What the German Chancellor's Spokesman Privately Said About Trump at the NATO Summit
Wandering around the NATO Summit last week, I found myself at what was ostensibly understood to be a “background briefing” for the German press corps. I’m of course always happy to uphold the basic journalistic practice of going “off-the-record” or “on background” when necessary, but the way that’s supposed to work is as a consensual and mutual exchange, not a unilateral dictate by some operative, about which I was never consulted. As such, I see no issue revealing that the briefing was conducted by Stefan Kornelius, formerly the head political editor of the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, who this year became the “Federal Government Spokesperson and Head of the Press and Information Office of the Federal Government.” According to his bio, “He reports directly to Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz.”
While I don’t speak German, I could follow along enough to apprehend that the vast majority of the briefing was about Donald Trump. In an interview with POLITICO, Marco Rubio said, “I would call this the Trump Summit,” and that was not incorrect as far as it goes. Everything from the public pageantry to the private whispered conversations inevitably revolved around the personage of Trump, deciphering his every move, calling up his every Truth Social post. They ought to build a Trump Hotel on the site of the Dutch convention center where the Summit was held, to mark what was overwhelmingly the paramount purpose of the gathering: to fete, placate, flatter, interpret, and dissect Trump.
This surreptitious German briefing was one of the rare instances where more unguarded official insights were offered as to the nature of the Trump Summit. After the fact, I was able to receive several different English translations of the roughly 45 minute exchange between German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s spokesman and the assembled journalists. He recounted, from the perspective of Merz, what the closed-door interactions with Trump had been like, and what inferences could be drawn about various policies. As you’ll see, he also said a few things that might’ve caused a diplomatic imbroglio if they’d been reported.