Lacking a figure to rally around, Germans have found one to rally against: Donald Trump. If we can’t be inspired by the positive, we have decided to embrace the negative, to join the “resistance” as a way of unifying, motivating and aestheticizing our politics.
After all, sometimes all you need is a good evildoer to make a story work. And Mr. Trump is the perfect villain, particularly to the German left. The political coolness everyone can agree on is to be anti-Trump.
A “cool” political culture needs a code that insiders can quickly recognize to create social cohesion. The more people you’d like to be involved, the simpler the code needs to be. And so we’ve reduced Mr. Trump to a caricature — his yellowish hair, his ill-fitting suits, his figure rendered into various comic-book-villain tropes (the Joker is a favorite among Germans). During the G-20 summit meeting, such depictions were everywhere. An uninformed visitor might assume that Mr. Trump is a candidate in the coming election.
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