In 1963, President Kennedy stood alongside the leader of the German Social Democrats, Willy Brandt, and declared “Ich bin ein Berliner”. In 1987, President Reagan was side by side with the leader of the Christian Democrats, Helmut Kohl, as he urged: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” But in February 2025, President Trump’s deputy, JD Vance, angered both Social and Christian Democrats by attacking European values at a conference in Munich. The president’s “adviser” Elon Musk even spoke by video link to an election rally of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Four months after their victories in the presidential and congressional elections, the Trump team helped to boost AfD to second place in the Bundestag, with hopes of a place in government at the next election.
Back in October 2016, the month before Donald Trump was first elected as president, he spoke at a rally in Ohio. Two of his supporters confronted reporters at the event. “Lügenpresse! That’s what you are,” one man shouted at the press. He then coached his colleague in how to pronounce the German words for “lying press”. When video of the incident reached Germany via social media, the use of Lügenpresse had special resonance.
Originally coined in World War One to describe enemy propaganda, the term was appropriated by Hitler and the Nazis in the 30s to undermine public trust in the domestic news media. In 2014, two German-speaking American academics found that “reports of verbal and physical attacks on journalists and news organisations by individuals calling them Lügenpresse had again become a frequent feature of the public discourse in Germany”.
The trend coincided with the launch of Alternative für Deutschland. By the time of the 2017 federal election, the first in which AfD won enough votes to earn seats in the Bundestag, the party had positioned itself as being “against the media”. Research into Facebook posts recorded by the European Journalism Observatory 2018 showed that on average 18 per cent of the posts by German political parties referred to the media in some way but the figure for AfD posts was as high as 47 per cent, almost half of all their posts. The party itself was not found to have used the term Lügenpresse but by the federal election of 2025, it was still in common use by AfD members – one used it to challenge the BBC’s Europe editor Katya Adler during a campaign report. Lügenpresse might have had too much of a Nazi heritage for the party leaders, who preferred to use the English term “fake news”.
Trump has said that calling the news media “fake” was “one of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with”. It is, of course, not true that he came up with it – there are references to fake news as far back as 1890. But who can doubt that undermining trust in news media among his half of America is among his proudest achievements? I saw the impact while working on the losing side in the November 2024 elections.
Phoenix is the fastest growing urban sprawl in the US, creeping further and further into the desert. I arrived with my wife in October to volunteer for the “Harris-Walz” campaign, canvassing voters in the battleground state of Arizona that had helped Joe Biden defeat Donald Trump in 2020. Kamala Harris was up against it, and one local Democratic volunteer burst into tears when told we had travelled from Britain to help.
All the Americans we met were polite and didn’t seem to resent our intrusion into their electoral affairs. What marked out the Trump supporters was the frequency with which they would inject into the conversation “that’s lies” or “that’s fake news”, sometimes in response to what seemed to us to be uncontested fact. In 2017, Trump had tweeted “The FAKE NEWS media is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people”. Such was the dislike and distrust his followers felt towards their “enemy” that they rarely seemed to know what these news organisations had actually reported. In their minds, whatever it was, it wasn’t true. One retired schoolteacher told us: “I never watch or listen to the news any more because it is all lies.”
This came during an impromptu focus group we held in the dining car of a long-distance train across the Arizona desert. We enjoyed a beer with a woman who was “totally opposed to universal healthcare because it is communist”. We shared a dinner table with a woman who seemed a natural Democrat but had switched to Trump. The official figures showed that the American economy was in a much better state than most Western countries, but Biden got no credit for this from her, only the blame for higher prices in supermarkets and gas stations.
On November 5, 2024, we joined the Arizona Democrats Election Night Party in the Hilton Hotel in Phoenix. It didn’t last very long. Within an hour, it was clear the 45th president of the United States would also be the 47th. The next morning, we got an automated email: “Thanks for joining, how was your experience?” My experience on the campaign was that “fake news” allegations consolidated Trump’s base because it kept them in voluntary isolation from challenging facts and figures. But I saw no hard evidence that it won votes. Nor did Trump win because of his wealth – the Harris campaign outspent him in Arizona by $20.4million to $16.6million – or his “ground game”: we never saw a Trump canvasser in Phoenix.
