration’s war on “wokeness” is having on academic institutions, public libraries and local media where there isn’t big money involved, less attention given and little power to resist; that is in small-town-America where the agents from Immigration Patrol (ICE) visit the local college or the place where immigrants hang out – and nobody knows what really happened, with hearsay making its frightening round. This story is about the people wo did not respond to my request for a chat or an interview during my travels through the “flyover country” and about what could have motivated them to remain silent.

Before I left for my trip through the American “hinterland” on April 12th I had sat with Ron and Nick in their living room in Washington, D.C. to discuss the issues of cruelty and race. Ron is a Professor of Psychology and Divinity. And Nick, who is British, has had a long career in international development having seen the world. We talked about the connection between Christianity and the American psyche and about the different American and European experiences on a whole range of cultural issues. Our conversation touched on many phenomena about which I would later hear from the people I met on my journey, issues that also related to what I saw zapping through the TV channels in my hotel room late at night. It might therefore be worthwhile to compare how the more academic analysis of Trump’s America by my Washington friends tallied with the personal encounters on my five-week-long road trip of 2750 miles. 

When you pass from Selma to Montgomery in the state of Alabama it’s all about history, from slavery to Civil Rights, from decayed sharecropper houses to impressive Memorial Sites. You also feel that it is all about racism, from the historic march across Edmund Pettus Bridge in March 1965 to the repeated election victory of Donald Trump in November 2024. What has changed? On this 54-mile-long journey you see the markers of white supremacy and black despair, of black dignity and white fear, you meet African Americans disheartened by recent political changes and hear stories of white resentment feeding the conservative backlash. It reads like a continuous story of two tribes losing.

When your car is winding down the last bends from the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains into the northwest corner of Georgia you would not suspect that the people populating this gentle landscape have voted three times for the most rabid Congresswomen in the US-House of Representatives. When you continue driving into Dalton, which proudly calls itself the “Carpet Capital of the World” you can’t believe that this respectable city and its pleasant surroundings hold enough resentment and anger of their citizens to send a mad conspiracy theorist to Washington D.C. who keeps calling for violent action against Democrats and other opponents of the MAGA movement. This story is about how somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene could emerge victorious from the 14th Congressional District in Georgia between the border to Tennessee and the suburbs of Atlanta - and how she is being seen from a place like the city of Dalton. 

When I drove through America during the first Gulf War of 1991 there was pride in the country’s soldiers and veterans everywhere. People celebrated the 43 days of “Operation Desert Storm” as redemption for the loss in Vietnam. There were “Support Our Troops”-Signs” on every front lawn and victory parades in every town. Yet by 2015 Donald Trump could call war heroes or war dead “losers” and “suckers” and still be elected with almost 2/3 of American veterans consistently voting for him ever since. As a “thank you” the recent cuts declared by Elon Musk’s government efficiency unit (DOGE) hit veterans disproportionally since they make up one third of the federal workforce. And Donald Trump just announced that he would rename “Veterans Day” into “Victory Day for WW I”? How could such a winner-takes-it-all- and narrow nationalism replace the heartfelt patriotism of glorified times past? 

Religion and Southern identity are closely intertwined. You can’t travel through the American South without feeling that religion is universal even if church attendance is receding as everywhere else. And where could the identity of the South be better studied than with the Southern Baptists, the predominant denomination with its biblical literalism. Where Donald Trump wants “America back” the Southern Baptists want to go “back to God”. Yet close to four out of five Southern Baptists will have voted for the current not so religious president. How does this go together? To find out we are in Nashville, Tennessee, the capital of country music which some have also called the “buckle of the bible belt”. And there, in the well-to-do southern suburb of Brentwood we find “Brentford Baptist”, a huge church, or better, a modern bible reading religious complex.

Sitting in section ME, row 22, seat 14 at the Taladega Superspeedway Racing Track I am supposed to be in the middle of Redneck culture. At least so goes the stereotype: among conservative white beer drinking men and southern racists who hate everything associated with black culture, feminists, LGBTQ activists and sober coastal elites. When I look around, I see indeed many white men of a certain unkempt description, but also middle-class families, small groups of African Americans and some people who could easily be on the board of some medium-sized company, all enjoying themselves together under the already blazing Alabama sun. NASCAR racing has been described as a battlefield of class and culture wars where Confederate flags are flying, and Republican politicians visit to show their real or fake Southern conservatism. We will see. 

The pope is dead, but not everybody at the “Eternal World Television Network” in Irondale, Alabama, is shedding tears. For the moment the heated attacks on Pope Francis have made way to an adulatory coverage of his funeral. But with the conclave coming the ideological battle for the soul of Catholicism will surely return to the airwaves of EWTN, the world’s largest religious media network. The story of this Catholic TV network aligns with the political developments of the Republican Party and the American Right. It marks a challenge to the traditionally more liberal Catholic Church in den US. And all of it started with Mother Angelica, an ordinary nun whose extraordinary career from being cloistered to becoming a revered TV-Evangelist encapsulates the developments and changes in US-media, religion and politics over the last 40 years.

You visit the “Farmington Historic Plantation” at the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, to learn about history. At least that is the idea. It is here that President Abraham Lincoln had his first personal encounter with slavery when he visited his slave-owning friend Joshua Speed in 1841 to overcome the depression and despair he had fallen into as a young politician at the time. Today David Green leads the visitors around the 550-acre plantation grounds. And he often wonders how he can best explain the experience of slavery and its role in Southern history to his often- unsuspecting tourists; when he as a history teacher himself “does not get” what has happened to his country over the last generation.

If in the world outside Democracy is dying and the international world order collapsing, you would not know that spending a few days in Munfordville, Kentucky. Because this small town with its 1686 inhabitants and 776 housing units at Interstate 65 halfway between Louisville and Nashville has everything you would need if you like the peace and quiet as everybody here does; those who have always lived here and those who came here from one of America’s big cities. But there are a few faint worries creeping in. 

If you want to meet somebody whose biography encapsulates the recent developments in places like Lordstown and Youngstown in the former industrial heartland of Northeast Ohio, you couldn’t do much better than talking to George Goranitis, the young president of Local 1112 of the United Automobile Workers (UAW). At 35 years his is still a rather short but nevertheless interesting biography at the centre of the region’s recent history between hope and despair, between high minded political promises and deep private disappointments. It also shows the trade union of the automobile workers caught between electric and gas-guzzling vehicles and between Democrats and Republicans.

Driving 30 miles south from Pittsburgh and entering the old mill town of Charleroi you think the place is totally deserted. Most of the shops in Main Street are boarded up. There is hardly anybody around. The traffic lights along the dozen blocks of the town are dangling uselessly in the wind with hardly any traffic flowing. The day before I arrived the local newspaper reported the “Final whistle at the Corelle plant”, the closure of one of the last factories in the once proud city “after 132 years of glassmaking”. Another few hundred jobs lost. And another small chapter in this 50-year-long decline of the American Rust Belt ending. Yet, the news the city recently made has been all about invading Haitians. 

In the good old times, whenever these might have been, one could always talk to people, even in Washington, D.C.. They’d be incredibly busy but would then tell the inquisitive journalist more than he ever wanted to know in the first hour of us meeting up. That has changed, at least in the capital, which the Executive Orders of Donald Trump and have turned into a city in fear.