Trump called Merkel ‘that b**ch’ and anti-German slur, new book alleges

Former President Donald Trump called Chancellor Angela Merkel “that b**ch” and used the disparaging term “krauts” to refer to the Germans, a new book alleges.

I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker will be released on Tuesday.

The Post journalists write about an incident in their book when Mr Trump was allegedly speaking to aides and advisors about NATO as well as the US-German relationship in the Oval Office when he referred to the German Chancellor, who has led her country since 2005, as “That b**** Merkel”.

The then-president also mentioned his late father, Fred Trump, who had German ancestry.

“‘I know the f***ing krauts,’ the president added, using a derogatory term for German soldiers from World War I and World War II,” Ms Leonnig and Mr Rucker write.

The authors went on to note that the former president denied making the above comments through a spokesperson when contacted about the passage prior to the book’s publication.

Mr Trump and Ms Merkel were famously at odds throughout his presidency, as the two differed significantly on policy issues including the German chancellor’s support for allowing refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East and northern Africa resettle in Germany and other parts of Europe.

In 2018, he attacked her indirectly, writing in a tweet that the people of Germany were “turning against their leadership” on his Twitter account, and added that crime was “way up” at a time when it was actually at a 30-year low.

Ms Merkel has made her own statements about the US and its reliability as a world power amid Mr Trump’s rise to power, and that same year warned other European leaders that the continent must “take destiny into its own hands.”

“It is no longer such that the United States simply protects us, but Europe must take its destiny in its own hands. That's the task of the future,” she said during a speech alongside France’s president, Emmanuel Macron.

“Trump then pointed to a framed photograph of his father, Fred Trump, displayed on the table behind the Resolute Desk and said, ‘I was raised by the biggest kraut of them all.’”

A Trump spokesperson told the reporters that the former president denied making those comments.

Mr Trump’s grandfather Friedrich Trump left Germany for the US in 1885, avoiding three years of mandatory military service, with Fred Trump being born in the Bronx in New York City in 1905.

Mr Trump and Ms Merkel had a tense relationship. As a presidential candidate in 2015, Mr Trump said the German leader “should be ashamed of herself” because she allowed a million Syrian refugees to enter her country. He tweeted that she was “ruining Germany” when Time magazine named her the person of the year.

Ms Merkel left her post as the leader of the Christian Democrats in 2018 and is expected to leave the office of the chancellor later this year, with the next German general election taking place on 26 September.

The chancellor flew to the US on Wednesday for a last visit to the White House on Thursday afternoon, when she’ll be meeting with President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other senior administration officials. It will be the fourth US administration Ms Merkel interacts with, having met every US president since George W Bush.