skit herre posted:

Since Trump was elected I have been thinking a lot about the US, it's politics and it's citizens. Some things that are really perplexing to me as a German:

This deep, deep divide in terms of political opinion and especially the immense hate that comes with it. So many people seem to actually despise and wish real harm on people just because they voted for the other major political party.
The things I see are mostly examples of Republican voters expressing their extremely hostile attitude towards Democrats, but that is probably just because I mostly see these sort of things as screenshots or stories shared on pages like SA or Reddit and the hostility probably also goes the other way. People over here, of course, also have very divergent political opinions, but I just don't see the sharp divide and this strong "you are either with me or against me" mentality.

The fact that in many states employees have basically no rights regarding their employer. How people just accept the reality that everyone can be fired for no reason at any time and often even think that this is a good thing because 'it creates jobs' or whatever.
One of the most baffling things to me is, for example, that companies have the power to to forbid their workers from dating each other and similar things that concern only their private life. And that in the land of the free. Still, many people seem to have been led to the believe, that unions are a scam somehow.

That many citizens, apparently even many of those that clearly have benefitted from it, still hate the idea of universal healthcare and actually believe that it ultimately leads to things like death panels and full communism, even though the people in pretty much every other western country seem to be universally happy about the fact that should they ever lose their job they won't have to die because they can't afford their diabetes medication.

Also that apparently it is a defendable position for a politician to just straight up deny that human-induced climate change is real, which I think is a thing that would get you laughed out of the Bundestag. It's incredible to me that so many people in America just won't accept what seems to me to be an indisputable scientific fact. Of course, it's entirely possible, that there are more climate change deniers over here than I think, but I just don't see them.

There's lots more stuff like the influence religion still has on politics, but those were the things that immediately came to mind and I am not even sure if the things I wrote fit OPs idea for this thread. Sorry for my English by the way, it is obviously not my first language.

/e: Also, of course, everything that has to do with your new president and that he can get away with lying people in the face every day even though his lies are being debunked every evening on the news and comedy programs.