Watch: President Trump Welcomes Germany’s New Leader Friedrich Merz to Oval Office

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 12:40 ET — Trump dings Elon
President Donald Trump said he was “very surprised” and “disappointed” by Elon Musk’s harsh criticism of the Big Beautiful Bill. He pinned much of Musk’s disapproval of the bill on the legislation’s elimination of electric vehicle tax credits, saying Musk was aware of the policy “from the very beginning.” Musk denied this, saying that the bill was “never shown to me even once.”
Read more at Breitbart News.

Update 12:25 ET — Lunch

Chancellor Merz will be feeling relieved that, sitting between President Trump on one hand and one of the top critics of Germany on the other, Vice President JD Vance, he got through the Oval Office meeting without argument. The party will now take lunch together and continue discussions behind closed doors. We may get a second press conference afterwards.

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.

Update 11:51 ET — Trump launches right into Germany’s mass migration problem

The discussion between Trump and Merz before the cameras of the press has started friendly, with Merz in particular making a point of thanking President Trump for the use of Blair House, the President’s official guest house in Washington D.C..

The first question from the media was about U.S. domestic politics — the travel ban announced overnight — but Trump soon turned it around on Germany, blaming former Chancellor Angela Merkel for high levels of migrant crime there.

He said: “we have thousands of murderers. I hate to say this in front of the Chancellor, because you have a little problem too with some of the people who were allowed in, it’s not your fault, it shouldn’t have happened, I told her it shouldn’t have happened but it did… we’re moving them out, we’re moving them out very strongly. It can’t come fast enough”.

The President makes clear this isn’t Merz’s doing, but does not shy away at all from displaying Germany’s problems to the world.

The original story continues below

Germany’s recently-installed Chancellor arrived at the White House on Thursday morning for his first face-to-face meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump. Described by British state broadcaster the BBC as a “showdown” meeting, the talk is being watched with keen interest in Germany and stands to make or break Berlin’s relationship with Washington, which Merz is reported to have been carefully cultivating by telephone.

As Chancellor Merz arrived at the West Wing lobby porte-cochère President Trump said “we love the German people”. Both men then entered the Oval Office.

While both men are businessmen and keen golfers, Germany has been a subject of frequent criticism for both Trump White Houses, and while Merz may wish to steer the conversation towards persuading the United States into more support for Ukraine, he may end up being grilled on Germany’s democratic backsliding and low NATO defence spending.

The German Chancellor, who has only been in power a month, indicated before he entered the White House that he would attempt to be firm with President Trump if required, stating: “I will state my opinion very clearly if necessary”. The AFP states Merz has been studying footage of previous White House meetings between Trump and foreign leaders to avoid mistakes of others.

Merz has previously indicated he resents American interest in German domestic politics, yet he got involved in the 2024 U.S. President Election by signalling he thought a Kamala Harris victory would be “friendlier” for Europe ahead of the vote.

A clear concern for the Trump White House is Germany’s apparent determination that it has to destroy democracy in order to save democracy, with serious moves underway to treat the nation’s second largest elected political party — the sovereigntist AfD — as an extremist threat. Whether the nation’s internal political police force should have the right to eavesdrop on and wiretap the AfD is presently being challenged in court.

Speaking at Germany’s Munich Security Conference in February, Vice President JD Vance warned Europe is starting to act like the “bad guys” as it turns towards censorship, stating now the greatest threat to Europe is “the threat from within”. Vance criticised the organisers of the conference for having banned representatives of the AfD party from attending at all, warning it is “incumbent” on political leaders to engage in dialogue with their own citizens.

He said:

Now to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid vote a different way or even worse, win an election.

… I’m sure you all came here prepared to talk about how exactly you intend to increase defense spending over the next few years in line with some new target… But let me also ask you, How will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don’t know what it is that we are defending in the first place?

… I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important, but what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important. And I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people.

This story is developing, more follows