Trump’s anti-media rhetoric is sometimes difficult to distinguish from the rants that former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez specialized in. Trump’s censorious tendencies have led some to see German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the real “leader of the free world”. But Germany is no safe haven for free speech. Merkel’s government has adopted a draconian and arbitrary law against “illegal content” on social media which has seen both political speech and satire removed by Twitter. So illiberal is the law that members of Putin’s United Russia party essentially copy and pasted it and proposed their own version last summer.