“Fantasyland” – or two fanciful speeches followed by a feckless war

In two recent speeches the US-President and his Secretary of State have mapped the contours of the “Fantasyland” America has become. In his State of the Union Address before Congress Donald Trump has better described the state of his unhinged mind than the actual situation in the country. And for the global audience at the Munich Security Conference barely two weeks earlier Marco Rubio mapped America’s Foreign Policy goals which looked more like the wishful thinking of the MAGA crowd than a serious geopolitical strategy to address the challenges of a dissipating world order. All of this followed by the war on Iran. With the second Trump presidency fast approaching its self-destruction the questions for the domestic and the international audience are the same: Which America is the real one - and how to deal with it after Donald’s departure? 

First, Trump’s address to the nation. His 108-minute-long flight of fancy has been analysed and stripped of its lies and delusions by gangs of fact checking journalists. Gas and food prices are n o t down, inflation is still hovering around, the labour market might be doing okay but for college graduates it is collapsing. Crime is going down but has been doing so since the Biden years. Illegal border crossings have been reduced, but legal immigrants in America’s inner cities now must fear for their lives. And the income from tariffs will never replace income taxes as promised. 

Now more people are realizing the reality behind the lies even without listening to his speech or reading the fact checking afterwards. Trump’s approval ratings have fallen below the 40 % rate for the first time because people were shocked to watch the killings of American citizens by his brutal anti-immigration squads and because they do not find themselves in his self-declared “golden age” when they go shopping and notice that his tariffs have not reduced the price of their groceries. 

Trump is in trouble. The Supreme Court has out ruled the bulk of his tariffs. The future Chair at the US Federal Reserve sounds more combative on monetary policy than the President had hoped for. And the first Republican members of Congress are willing to jump from the sinking ship of his Presidency; a foreboding of what will be happening once the Democrats win the majority in the House of Representatives at the mid-term elections in November, and possibly even a tie in the Senate. 

But to take the pulse of the America at this turning point of Presidential power one should not forget the gullibility of his voters and the passivity of politicians and professionals inside the country’s institutions which allowed Donald Trump to usurp and abuse the powerful position which he has now started to destroy by his own loss of touch with reality. Throughout its history America been prone to fallacies and make believe before returning to realism. It is a country where snake oil salesmen have often prospered before puritan pragmatism set in again. 

In any case, the return from the “Fantasyland” of Trumpism to a semblance of truthfulness will be an unpredictable mess. When will a sizeable number of his voters leave the “team Trump” they had signed onto for a decade? Looking at the most recent by-elections in Texas and Michigan enough of them will stay home at the November election to create a significant shift to a Democratic majority at least in the House or Representatives. 

What are those around him, the Republican members of Congress and his hard-core supporters in the MAGA movement, going to do when the tide turns? Most Members of Congress up for re-election in November will stay with Trump due to his threats to finance the election campaign of a loyal rival at the Republican primaries. The other 2/3 will remain strangely quiet whilst preparing their stance for the campaign of 2028: that they never really supported the follies of Donald Trump.

Even before the bombing of Teheran some staunch MAGA supporters and commentators like Christopher Rufo and Ben Shapiro had started to distance themselves from Trump’s more extreme domestic rhetoric and actions. What the right-wing blogosphere will look like and where American conservatism will go after Trump has become a lame-duck President in 2027 and gone in 2028 is an interesting but open question. 

And how prepared are the Democrats in Congress and in civil society to pick up the pieces left by his unequalled path of destruction? The grass-roots resistance in Minneapolis and other cities against the violent raids of the Immigration Authority ICE has been impressive and uplifting civil society activists nation-wide. But the reaction of leading Democrats and the party’s bureaucracy to the State of the Union Adress has been as uncoordinated as ever. 

The currently “leading” presidential candidate for the Democrats, California’s governor Gavin Newsom, seems more interested in self-promotion than the fate of working-class Americans. Despite his unquestionable political skills, he would be an unsuitable candidate for the Democrats at the next presidential election. Another slick and well-coiffed Californian who made his money from his father’s connection to the Getty family would be a welcomed hate figure for the anti-elite Republican right and a no-vote candidate for Independents or disgruntled Republicans in middle-America. 

And then there is the Democratic left which still thinks that the party can win national elections with a “socialist”-sounding program that has recently catapulted Zohran Mamdani to the mayorship of New York. There have been remarkably successful election campaigns by locally grounded candidates in recent weeks and months. Yet there is no sign of a nationally orchestrated Democratic campaign searching for locally acceptable candidates and tailoring their message to the place. Despite the domestic shrinking of Donald Trump, the “real” America might still be more conservative than most Democrats want to know. 

Second, Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference. It was probably the most imperialist and revisionist address of a Secretary of State in America’s recent history clad into the mantle of civilizational rhetoric and common heritage between America and Europe. With it the State Department adopted the tenets of the MAGA movement as US Foreign Policy and came close to a kind of historical revisionism as it has been put into deadly practice by Vladimir Putin in the Ukraine. At least both men seem to share the narrative of a “woke” Europe that needs to be taught lessons of nativism and nationalism. Rubio’s speech was carried by a civilizational thinking so far only prevalent in countries like China, India, Israel and Hungary. It replaced the ideas of the enlightenment with the beliefs of Christianity. 

