2016 Postmortem

I have lived in Germany for years, speak the language fluently, am married to a German and almost all of my best friends are German. I travel expensively throughout the country and talk to people of all political persuasions. It is nearly impossible to find ANYONE who thinks that Trump is any kind of a leader, or is the kind of person they want on their political scene. It is just about impossible to find anyone there who thinks Trump is something positive for the United States, Europe, NATO or the world. Germany has no flyover country. You can go from one end to the other by train, in any direction, leaving at breakfast, and be at the other end of the country before midnight, usually in time for dinner.

Today's Germany is comprised of people who are basically pacifist in political leaning, being obliged, from elementary school on, to learn what happened in the 1930s and 1940s. My girls were born there, grew up as Germans (only exception--we raised them bilingually so they would have no communication issues when visiting the USA), went to the Anne Frank Elementary School, which was purposely so named because the Gestapo had used it as their local building during the Nazi era.

If someone has lived in Germany for as long as I have and speaks the language as well as I do and wants to relate a totally different impression, I'm open to hearing it, but if someone wants to refute my observations with second-hand information, please don't bother. I had relatives who perished in the Holocaust, too, have plenty of Epsteins and Goodmans in the family. If had obsessed with that all my life, I wouldn't have had a 42 year relationship with a beautiful fabulous German woman, two of the coolest daughters a man could wish for, or some of the most loyal friends anyone could have anywhere. Of course, being from Texas, no one has to explain to me what it means to be under a blanket condemnation for nothing more evil than the address on my driver's license.