German politicians slamming Trump for successfully attracting investment to the U.S. (which is his job, by the way) and accusing Audi’s CEO of “management failures” is peak German incompetence. Rather than challenging this chorus of establishment parties and their left-liberal attacks on Trump and Audi’s CEO, Berlin’s political class is almost unanimously joining in. This refusal to acknowledge its own failures, combined with the resulting unpredictability of German policymaking, lies at the heart of the downward spiral into which chancellors such as Merkel, Scholz and Merz have led Germany. Berlin’s economically incompetent leadership now presumes to lecture one of Germany’s leading carmakers on where to invest. The arrogance is staggering. These politicians bear responsibility for the conditions that have left the German economy struggling and threaten to push many of its largest companies further into decline. Yet when a company responds to those conditions by investing elsewhere, they blame its management instead of examining their own failed policies. Audi is right to pursue opportunities in the United States. Its management has a responsibility to protect shareholder value and seek competitive returns. Whether German politicians feel slighted because the next Audi factory is built in the U.S. rather than Germany should not determine where the company invests. What CEO would stay in Germany and continue destroying shareholder value simply to please Berlin and its woke politicians, if the company could earn substantially higher profits abroad, particularly in the United States, where its investment is more welcome and receives greater support than at home? Merkel, Scholz and Merz bear substantial political responsibility for Germany’s deteriorating competitiveness, the pressures on domestic industries such as car manufacturing, and the resulting factory closures and relocation of production overseas. Their policies have undermined Germany as a place to do business (not least through excessively high energy costs driven by the nuclear phase-out, the halt to imports of cheap gas from Eastern Europe and the failure to secure reliable, competitively priced alternatives). As for @realDonaldTrump, Berlin’s self-important political elite should take a long, hard look in the mirror. Had Germany produced even one senior politician or chancellor in recent decades who championed Germany’s economic interests as vigorously as Trump champions America’s, Germany would not be in such a dire position today. Instead, German politicians would rather concern themselves with the authoritarian EU, Ukraine, global climate policy, foreign aid, NGOs, the UN, political correctness, gender-inclusive language, endless diversity programmes and ever more regulation than make Germany great again, both politically and economically. The two go hand in hand, something Berlin seems to have forgotten. Neither Germany’s political power nor its economic strength will recover through finger-pointing at companies that respond rationally to the conditions politicians themselves have created. As long as Berlin refuses to confront its own failures, the decline will continue.