But Marco Rubio’s Munich speech also marked the high point of his boundless opportunism. Running against Trump in the primaries of 2016 he called him a “con man” but afterwards shmoozed with the Donald backstage. As US-Senator he championed aid for impoverished countries, but when Secretary of State, he destroyed the whole operation of USAID leading to the death of many. Before Viktor Urban’s visit at the White House in 2019 he had expressed “concern about Hungary’s downward democratic trajectory and the implications for U.S. interests in Central Europe” – to now fly directly from Munich to Budapest to ensure the re-election of Hungary’s Premier who is trying to destroy Europe from within. 

Reading Dexter Filkins’ exhaustive portrait of Marco Rubio in the “New Yorker” you meet a politician whose duplicity has served him well, from the Florida House of Representatives through the US-Senate to his powerful double role as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. Leaving many feeling betrayed along the way. The only thing the son of a Cuban bartender and his housekeeper wife really seems to believe in is America’s rightful dominance of the Western Hemisphere including regime change in Cuba from where his parents had to leave when “little Marco” was four. In short, Rubio’s message from Munich to the world was an attempt at getting into the president’s good books and his journeymen’s piece on the way to the White House. 

But where do we place his musings in the wider context of America’s oscillating mood between traditional isolationism and sudden imperialist escapades? Well, the view of an ungrateful, derelict, decadent, and censorious Europe is as popular among conservative commentators - even some liberal ones – as it is in Main Street. “We liberated them and helped them after the war, but now these shifty, freeloading Europeans behave like errant teenagers who would need re-educated in our mores and values”, to paraphrase this line of thinking. 

This attitude towards the “old world” started with the rightful resentment over having to pay for Europe’s security. But later America’s culture warriors turned it into a tale of American moral superiority and European secular decay. In this view moral degradation is not a general or global phenomenon but has foremost gripped European societies. The new chasm that has replaced the transatlantic bridge runs between a Europe helplessly holding on to the institutionalised and regulated world of the past and a free-wheeling America following the Darwinist reflexes of the bully in the White House. 

But the civilizational framing of America versus Europe should not mislead Europe’s political class and public. Since it is only covering up America’s foremost economic interest to stop any political attempt at curbing the dominance of its tech industry, and with-it US-global power. 

Yet the Democrats in Congress have not exactly offered clear and convincing alternatives on those matters of Foreign Policy, be it on Europe, Venezuela, Iran or de-regulation. None of the Democrats at the Munich Security Conference could provide coherent answers to Trump’s and Rubio’s ever-shifting versions of “America First”. As a result, European leaders should not expect major shifts in US Foreign Policy after a changed US-Congress or even with a Democratic president. Any new administration will still have to deal with an all-too powerful tech industry and an American public disenchanted with the world. 

Third, the war on Iran. Most observers in the US agree that this is one of the biggest gambles any US president has taken since Jimmy Carter’s tragic failure to free the 52 US-citizens taken hostage by Khomeini’s militants during the hostage crisis of 1979 and 1980. Trump unleashed the purportedly “preventive” attack against Iran without explanation in his State of the Union speech, without the constitutionally required authorization by Congress and against the will of ¾ of the US-electorate. Even a clear majority of Republican voters was against bombing Teheran to facility regime change. 

Here too, Democrats in Congress are still struggling to find their position. They rightly protest having been sidelined in the decision making. But they are now as hesitating as European leaders to openly criticise the military action against Iran. It is a tough issue for anybody. 

But most leaders of the MAGA movement are up in arms against another foreign entanglement belying one of the basic promises of “America First”. The killed conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk had often spoken out against war with Iran. The former MAGA Congresswomen Majorie Taylor Greene now calls Trump a traitor to their right-wing cause. The prominent conservative commentator Tucker Carlson has called the strikes on Iran “absolutely disgusting and evil”. And Vice-President J.D. Vance, having once called himself “a skeptic of foreign military interventions”, has gone strangely quiet. With “Operation Epic Fury” Donald Trump has gone against his base at home. 

Where George W. Bush could build his Iraq-War adventure on a national consensus, Trump must hope for a bloodless war which will be over and forgotten soon; or he must go all the authoritarian way to silence his domestic critics. And that is exactly what liberal commentators fear because such an unauthorized declaration of war might encourage the President to try similarly autocratic means in domestic affairs where he is currently getting stuck. “When his fantasies unravel”, writes David Frum in The Atlantic, “Trump has a habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”. 

With two fanciful speeches and the feckless war on Iran America under Donald Trump has finally arrived in a long-nurtured “Fantasyland” (Kurt Andersen). And no matter if the next President will be Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, Gary Newsom or somebody else, the path back into domestic and global reality will be a hard one. Because citizens must relearn to tell the truth from lies and leave the techno-authoritarian virtuality of Trump’s fanciful Kingdom to deal with the mundane world of affordability issues at home and a new multipolar world abroad.