Shorouk Express
When asked about concrete outcomes, Merz said he had “no doubt at all that the American government is committed to NATO” and that the White House and the Chancellery would strengthen their bilateral trade partnership.
“We will be advising two representatives who are now talking intensively with each other about German-American trade relations embedded in the European framework,” he said. “The lunch was worth its weight in gold for that.”
Merz said he will extensively brief European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen later on Friday. The European Commission is working to strike a far-reaching trade deal with Trump, who doubled tariffs on steel and aluminum to 50 percent this week.
In the run-up to his visit, Merz had prepared for an ambush of the kind endured by the leaders of Ukraine and South Africa. It appeared to work.
“It wasn’t a press conference, but a good show in the Oval Office,” Merz said about the encounter, during which Trump called Merz “a very good man to deal with” and voiced optimism that the U.S. would eventually reach “a good trade deal” with the European Union. Trump also said he had no plans to remove any of the nearly 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany.
“These are concrete, I hope, reliable statements from the U.S. president that Friedrich Merz will come back to and can be built on,” Jürgen Hardt, the lead parliamentarian on foreign policy from Merz’s conservatives, told Welt TV. “The message was ‘We are good friends,’ and what more could we want?”
