But when it comes to Trump, Merkel’s reservations aren’t just about style. They’re about an American president whose admiration of strongmen is deeply unnerving to Germans who spent decades learning the lessons of their authoritarian past and building a prosperous democracy.

“He is questioning the traditional West, both in rhetoric, in his concept of ‘America First,’ introducing a new nationalism and explicitly economic nationalism,” Norbert Roettgen, the head of the Foreign Relations Committee in Germany’s parliament, told me recently.