Before Trump's tiff, he held a much more crucial meeting...

As the inevitable bust-up between a quixotic US president and his wayward billionaire tech guru was erupting into colourful headlines around the world, a tall, grey, spectacled man, very different in character from either, was quietly leaving the White House with his entourage.

- MARY DEJEVSKY

This was Friedrich Merz, the head of Germany’s new government, who had just completed his first visit to the Oval Office as chancellor. It was a meeting that may prove of more lasting significance for the wider world than the verbal fireworks between Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

In the main, the Trump-Merz encounter went well – no doubt to an extent, because foreign leaders visiting the White House are learning. As the two sat side by side in the Oval Office, it was hard not to believe that Merz had not spent some preparation time studying the worst (the ambush of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky) and the best (the smoothly authoritative defence of Canada by Mark Carney) examples of how to handle Donald Trump.

Beyond some token flattery, Chancellor Merz began by saying comparatively little, helped along by a US press corps far more interested in domestic politics, including Trump vs Musk, than in US-German relations. He piped up a little more on Germany’s rising defence spending – eliciting a jocular aside from Trump about how there was a time when a German leader announcing increased military spending would not have been so well received in the US – before touching on the vexed tariff question, with the two jointly accepting that any bilateral discussions would have to be continued in the EU context.