How Merz plans to avoid an Oval Office pasting
No other European leader has criticised Donald Trump as fiercely as Friedrich Merz, Germany's new chancellor.
On Thursday, the two will come face to face in Washington in what is the biggest test of Mr Merz's tenure so far.
It means entering the gladiatorial arena of the Oval Office and enduring the impromptu press conferences now dreaded by visiting leaders the world over.
Mr Trump has already ambushed Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky, South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa and Jordan's King Abdullah II in front of the cameras. But Mr Merz is no pushover.
'When he comes into the room, everyone goes quiet, like when the schoolteacher comes in,' a source from his centre-Right Christian Democrats (CDU) said.
'And he can be really tough on people, to the point of being rude.'
Leaders in Europe will be hoping that Mr Merz will be able to soften Mr Trump's stance on Ukraine and convince the president to drop 50 per cent tariffs on EU imports.
And Mr Merz has been doing his homework before his daunting date at the White House.
He has sought advice from Giorgia Meloni, Italy's prime minister who is admired by Mr Trump, and Alexander Stubb, Finland's president, who scored a diplomatic coup by playing an impromptu round of golf with the US leader.
Mr Merz, a former BlackRock banking executive, will look to bond with Mr Trump, rather than directly confront him.
He has been advised to let the president do most of the talking and if he must commit the sin of interrupting, to soften that with praise.
But like Canada's Mark Carney, who survived his Oval Office visit unscathed, Mr Merz is not afraid of confronting the world's most powerful man.
The bespectacled old school conservative rounded on Mr Trump on the night of his election victory in February.
Mr Merz was incensed that JD Vance and Elon Musk had endorsed and promoted the far-Right Alternative For Germany (AfD) during the campaign.
He declared the Trump administration was meddling in Germany's democracy after the AfD came second in their best ever election result.
Mr Merz added that Berlin and Europe could no longer rely on the US for its security and warned that Nato could soon be 'dead'.
It felt like the end of the international order created from the ruins of the Second World War.
The two leaders have since spoken on the phone during which the chancellor told the president the US remained Germany's 'indispensable partner'. But the truce did not last long.
Asked about the call at a conference later, Mr Merz mimicked Mr Trump's voice, to laughs from the audience, and said every second or third word the president said was 'great'.
Days later, when Germany's domestic intelligence agency designated the AfD as a 'Right-wing extremist' group, Mr Vance, the Oval Office attack dog, went for the jugular.
'The West tore down the Berlin Wall together. And it has been rebuilt – not by the Soviets or the Russians, but by the German establishment,' the vice-president said.
These were 'absurd accusations', replied Mr Merz. 'I did not interfere in the American election campaign,' the chancellor said before telling the US government to 'largely stay out' of German politics.
The two leaders' differences over Ukraine have narrowed recently but Mr Trump has a problem with Germany.
His dislike of Angela Merkel, the former chancellor, was plain and he had little to no time for Olaf Scholz, her successor.
For the tariff-wielding president, Berlin has too long profited from a massive trade surplus with the US, spending the money on woolly social policies while freeloading on America's defence of Europe.
To make matters worse, it is deeply committed to the EU, which the president says was set up just to 'screw' the US.
Germany, a faltering exporting powerhouse, now faces the prospect of massive 50 per cent US tariffs on the EU imports.
The AfD wants Germany to strike its own tariff deal with Washington, but Mr Merz has ruled out breaking ranks with the EU.
'Together, we are even bigger than the US,' he said in May. ' We are united, to a large extent anyway, and that will be my message to the American government.'
CDU sources said Mr Merz was optimistic about the relationship, and that they did not need a 'reset' with the US.
Mr Merz and Mr Trump share a background in the macho corporate world and are of a similar age.
The chancellor has two private jets, while the president has his own Boeing 757, nicknamed Trump Force One.
Mr Merz is a family man with two daughters: Constanze, a doctor, and Carola, a lawyer – more potential common ground with Mr Trump, who has five children.
They also share a love of golf, although Mr Ramaphosa, the South African president, was not spared fake accusations of white farmer genocide even though he brought golf legend Ernie Els with him to Washington.
And King Abdullah II won't forget being told to take in displaced Gazans under Mr Trump's 'Middle East Riviera' plan.
But Mr Merz shares a populist streak with Mr Trump.
Soon after taking office, Mr Trump declared a national emergency over immigration. Mr Merz did exactly the same thing.
Mr Merz is also no fan of Mrs Merkel, who sidelined him from the CDU during her 16 years in power.
The chancellor's vow to make Germany's army Europe's strongest may convince the president the two can do business.
Günter Krings, a senior CDU MP, said: 'Given his business background, his self-confident appearance and his focus on Germany's role in the world, there is a very good chance Trump will see him as his main European counterpart in the coming years.'
German political analysts said Mr Merz would show 'respect' to Mr Trump, but expect the same in return.
