In the columns of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a major Munich daily newspaper, journalist Kurt Kister shares a scathing reflection on the places he now prefers to avoid: Donald Trump’s United States, Munich saturated by the Security Conference held from February 13 to 15, 2026, and even a CDU congress in Stuttgart from February 20 to 21.
A former expatriate in Washington, Kurt Kister remembers a country he once loved. He recalls having “lived a few years in Washington, at a time when we were younger, more beautiful, and more optimistic.” He used to travel through New Mexico or California and dreamed of buying a wooden house in Bisbee, Arizona, to spend a few weeks there each year once he was older. This dream has faded. “Today, I am happy to have never bought such a wooden house,” he writes, stating that he will not visit the United States again as long as Donald Trump or a Trump supporter is in power.
The refusal is not an economic boycott but a sign of deep political discomfort, as he describes: “America is evolving towards a partially illegal state, governed by a hypernarcissistic imbecile.”
Kurt Kister, who considers himself a lover of oddities, explains that he no longer wants to see “the Canyonlands, Seattle, and Santa Fe,” as he deems a significant part of the country that elected and supports Donald Trump “profoundly undesirable.” He sees this shift as historical: “I could not have imagined that America, in terms of freedom, would one day become Chinese.”
In Munich, his boycott is only temporary. He leaves the city until the end of the Security Conference, which he compares to “Davos without mountains.” Finally, he watches from a distance the CDU congress, marked by Angela Merkel’s announced return. These familiar places have now become, for political and symbolic reasons, difficult to visit – as if traveling now requires a moral choice as much as a geographic one.
