Merz arrives at White House for high-stakes Oval Office talk with President Donald Trump in the same format as recent clashes with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa.
Update 11:59 ET — Joke at Germany’s expense
President Trump says he’s happy about Germany spending more on defence, but jokingly citing the Second World War says that while he wants Germany to re-arm, he doesn’t want it to re-arm too much. This gets a smile out of Merz.
Germany’s military spending, which has been rock-bottom for many years, has long been a matter of contention with President Trump, who wants Europe to take on more responsibility for its own defence. As Trump himself has expressed, the contradiction between Germany’s historically low military spending and its position of Europe’s greatest economy had been too much to bear.
Germany has launched an emergency spending package to boost its armed forces but this tranche of funding is only due to run to 2027.
German Chancellor Freidrich Merz has told President Trump and the United States to “stay out” of his country’s politics.
The country’s intelligence agency confirmed last week that it had classified the conservative Alternative for Germany party as a “proven right-wing extremist organization” because of their opposition to mass immigration and progressive ideology.
In a post on the X platform, Secretary of State Marco Rubio slammed German authorities for their continued crackdown against their political opposition.
He wrote:
Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy—it’s tyranny in disguise.
What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD—which took second in the recent election—but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes.
Germany’s leader-in-waiting takes unexpectedly tough line on Trump swerve– www.washingtontimes.com Source Link Excerpt:
Friedrich Merz, almost assured to be Germany’s next chancellor, is ignoring conventional wisdom when it comes to relations with President Donald Trump and his disruptive “American first” agenda for Europe.
