(Daily Caller) German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel gave a grim view of President Donald Trump in an interview with local media Friday.
Gabriel told Germans they would be in for a “rough ride” under the Trump administration, and thinks his election is a result of “a bad radicalization.” He took biggest issue with Trump’s “America First” pledge in his inauguration, saying, “What we heard today were high nationalistic tones.”
He did not stop there, adding that the only the thing missing from Trump’s speech was a similar rhetorical device once used by Adolf Hitler before he rose to power. Gabriel and German Chancellor Angela Merkel face re-election in September, amidst a rise of nationalist parties throughout Europe. These nationalist parties seem to correlate with Merkel’s 2015 declared open-door refugee policy, which flooded Europe with migrants from multiple war-zones in majority Muslim countries.
Trump himself echoed these claims in an Times of London interview Jan. 15, saying he thought Merkel’s decision to allow nearly a million refugees into German was a “catastrophic mistake.”
“I do believe this, if they (the EU countries) hadn’t been forced to take in all of the refugees, so many … I think that you wouldn’t have a Brexit,” he said.\
Merkel reacted critically to Trump’s election with a congratulatory message laying out first a set of values she believed the U.S. and Germany share, adding, “I offer the next President of the United States close cooperation on the basis of these values.”
After Trump gave an interview calling elements of NATO “obsolete,” he similarly drew a sharp response from Merkel. Merkel said in a public statement afterwards that “Europe’s fate is in our hands.”
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