With his administration under fire for its draconian border policies, President Donald Trump decided Monday morning to wade into another country’s immigration debate, tweeting, “The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!” He then added, “We don’t want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us!”

The first thing to note about this is that it’s wrong. Germany’s crime rate was at its lowest last year since 1992, with dramatic reductions in burglaries and youth-related violence. However, a number of high-profile crimes, including the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl by an Iraqi asylum-seeker last month and the 2016 terrorist attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, have stoked opposition to the government’s migration policies.

The political crisis Trump refers to, however, is real and quite serious, though it had shown some signs of abating on the same day he started tweeting. The root of the crisis is a dispute between Chancellor Angela Merkel and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who is also the leader of the Christian Social Union, the more conservative Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union.