By Mathias Risse
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
From the Munich Security Conference
Harvard’s motto is “Veritas,” truth. There is never a bad time to remind ourselves of that. Anybody who cares about it will have that particular buzzing in their ears that comes from noticing how this value gets trampled or mocked these days. There are many offenders all around. Still, the Trump movement, as it has entered its current phase by reiterating incessantly how the 2020 election had been stolen, deserves special mention, regardless of its recent election victory. This became evident again on February 14, 2025, when Vice President JD Vance the
It was my first time attending this amazing event that is organized around high-level decision makers from politics and the military, but that also includes representatives of business, civil society, and academia. Ukraine was high on the agenda this year. Everyone was surprised when Vance had nothing to say about it. Perhaps he was not in the loop on this subject. But what he did talk about was as it was . He opted to gaslight his audience on their commitments to democracy and rights.
“Gaslighting” is a term that is all over the place now, which says a lot about our times. I use this term as follows: X gaslights Y in the presence of Z if X tries to persuade Y and Z that Y violates certain values or commitments that X, Y, and Z all are taken to endorse, whereas in fact it is X that violates them. One example is what Trump did after the 2020 elections. He (X) accused Biden’s Democrats (Y) of violating democratic norms (targeting the electorate, Z), whereas it was him who did so by filing and inspiring hundreds of around “election fraud,” persistently ascribing multifarious versions of dishonesty to Democrats, and getting many followers so agitated that they stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Successful gaslighting has two major effects: it creates a moral high ground for X and followers, and it puts a burden on Y to show that it is not Y that violates norms. Among the resulting cacophony voices in defense of Y do not sound different from those in defense of X. I suspect one reason we see as yet so little protest against what Trump has been rolling out is that many Americans are exasperated by all this gaslighting over the years.
Joining the gaslighting has been a test of fealty for many who sought positions in Trump’s administration. Vance turned gaslighting . His extraordinary talent was amply on display in Munich last Friday.
Again, everybody expected thoughts on Ukraine. Instead, the Vice President started by saying that what he worried most about for Europe was not Russia, China, or any other external actor. It was “the threat from within – the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values that are shared with the United States of America.” It is worth pausing: Russia’s war has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, makes Ukraine’s future uncertain, and in ways that are evolving, changes Europe’s whole security architecture. But such realities notwithstanding, for Vance that is not Europe’s main problem. He went on to offer examples meant to show that Europe – and he included the UK as he was going through them – was insufficiently committed to democracy and the rights of citizens to express themselves. The decision of the before the final round of voting in light of widespread Russian interference was offered as a prime example of insufficient commitment to democracy. Unwillingness of German mainstream parties to govern with the right-wing AfD – in light of its refusal to reject Nazi positions – was another. were, among others, Sweden (for penalizing someone tied to a Quran burning) and the UK (for penalizing someone for an anti-abortion protest in an area where it was not permitted). Gaslighting is simpler than Orwellian doublespeak: it enlists half- or quarter-truths. There is something to all the cases he mentioned: when you need to sort it out, it is their take against yours.
European countries take such measures to make their democracies resilient and to protect the human rights of their citizens from both hostile takeovers by extreme parties and from external interference. The day before his speech, concentration camp, in the outskirts of Munich, where Nazis killed more than 40,000 people. It is because such sites exist that European nations take a protective attitude towards their democracies. It is to make sure everybody can exercise a whole range of freedoms and find themselves respected as citizens that certain aspects of particular rights (such as the burning of someone else’s holy book as an expression of freedom of speech) can be constrained. Speech is treated like another category of action rather than an altogether different category. After all, speech can do as much harm as other kinds of action. The American obsession with speech utterly unconstrained by government is not broadly shared around the world. Even in U.S. history this has not always been the dominant view, and the right of American citizens to speak freely is not matched by the rights of American employees to do so.
European cases involving rights restrictions tend to be controversial domestically. Hardly anybody takes them lightly, as they cut to the heart of democracy and the protection of personhood. But it is a fair guess that the great majority of Europeans would agree that democracy and human rights need guardrails. What makes it hard for European politicians to engage with the Trump administration is that it is increasingly clear to them that these guardrails are needed against the likes of Trump and Vance. This is a painful realization not only because American protection can be replaced only via large-scale transformations of European societies, but also because the underlying value commitments are widely shared across the nations. What makes all this so vexing is that Trump and Vance speak for the American people with full democratic legitimization. Like it or not, Trump is one of the great American phenomena of all time, as American as apple pie, tailgating, and 4th-of-July fireworks.
Vance’s speech was appalling to the MSC audience: one could feel it. To me, the lowest point of a speech that kept its audience gasping was Vance’s statement that efforts at maintaining such guardrails, “to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, [look] more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or, God forbid, vote a different way—or even worse, win an election.” Vance is directly gaslighting the Europeans – and the world – by ascribing to them insufficient commitment to democracy and rights. He accuses European countries that by protecting their democracies and the civil and human rights of their citizens, they engage in practices associated with totalitarian regimes: “Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation.” But it is in fact him, the Vice President, and the movement he is part of, who have championed violations of democratic norms and civil rights by making a mockery of the 2020 elections. They are who tried to safeguard American democracy from their onslaught. Vance would not be Vice President . In fact, he could enter politics .
