When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told an audience of young Catholics on Friday that he wouldn't recommend his children study or work in the United States right now, ex-Republican strategist Steve Schmidt heard something that ran far deeper than diplomatic friction.
"The words matter because the speaker matters," Schmidt wrote in his Saturday newsletter, The Warning. "When a German chancellor — a conservative Atlanticist, a lifelong admirer of the United States, a man formed politically by the postwar alliance that made modern Germany possible — says publicly that he wouldn’t want his adult children to study in America or work in America, the world should stop and listen."
Speaking to young people in Würzburg, Merz cited a "social climate" that had "suddenly developed" in the United States, adding that even the best-educated Americans are now struggling to find work. Trump has feuded with the German leader, going after him after Merz warned the U.S. was being "humiliated" by Iran and risked another Afghanistan-style quagmire.
Merz's warning to his children was a diagnosis, Schmidt said. He argued the chancellor sees through a uniquely German lens shaped by his country's confrontation with the rise of fascism, recognizing "danger signs that Americans still dismiss as exaggeration."
"He isn’t mocking America. He’s mourning it. There’s a profound difference. Merz has met the arsonist." Schmidt wrote.
Schmidt added that Trump has "transformed the greatest democratic experiment in human history into an object of alarm" among the same allies who once told him the U.S. remained "indispensable" — a sentiment increasingly hard to hear from Berlin as Trump's grip on reality faces swirling scrutiny.