Merkel Has Harvard Cheering Attack on Trump Politics of Lies
Merkel also warned of the damage done to public life when people treat “lies as truth and truth as lies”.
(Bloomberg) -- Angela Merkel delivered a forensic takedown of Donald Trump and his presidency to Harvard University’s class of 2019 on Thursday as she urged graduates to act with integrity and self-control as they embark on their careers.
Without ever mentioning the U.S. leader by name, the German chancellor checked off a list of policy issues where she has clashed with Trump -- from trade, to immigration and climate change -- that left her audience in no doubt as to whom she might mean.
When she called on the students and university alumni to "tear down walls" they rose to their feet -- Trump’s 2016 battle cry, of course, was to "build the wall" to keep out immigrants coming across the border with Mexico.
“Tear down walls of ignorance and narrow-mindedness, for nothing has to stay as it is,” Merkel said in a speech that drew from her own experience of life behind the Berlin Wall to argue that positive change is possible.
Yet she also warned of the damage done to public life when people treat "lies as truth and truth as lies" and suggested it’s better to stop and think before acting on "first impulses" -- comments that prompted cheers and laughter.
The 64-year-old chancellor has been horrified by Trump’s willingness to go back on his word as she tries to hold together the global order that the U.S. helped to create. Just over two years after Trump took office, some of Merkel’s aides worry the breakdown in U.S.-German relations has passed the point of no return.
Peter Beyer, who coordinates relations with the U.S. in the German foreign ministry, confirmed that Merkel was alluding to Trump in her speech. U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s meetings Friday with Merkel and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas in Berlin are a chance to intensify collaboration on issues such as Iran, he said.
“We of course interpret what the chancellor said as a counterpoint to Donald Trump and his policies and how he goes about politics,” Beyer said in an interview with German public broadcaster ARD Friday. “The chancellor remained faithful to herself and in terms of content this is what she in any case works for in politics.”
As Trump wages a trade war with China and threatens tariffs on German cars, Merkel’s most explicit invective was aimed at a trade policy that jeopardizes the “foundations of our prosperity.”
America First
Some 2,000 miles to the west, Trump was giving his own commencement speech to the graduates of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. He used the occasion to reprise his America First doctrine, saying the U.S. won’t sacrifice its interests for those of foreign powers.
“We don’t do that anymore,” Trump told students. “In all things and ways we are putting America first, and it’s about time.”
Merkel, Germany’s first female chancellor, drew at length from her own biography as the daughter of a pastor who grew up in communist East Germany and rose from political obscurity after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and German reunification in 1990 to the country’s highest elected office.
She spoke of living under a dictatorship and assuming nothing would change before the wall came down.
“Anything that seems to be set in stone or unalterable can indeed change,” she said.
The crowd sprawled out on the university campus embraced the chancellor as the antithesis of Trump-era politics, applauding when she pledged climate neutrality by 2050 -- even though she’s pilloried at home for missing targets.
Merkel, who says she won’t run again when her current term ends in 2021 at the latest, was aiming to burnish her legacy. She denies seeking another political office, including heading one of the European Union institutions, and said Thursday that her post-chancellorship future is “completely open.”
Merkel joins a list of prominent commencement speakers in recent years, from Facebook Inc. co-founder and Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg to “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling and television host Oprah Winfrey. Last year’s address was given by U.S. civil rights pioneer and U.S. Representative John Lewis.
Merkel is the first German leader to give an address at Harvard since 1990, when former Chancellor Helmut Kohl delivered it the year of German reunification.
To contact the reporter on this story: Patrick Donahue in Cambridge, Massachusetts at pdonahue1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ben Sills at bsills@bloomberg.net, Tony Czuczka, Iain Rogers
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