Inside The Trump-Backed Campaign To Push Angela Merkel Out Of Power

WASHINGTON Its not new to hear U.S. officials rooting for regime change. Its just been a while since theyve talked about it with regard to Berlin.

President Donald Trump s attacks on Twitter against German Chancellor Angela Merkel this week provided the clearest evidence yet of a sprawling American campaign to undermine her. While Trumps disdain for Merkel has been evident since the early days of his presidential run, he and his ideological allies have ramped up their efforts dramatically just as the German leader faces what experts call one of her most serious challenges yet: developing a Europe-wide policy on asylum seekers by July 1 to appease a crucial right-wing partner in her coalition government.

Merkel now has to contend with not only local opponents but also a network of influential anti-immigrant Americans and other international activists inspired by Trump and similar illiberal leaders, like Hungarys Viktor Orban and Russias Vladimir Putin.

Theyre determined to punish the chancellor for welcoming more than a million desperate refugees seeking shelter in Europe since 2015 and ultimately want to prove that compassion toward immigrants is now political suicide in the West.

The leaders of the two biggest nations in Europe are increasingly besieged, said Gerald Knaus of the European Stability Initiative, referring to Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron. And both of the big outside powers, the U.S. and Russia, are on the side of those who besiege them.

The key players are hard to identify, but their number includes the president himself, national security adviser John Bolton , former White House aide and ongoing Trump defender Steve Bannon and powerful Trump whisperer Stephen Miller, who attacked Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign by calling her Americas Merkel.

Proof of their work trickles out in bits and pieces. A month before the presidents Monday tweet suggesting Germans are fed up with Merkels already tenuous coalition, his ambassador in Berlin, Republican operative Richard Grenell, had dinner with a hard-line and rebellious member of Merkels party, health minister Jens Spahn. Spahn wants Merkels job , and after his husband posted the image on Twitter , it drew attention and as much astonishment as derision in pro-Merkel Facebook groups, Kings College London lecturer Alexander Clarkson told HuffPost.

German distrust of Grenell grew just weeks later when he told Breitbart he wanted to empower hard-right activists around Europe who were dissatisfied with their countries political leaders. Many in Germany and across Europe understandably perceived his comments as interfering in domestic politics, nine U.S. senators argued in a June 12 letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Dinner with friends. Welcome to Berlin @RichardGrenell @mattlashey and Lola pic.twitter.com/iSVplTsqKt

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Dinner with friends. Welcome to Berlin @RichardGrenell @mattlashey and Lola pic.twitter.com/iSVplTsqKt
Daniel Funke (@Daniel_W_Funke) May 17, 2018

Grenell next announced plans to host the stridently anti-immigrant Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz for lunch on June 13. He had described the leader to Breitbart as a rock star. The U.S. embassy ultimately said the meal was canceled for scheduling reasons but Grenells endorsement was common knowledge once Kurz was in town. The Austrian used his time in Berlin to hold a joint press conference with German interior minister Horst Seehofer, where he called for European leaders to unite against immigrants. Hours later, Seehofer told Merkel he would not budge on plans to enforce a hard border around Germany violating a fundamental principle of the European Union by turning away asylum seekers registered in other European countries. His stubbornness escalated a dayslong dispute and magnified the risk that Merkels government would collapse.

Seehofers party, the conservative Christian Social Union, has spent decades aligned with Merkels center-right Christian Democratic Union. His move threatened to tear the two apart or leave Merkel looking like a lame duck for the sake of boosting the CSUs support among anti-immigrant voters ahead of October regional elections. It took days of negotiations and Merkel supporters rallying for Seehofer to agree to hold off and let Merkel try to address concerns about Germany taking more than its fair share of refugees.

The chancellor says she acknowledges the problem but wants an EU response, not an individual German one. She now needs to use a June 28-29 summit to convince 27 fellow European leaders to adopt a new joint policy on legally admitted asylum seekers who are registered in one country (usually those in the south and east, like Italy) and attempting to move to others.

But Merkel is working amid an international barrage of criticism and wildly exaggerated claims about the way her leadership has allowed refugees and migrants to threaten Europeans.

Much of that comes out of the U.S.

Popular conservative websites, from Breitbart to The Daily Signal, frequently run dramatic headlines about open borders supposedly causing murders and rampages . They know what theyre doing, playing up offenses against natives even though many asylum-seeker crimes are against other vulnerable migrants, and avoiding similar coverage of crime by native Germans or context about the falling number of crimes including violent offenses overall . In March, Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart, met with the race-baiting Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which won over 10 percent of the vote for the first time last year and wants to rally the public against immigration, often by peddling lies . The party wanted Bannon to help with its plan to establish its own 24-hour newsroom to have more sway on television and social media an attempt to mirror Bannons own U.S. success in making long-sidelined views seem more mainstream.

The AfD is not directly involved in the current crisis because it is not a member of Merkels coalition. But its determination to call the chancellor insufficiently tough on foreigners, and its potential electoral success in her coalition partners heartland, drove the split within the government. Polling suggests AfD views have gained traction since the fight broke out.