Donald Trump attracted attention in the TV debate with crude claims – including about Germany. The Foreign Office did not want to accept this.
False claims are Donald Trump’s daily bread. The 78-year-old Republican lies as naturally as others talk about the weather. The Washington Post counted more than 30,573 lies or misleading claims that Trump made in public statements during his time in the White House. And it hasn’t gotten any better since then.
Now even the German Foreign Ministry felt compelled to clarify one or two of Trump’s fairy tales. A few hours after the debate, the Foreign Office published a post on X in which the ministry, led by Annalena Baerbock, refuted some of the claims made by Trump as false.
In the debate with Harris, the former president claimed that she wanted to end fracking, a controversial form of gas extraction, from “day one” of her possible presidency. The dire consequences of this can also be seen in the energy transition in Germany, which has led to a collapse of the energy system. “Germany has (Editor’s note: the ban on fracking) and within a year they went back to building conventional power plants,” Trump said.
In the Foreign Office’s post, the ministry addresses Trump more or less directly and makes it clear: “Whether you like it or not: Germany’s energy system is fully functional, even with 50 percent renewable energy. And we are not building any new coal and nuclear power plants – we are closing them. Coal will have been completely replaced as an energy source by 2038 at the latest.” The Foreign Office’s post also showed a picture of Donald Trump from the TV debate.
During the 90-minute debate with his Democratic challenger Kamala Harris, the former reality TV star proved once again that facts are not that important to him. He trumpeted frightening stories about crime in America, which has supposedly gone “through the roof” (false; according to FBI data, the crime rate has fallen during the Biden administration), he warned of mass immigration, after which millions of migrants would supposedly stream into the country every month (false; the US Border Patrol recently counted 300,000 per month). Or that Haitian migrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs to survive. He referred to his running mate JD Vance, who had previously fueled the horror story on social media.
The latter claim provoked particularly much outrage. Not only had the Springfield City Council made it clear before the debate that it was not aware of any such incidents, but the Haitian government was also outraged by Trump’s conspiracy theory. And then there was the German Foreign Ministry. In an addendum to its X-post, it succinctly noted: “PS: By the way, we don’t eat cats and dogs in Germany either.”
Most X users found the clarification and the smug comment amusing. Richard Grenell, on the other hand, did not. The former US ambassador to Germany criticized the post as obvious election interference that was worse than that of Russia and Iran. “We see this clearly and will act accordingly,” he wrote on the X platform.
Grenell was sent to Germany as ambassador by then-US President Trump in 2018 and made few friends in political Berlin at the time. He is being considered as a candidate for the post of US Secretary of State should Trump win the presidential election in November
Union politicians also criticized the Foreign Office’s reaction. “It is the official account of the Foreign Office. That is very strange diplomacy,” CDU politician Norbert Röttgen told the magazine “Der Spiegel.” “Trump could be the next president of the USA,” he added.
