Vice President JD Vance’s address to the Munich Security Conference last week was the most shocking thing to happen at that annual summit since President Vladimir Putin of Russia condemned the American-led liberal international order there nearly two decades ago. And just as that tirade presaged the era of diplomatic tension and violent conflict in which we’re currently embroiledumibet2, so too did Mr. Vance’s speech augur a coming dark age.

After a few perfunctory sentences about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the most destructive conflict on European soil since World War II, Mr. Vance explained the real problem facing the West. “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia” or China, he said, but “the threat from within.” Government censorship, Mr. Vance averred, threatens the very basis of the trans-Atlantic alliance between Europe and the United States. Having portrayed longstanding European allies as adversaries, Mr. Vance then declared that “there is no room for firewalls,” a reference to the informal agreement among mainstream political parties not to form coalitions with the extreme right.

Mr. Vance’s astonishing intervention in European politics was accompanied by an equally striking break with diplomatic protocol. While Mr. Vance declined to meet with the leader of the country hosting him, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he did make time to confer with Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, currently polling second in Sunday’s federal election. By his actions and through his words, Mr. Vance all but endorsed the AfD.

Mr. Vance is not the first high-ranking Trump administration official to back the far-right party. Since December, when Elon Musk endorsed the AfD as the “only” force that can “save Germany,” Mr. Musk has repeatedly expressed his support for the party to his over 200 million followers on X, the social media platform he owns. Last month, addressing AfD supporters via video link, Mr. Musk asserted that in Germany, “there is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” German children, he said, “should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents.” (In Munich,66br Mr. Vance joked that “if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” a tacit stamp of approval for Mr. Musk’s endorsement of the AfD.)

Devoid of context, Mr. Musk’s statements might seem unobjectionable. The extent to which a nation’s atonement for past sins should influence present-day policy is a legitimate subject for debate. But Mr. Musk didn’t share his thoughts in an airy seminar discussion. He stated them defiantly at a political gathering of right-wing German nationalists. To anyone remotely familiar with the country’s political vernacular, his statements sound uncomfortably close to the acrid lamentations, equal parts self-pitying and resentful, of Germans who wish to dismantle their country’s much-admired memory culture and minimize Nazi crimes.

As Molly Ivins said of Pat Buchanan’s speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention, the musings of Mr. Vance and Mr. Musk sound better in the original German. According to Ms. Weidel, who introduced Mr. Musk at last month’s rally, Germany’s scrupulous Holocaust commemoration is a “guilt cult” and Adolf Hitler was not “right-wing” but rather a “communist.” Alexander Gauland, one of AfD’s founders, grumbled that the Third Reich was “just a speck of bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, said Björn Höcke, a prominent provincial party leader, shows that Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital.” Mr. Höcke, who once called for “nothing less than a 180-degree turnaround in the politics of remembrance” and has been convicted of using Nazi rhetoric in his speeches — presumably a victim in the eyes of Mr. Vance — complains that Germans have the “mentality of a totally vanquished people.”

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Such a scenario would represent a notable degree of ticket-splitting, perpetuating a trend captured by surveys throughout this election cycle. Democratic Senate candidates in a number of swing states, including Arizona and Nevada, have consistently polled ahead of the top of the ticket, especially when President Biden was the party’s standard-bearer. As Ms. Harris’s nomination has made the election more competitive, the gap between her and those down-ballot Democrats has narrowed — but the trend persists in most races in swing states.

Ms. Harris may give remarks about border issues during the visit, according to the people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss a trip that has not yet been made public. The people said final details about exactly where Ms. Harris would visit or what else she might do on the trip have not been decided. The Harris campaign did not immediately provide a comment.

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