Conservative German multinational media company Axel Springer has offered a unique vantage point for observing the disarray of the German right in the face of America's U-turn on Europe. The publisher of the influential Bild tabloid, Germany's leading daily, Die Welt, and the website Politico has made a transatlantic orientation among his company's founding principles. But for the past few days, nothing has been going right within the German group.

Its CEO, Mathias Döpfner, who has made no secret of his support for US Vice President JD Vance or the Make American Great Again (MAGA) movement − viewed as a radical liberal-conservative phenomenon from which Germany should draw inspiration − has now been forced to distance himself due to the "red lines" crossed by Trump: his attacks on the rule of law, his trade war with Europe and his rapprochement with Russia to the detriment of Ukraine.

Döpfner, 62, head of Axel Springer since 2002, admitted on March 3, that he had been wrong about Trump. "In recent weeks, many transatlanticists − myself included − still wanted to hope that, behind the provocative speeches and posts, there was a constructive concept. That hope has been destroyed. Trump means what he says. And it no longer has any similarity to the America that stood by Europe for decades, relying on the rule of law," he writes in an op-ed in Die Welt, reversing the stance he gave a few days earlier to the Financial Times, when he said that Trump should be "taken seriously, but not literally."

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