The Faces of America – Prayer in the Oval Office and a Values Map Pointing Toward Authoritarianism

There are images that could hardly be more symbolic. Donald Trump sits at the desk of the Oval Office, eyes closed, head bowed. Around him stand his loyalists, laying their hands on him as if he were an object to be venerated. It looks like the worship of a golden calf – a sacral ceremony in the midst of the political power center. "Prayer changes hearts and transforms lives … and unites us all as one nation under God," reads the quote that was circulated along with it. But what becomes visible here is less lived faith than the transformation of religion into a sick form of political legitimation of power. A president stages himself as a mediator between God and nation, and millions of followers applaud this performance.

In contrast stands the second level: sober data, condensed into a scientifically designed chart. We have created a values map based on international comparative data – supported by the World Values Survey (WVS), the European Social Survey (ESS), the United Nations and analyses from the Pew Research Center. Our goal was not to locate political movements according to party slogans or media images, but on the basis of consistent indicators: attitudes toward liberal values, positions on international cooperation, fundamental sociopolitical orientation. Each point on the chart represents a political movement, placed according to these measures.

The map thus shows not only the United States but an entire panorama. The Norwegian left, for example, appears far up on the left – firmly anchored in the liberal, internationalist spectrum, carried by a political climate that takes equality and multilateral cooperation for granted. In similar proximity move the left-wing currents in Germany, which uphold values such as solidarity and European integration. The German right, by contrast, lies more conservative but still clearly in the pro-Western camp, embedded in the EU and NATO and far removed from isolationism. Quite different are the conservative movements in France, Great Britain and Italy: they are shifting rightward, some more nationally oriented, but with varying degrees of international commitment. While the British and French right appear more skeptical yet remain institutionally anchored in the West, Italy is drifting more distinctly – conservative, Euroskeptical, nationally focused.

At the lower end of the chart, we see states that have already left the Western value order behind. Turkey and also the Hungarian right are positioned there, conservative and authoritarian, with a politics that places national sovereignty above the rule of law. China, on the other hand, marks a special case: authoritarian, deeply conservative in its state doctrine, and at the same time only willing to cooperate internationally when it serves its own interests. Still deeper, at the outermost edge, stand Russia and North Korea, those prime examples of isolationism and autocracy that define international cooperation not as an opportunity but as a threat. And this is precisely where it becomes explosive: the US right, which once was part of the Western democratic consensus, is now alarmingly close to this authoritarian spectrum. Where commonalities with Europe once defined the course, the American right now shows greater proximity to Moscow and Pyongyang than to Berlin or Oslo. The US left, however, remains in the upper left of the coordinate system – liberal, open to the world, internationalist and thus still in harmony with the democracies of the West.

It is this contrast that makes the abyss visible. On the one hand a president who stages himself like a cult object, touched and surrounded by an aura of quasi-religious veneration. On the other hand data proving that his political movement has long since fallen out of the value horizon of liberal democracies. It is no exaggeration but the sober diagnosis: Trump’s America is on a path that has more in common with Moscow and Pyongyang than with Berlin or Oslo.

Whoever considers both images together – the photo of political worship in the Oval Office and the values map we have created – recognizes the schizophrenic reality of a country that styles itself as a "nation under God" while in fact adopting values and patterns of authoritarian regimes. The contradiction is not only grotesque, it is highly dangerous: for it shows that the United States is in the process of giving up its democratic identity – in the name of religion, power and revenge. For Europe and Germany this is more than an American tragedy. It is a wake-up call. Anyone who believes that the tectonic shifts in America are a distant problem is mistaken: their tremors reach as far as Berlin, Paris and Brussels.

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