Berlin's mayor just issued this message for Donald Trump. It's quite something

[DFW]

10. Oh, they know.

Their reaction is one of frustration. They ask, "how could you let this happen, when you KNEW the awful consequences?" They realize full well that no one single person "let" this happen. The march the day after the inauguration was not ignored.

All the same, they are confronted with what looks to them like what happened in Germany in 1933. A regime, getting a minority of the votes, was allowed to seize power with hardly a whimper, turned out immediately to be worse than even its staunchest ideological foes predicted, and no legal mechanisms seem to exist to correct the error. Since what happened in Berlin on March 1, 1933 had rather serious consequences for the world, and Trump now has access to (if not complete liberty to deploy on his own) nuclear weapons, yes, the world is looking at us with a feeling of disbelief and abject terror. Well, all except the current government of Hungary.

They are, in general, not aware of the concept of Gerrymandering, or how it distorts the make-up of the House of Representatives to cement minority rule that aids the extremist right when a Republican is in the White House and stifles progress when a Democrat is in the White House. In Germany, for example, with a parliamentary democracy, their House of Representatives, the Bundestag, is awarded their number of seats on a basis of how many votes their party got nationally. Their State governments are awarded seats on the basis of how many votes the parties got Statewide. Statewide votes are held separately from the national votes. Their equivalent of counties, or "Bezirke" are not subject to Gerrymandering at whim by State governments.