The point of his Munich speech, I surmise, was to position the U.S. on a moral high ground from which to chastise Europeans (and others) for insufficient democracy credentials – without which, Vance added, “there is nothing America can do for you.” “There is a new sheriff in town,” he pronounced, “and under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.” Meanwhile, back home, journalists from Associated Press were for calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico. Vance succeeded in creating a situation where it is now the Europeans who must explain why he is wrong, adding to a cacophony of voices. He brought his style of politics into the heartland of international affairs. As I am writing this, it feels like a kindergarten-level activity to say, “but he did it.” That is how gaslighting is effective. We should expect to see much more of it.
As all this has been unfolding, Trump continued his own gaslighting by putting out that “ It is those who criticize him for authoritarian tendencies who are to blame for creating conditions under which the country needs a savior. In reality, the democratic and human-rights norms the U.S. has so long cherished and defended are threatened by Trump and those abandoning any commitments to these values, and to the truth, just to sit at his table. (How badly can anyone crave power and money, one often wonders.) Again, it feels so tedious to say this, and again, this is how gaslighting is effective.
The Munich speech was not the only time Vance did his gaslighting last week. The VP spoke on February 11. He was not there to discuss AI safety, he clarified, but AI opportunity. Europeans, he argued, were obsessed with AI safety. They not only blocked their own path to prosperity, but also that of U.S. companies expected to follow EU regulation. The culprit again is “so-called misinformation.” He added: “it is one thing to prevent a predator from preying on a child on the internet and quite another to prevent a grown man or woman from accessing an opinion that the government thinks is misinformation.”
Of course he is right thus far. However, the key rationale for regulating the flow of “information” is that unregulated freedom of speech benefits those most who have the loudest voices and biggest bullhorns, which in the present age means those with the money to control the flow of information and the practices of data collection and mining. Many of those who exercise such control now directly work for or with Trump. The photos from Inauguration have shown the world what kind of alliance has been shaping up there between his government and a club of tech billionaires. These new conditions are what Shoshana Zuboff has called "the fusion scenario."
The future of the world will be shaped to a large extent by AI and thus by those who build it. Given how much is at stake, doing so safely – with an eye on values such a democracy and civil and human rights – is essential to building a good future for everyone. Vance gaslights Europe and everyone concerned with AI safety by describing them as being driven by elitist control instincts (“so-called misinformation”) when in fact what is happening is that the tech billionaires already made their pledges to Trump. In the closing panel to the main program of MSC, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya – in the eyes of many the legitimate President of Belarus – pointed out that authoritarianism spreads like cancer, until eventually “people like you” are incapable of stopping it. (She meant her Munich audience, but it includes any reader of these lines.) Gaslighting about “so-called misinformation” and “Soviet-era words” makes this cancer spread.
Comparisons to Fascism have come up quite a bit in recent weeks vis-a-vis what the Trump government has already done. The term Gleichschaltung appears frequently, the bringing-in-line of all governmental and civil society actors to undermine effective checks and balances. That is what Hitler did in 1933. Here too we see gaslighting in action. The AfD’s candidate for German Chancellor, Alice Weidel, has associated any kind of content moderation or restrictions on freedom of speech with Nazi practices. Bafflingly, as the head of a party that refuses to distance itself from National Socialism, she has argued that censorship , and that . Therefore, one could vote for the AfD without being near National Socialism because Hitler – for many the very embodiment of evil – was not actually a Nazi. Now it is the responsibility of why Hitler was a Nazi after all. And so the gaslighting takes its course.
As a German citizen and an American citizen, and one who deeply cares about the history of both countries, I still see overwhelming differences between Germany in 1933 and the U.S. in 2025. But what also comes to mind in the midst of all this gaslighting is about how Nazis psychologically enabled followers to eventually commit atrocities by distorting established moral notions. By changing certain ideas about what is meant by loyalty, about what sacrifice can be expected in the service of your country, what kind of life counts as worthy of protection, etc., otherwise quite ordinary people with proper moral motivations were pushed to overcome moral qualms. The gaslighting we are currently observing is not the same as these distortions. It really is not. But conversely, these moral distortions often do involve gaslighting as I understand it. That is a scary thought in the current situation.
Harvard’s motto, again, is “Veritas.” I kept thinking of it as I stood in Munich listening to Vance, in a location just minutes away from the where Chamberlain abandoned parts of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938. It was after much gaslighting that Chamberlain returned home to champion “peace in our time.” Remember that everyone was expecting to hear about Ukraine. Look at the news how that topic is developing. Meanwhile, we will be fortunate if the AfD remains under 20% in German elections on February 23.