'I suspect that Trump will give Merz a chance. He's got a decent story to tell on promised defence spending increases,' a European diplomatic source in Washington said.
'The real risk is Vance in the Oval Office on freedom of speech – particularly the new laws in Germany banning extremism which Vance has seen as an attack on the AfD and anti-democratic.'
'The Americans know that the fight for freedom of expression and sovereignty is being waged everywhere,' an AfD source told The Telegraph.
'That's why they cannot look away when democracy is simply abolished in their most populous ally.'
The AfD is now the main opposition and just a whisker behind the CDU in the polls.
It will be watching on intently from Berlin as Mr Merz and Mr Trump meet in Washington, as will the world.
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Two of the administration's primary targets have already been subjected to treatment that wildly exceeds reasonable and lawful oversight. In a March 25 letter to Columbia, the Trump administration demanded not only that the university 'complete disciplinary proceedings' related to campus encampments, but that it impose a minimum penalty of expulsion or multiyear suspensions. But what if, in a given case, a one-year suspension is most just? The administration told Columbia to 'centralize all disciplinary processes under the Office of the President.' What statute empowers it to dictate how administrators and faculty divide power? It demanded that the institution 'formalize, adopt, and promulgate' a definition of anti-Semitism, as if institutional neutrality about that topic of debate is somehow at odds with Title VI. Most strikingly, it ordered Columbia to begin 'placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership' for five years, a flagrant intrusion on faculty governance and academic freedom. In an April 11 letter to Harvard, the Trump administration made at least one legitimate demand––that the university comply with the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling that its admissions office cannot discriminate on the basis of race. But the administration also made demands that ought to be beyond the state's purview. Harvard was ordered to reduce 'the power held by students and untenured faculty' in its governance. It was told to pay for an external anti-Semitism audit that would list faculty members who discriminate against Jews so that they can be punished. Yet the next paragraph of the letter demanded that Harvard shut down all DEI initiatives. The letter even seeks to micromanage student groups; funding decisions 'must be made exclusively by a body of University faculty,' it states. Harvard has rejected these demands in court filings, and it is suing the administration to stop it from enforcing the letter's terms. Still, the overall effect of the administration's enforcement is aptly summed up by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. In an amicus brief supporting Harvard's lawsuit, the organization declared that the state's 'coercion of Harvard violates longstanding First Amendment principles and will destroy universities nationwide if left unchecked.' An aggressive regime of civil-rights enforcement is easy to defend in theory. Without bureaucrats focused on the obligations that colleges have under Title IX and Title VI, institutions can neglect the statutory rights of students. Federally dictated policies and procedures can enhance consistency and impartiality. Investment in the Office of Civil Rights and campus-compliance structures can reduce sexual assaults and bigoted harassment. And penalties can be meted out justly to particularly bad actors. But that isn't how the civil-rights regime that arose in 2011 has worked in practice. Listen: Why Trump wants to control universities The new Title IX bureaucracy cost colleges hundreds of millions of dollars to implement, from 2011 to 2016. And for all the bureaucracy's illiberal excesses, colleges ultimately reported an overall increase in forcible sex offenses during the same period. Meanwhile, policy making through the bureaucracy rather than Congress sowed dysfunction, with appointees of different presidents imposing wildly different, sometimes contradictory, accounts of what the law required, such that satisfying one administration got you in trouble with the next. Similarly dismal results are likely as the Trump administration applies the Title IX playbook to Title VI. There is no reason to assume that Jewish students will be better off if colleges comply with every Trump-administration dictate. As Republican administrations used to understand, intense bureaucratic attention to a problem doesn't automatically improve it. And often, state coercion can invite state abuses, yield unintended consequences (see the Israeli students who will have to leave Harvard if Trump succeeds in banning foreign students), and crowd out better solutions. Returning to pre-2011 norms would be better than the status quo. But at this point, an act of Congress might be the only way to stop what one attorney has called the 'regulation by intimidation' that threatens higher education. Congress could clarify what Title IX and Title VI require of colleges, in particular establishing that colleges can never be punished by the administrative state for allowing speech protected by the First Amendment or extending due-process rights to accused students that they would enjoy in a court of law. It could raise the bar for launching an investigation. It could afford colleges more due process before penalties are imposed. And it could silo penalties, so that violations in one part of a university, such as the law school, do not threaten another part, such as a cancer-research center. Many kinds of reform are possible. It is, in any case, unsustainable for colleges to be micromanaged by rival factions of coercive ideologues. Yet many Trump critics are still focusing on his administration's glaring procedural violations, rather than the enforcement model that underlies them. Even if Trump's team were as procedurally diligent as its predecessors (a low bar), the overly aggressive approach to civil-rights enforcement that began in 2011 and persists today would serve academia ill. Civil-rights enforcement on campuses has mutated into something with costs that outweigh its benefits.