Don’t try to take on a US marine
Joe Biden’s belated decision to stand down as the Democrats’ candidate had left little time and policy space for Kamala Harris to differentiate herself from an unpopular president. When all the votes had been counted in Arizona, a full week later, there was a twist that was also a further clue as to why Trump won. The result in the contest for the state’s seat in the Senate was the reverse of the presidential ballot. Trump had beaten Harris by 52.2 per cent to 46.6 per cent but Democrat Ruben Gallego had defeated Republican Keri Lake by 50.06 per cent to 47.65 per cent. What Gallego had that both Harris and Lake didn’t was that he was a former marine and a male, and a Latino male marine to boot. But there was more to it than that. “As the proud son of immigrants”, Gallego had been tougher on illegal immigration than his party, promising “to keep our border secure, allow for a prosperous cross-border economy, reform a broken immigration system, and stop the flow of fentanyl into our communities”. Gallego won Latino men by 30 points in this heavily Latino state while Trump dominated that group elsewhere. When we returned to the UK and friends commiserated with us about Trump’s victory, I told them the tale of Senator Gallego.
There is one parallel between the United States and Germany that is also significant for the United Kingdom. During the European Journalism Observatory’s study of AfD’s online strategy during the 2017 Bundestag elections, they highlighted that although the party criticised a range of different news media, there was “a specific focus on two of Germany’s public broadcasters (ARD and ZDF)”. AfD had called for the abolition of the licence fee for public service broadcasting, so ARD and ZDF reacted most strongly to the Lügenpresse attacks in order to justify their work and the public’s trust in them.
In 2025, relations between AfD and those broadcasters deteriorated further when the party was not invited to take part in one of the main TV election debates. The decision to invite only Friedrich Merz of the CDU and Chancellor Olaf Schulz of the SDF had been made months before polling day – they were the two most popular parties in the polls at the time – but when the election was called, AfD was undeniably ahead of the SDP.
Settling into his second term in Washington, Trump was, unlike his new friends in the AfD, able to use political power to exact revenge on TV networks. He had public broadcasters in his sights, particularly their funding. In his first term, Trump had tried and failed to cut federal funds for National Public Radio and America’s public television network PBS. Now his choice as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opened a new line of attack. Under FCC rules, public broadcasting stations, national and local, are not allowed to transmit commercials. Instead, they play what they call “underwriting spots” that explain who has helped to pay for the programme, but must stop short of telling listeners and viewers to buy a specific product or service. The FCC chairman Brendan Carr ordered an investigation because “it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements“.
These political threats to publicly funded broadcasting in the US and Germany might come to nothing. However, the researchers who talked to German news editors in 2017 found that the re-emergence of the term Lügenpresse “led to considerable self-reflection within institutions in an effort to counter the lack of trust and to demonstratively better serve the public”. The main focus was on making professional standards and practices more visible to the audience.
In the UK, the publicly funded BBC has been in its own period of considerable self-reflection amid allegations of bias, mostly from the right but also from the left. The continuing importance of the BBC and its “public service” partners in advertising-funded broadcasting has been underlined by the regulator. Ofcom research showed that websites and apps have overtaken television as the single main source of news for UK adults but a discussion paper emphasised the continuing importance of the news services of the public service broadcasters such as BBC, ITV and Channel 4. Ofcom discovered that the viewers who watch the news on these channels are more knowledgeable about facts, have higher levels of trust in democratic institutions, and are more likely to have voted in the 2019 general election than those who don’t. That, of course, is why they are the target of the populists.
In 2019, the then-prime minister Boris Johnson said the Conservative Party was “looking at” abolishing the compulsory TV licence that provides most of the BBC’s funding. Among the corporation’s responses to the attacks on its impartiality was a new fact-checking tool, BBC Verify, an echo of the German attempts to provide audiences with more transparency. Ofcom “wants to see the BBC build on its work” at a time when the Israel- Gaza conflict has produced unprecedented levels of criticism by supporters of Israel. In February 2025, a BBC documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone became a symbol of the controversies. The leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, raised the pitch of the party’s attacks: “I cannot see how my party could support the continuation of the current licence fee-based system without serious action by the BBC management to prove the organisation is committed to true impartiality.”
According to The Independent, the Conservative leader, attempting to fend off the threat on her right flank from the right-wing Reform UK party, had decided to make “another lurch to the right”. There was no need to deploy abusive terms such as fake news: the political connection between content and cash was clear enough.