This week, Trump met with German chancellor Friedrich Merz in the former’s gilded lily of an Oval Office.
Merz is a businessman, and shrewd enough to know that flattery would be the main course on the menu.
He came bearing a framed copy of Trump’s grandfather’s German birth certificate. The president called the montage “fantastic” and said he would hang it in a place of honor.
He then got down to the most important topic of the day: the aesthetic state of the Oval Office.
"It’s an Oval Office that’s in very good shape,” Trump announced. “We like fixing things up, and having them tippy top, like they have in Germany. They do that in Germany very much. And we do it here."
As though he had not flattered himself enough or been flattered enough by Merz, Trump could not resist embellishing his own approval ratings beyond even the blinding shine of the office the two convened in.
"We're having a very good run," Trump announced with rare modesty. "We had a—I also had a great election, great win, won everything. Won the popular vote, all seven swing states, which is a big deal."
After allowing him to go on for a bit, Chancellor Merz had a pressing question for Trump about the new travel bans.
"Mr. President, on your new travel ban, why now?" he asked. "And if the Boulder attack was part of your reasoning, why not include Egypt on that list, where the suspect is from?"
The answer, when it came, was... painful. "Well, because Egypt has been a country that we deal with very closely, they have things under control. The countries that we have [sic] don't have things under control."
Mr. Merz knew that Trump usually does most of the talking with foreign counterparts. He did not buck the trend, sitting in silence for minutes at a time as the president rambled on.
Mr. Trump praised what he surely believed to Mr. Merz's most important capacity: his English skills.
"You speak English," Trump said, evidencing his outstanding, better-than-any-other-president-ever foreign diplomacy skills. "Because you speak such good English, is it as good as your German, would you say?"
This left Merz to point out the obvious: German is his mother tongue, but he does his best with English.
Trump then lauded Merz's negotiating stances and his agreement with Trump’s opposition to a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.
He thankfully left out Merz's tall stature, a rare exhibition of self-control that he did not manage after his meeting with Ahmed al-Sharaa, the current head of Syria, when he openly gushed about the latter's height and attractiveness.
Trump then mused aloud, inappropriately, as to whether it was a good idea for Germany to increase its military spending, something that Trump has since his first administration bullied Germany (and the European Union as a whole) to do.
“I’m not sure that General MacArthur would have said it was positive, you know?” Mr. Trump said at one point, referring to the American military commander in Asia (who therefore spent no time in Germany) in World War II. “He wouldn’t like it, but I sort of think it’s good. You understand that?”
Mr. Merz said he did understand, allowing Trump's massive blunder about MacArthur to go unaddressed—as did, for some strange reason, the New York Times.
“He made a statement, never let Germany re-arm,” Trump went on inanely.
There is no record of General MacArthur ever having said those words.
It is widely known by anyone with even a cursory knowledge of World War II that MacArthur was wholly uninvolved in the European theater. In fact, he retired in 1937, but was recalled into service in 1941 as Commander of the U.S. Army in the Far East. After the war, President Truman named MacArthur the military governor of Japan.
Sadly, Trump continued on his path to reverse diplomacy.
"There will be a point when I’ll say, please don’t arm any more if you don’t mind," he said, thumping Merz patronizingly on the leg. "We'll be watching them," he added to the assembled press for extra flair.
He could not resist embellishing further: “I think that’s a good thing, at least to a certain point. There will be a point when I say, please don’t arm anymore.”
Trump uttered this as though Germany is in more danger of authoritarianism control than the U.S.; they are not. And he did so as though he and his Vice President, the vainglorious J.D. Vance, haven't been pushing for Germany and Europe to embrace the AfD, its radical right party that emphasizes nativism; they have.
Mr. Merz chimed in here and there, appealing to Trump’s sizeable ego and national pride. He thanked Americans for liberating Europe on D-Day, 81 years ago on Friday.
And then Trump went off the rails.
"That was not a pleasant day for you," he interjected, as though Merz himself where alive on June 6, 1944, ad as though Merz himself was part of the Nazi regime.
While Trump giggled like an idiot in response to his own bad joke, the German Chancellor chose to handle it indirectly, as most foreign leaders seem to do with Trump.
"No," Merz agreed.
But the Chancellor could hardly let such an insult to Germany and its people go unchallenged.
"Well, in the long run, Mr. President," Merz amended gracefully, "this was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship."
The German news media reacted to the meeting with a mix of relief and bemusement: relief that the meeting had not devolved into a shouting match, as it had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and bemusement that Germany’s leader, fresh off an election win that Trump unwittingly helped along due to his own bad example of what authoritarianism looks like, had to debase himself with such an interaction.
“Merz can hardly get a word in edgewise in the Oval Office,” declared the flagship public news outlet Tagesschau.
Mr. Merz flattered Mr. Trump but mostly let him talk, noted the left-leaning Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Mr. Merz's role resembled that of a movie extra, observed one of the country’s most influential news sources, Der Spiegel.
Trump topped off his own ignorance by brushing aside Merz's flattering suggestion that Trump might be the “key person in the world” who could halt the bloodshed in Ukraine by pressuring Vladimir Putin to negotiate.
Trump suggested that Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine was not, as he said recently, the source of the greatest casualties since World War II. It was rather, he said Friday, more like "a playground fight between two children who hate each other."
Imagine comparing Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with nearly 1,000,000 dead on Russia's side and likely 750,000 on Ukraine's end, to a schoolyard squabble.
As even a five-year-old child can see, the war is a battle for Ukrainian statehood, sovereignty, and self-determination.
With children, Trump intoned unwisely, “sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.”
He added that he'd relayed this absolutely razor-sharp, incisive analogy to Putin in their phone call with Putin this week, belying his own lack of diplomacy skills and his enabling of Russia's aim to demilitarize Ukraine and bring much of the country under Russian rule.
The lack of intelligence is blinding, the incompetence unparalleled.
And we're only four months in.
Note: The sources for this short piece are as follows:
FiscalNote, R. C. (n.d.). Roll Call Factba.se - Remarks: Donald Trump Holds a Bilat with Friedrich Merz of Germany - June 5, 2025. Roll Call Factba.Se. Retrieved June 5, 2025, from https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-remarks-bilat-friedrich-merz-germany-june-5-2025
Trump to German Chancellor: D-Day “not a pleasant day for you.” (2025, June 5). https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/c989r2569y4o
National Museum of the United States Army. (n.d.). Retrieved June 8, 2025, from https://www.thenmusa.org/biographies/douglas-macarthur/
Ukraine: The Latest. (n.d.). Apple Podcasts. Retrieved June 8, 2025, from
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