It took Trump just about an hour to form the appropriate media response to being "snubbed" by Time editors for Person of the Year 2015 in favor of Angela Merkel [10](and also the leader of the Islamic State, al-Baghdadi). He framed it, as he usually does, in Twitter format:
I told you @TIME [11] Magazine would never pick me as person of the year despite being the big favorite They picked person who is ruining Germany
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2015 [12]
And yes, it's easy to accuse Trump of being a sore loser (even though he continues to win: remember for the media mogul, it is all about media presence, and unwittingly Time contributed to his cause), but the reality as Reuters reports, is that once again, Trump may be - in his traditionally very politically incorrect and hyperbolic way - spot on.
Read the following [13]and decide if Trump may be, in fact, right:
In past years, Angela Merkel has been feted like a superstar at annual meetings of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, earning thunderous ovations for defending German interests in the euro crisis and facing down Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. But a CDU congress in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe next week is shaping up to be a very different affair. Under intense pressure from conservative allies to reduce the flood of refugees into Germany, the 61-year-old chancellor faces the biggest test of her authority from within the party in years.
The influential youth wing of the party has openly defied her in the run-up to the glitzy two-day event by demanding she agree to an "Obergrenze", or cap on the number of asylum seekers Germany accepts - a step she has repeatedly rejected on the grounds it would be impossible to enforce.
Her Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union (CSU), have been pressing for a cap for months, and even some of Merkel's own ministers are lobbying openly for a tougher stance from the chancellor, who marked 10 years in office last month and must decide by next autumn whether she will seek a fourth term in 2017.
"Merkel has never endured such sharp criticism from within her own ranks since becoming chancellor," read a front-page editorial in conservative daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Monday. "Under no circumstances can she allow the congress to approve a resolution on refugee policy that includes the word 'Obergrenze'."
'CATASTROPHIC MOOD'
But some CDU members described the mood in the party as abysmal.
For the first time in years, off-the-record conversations with lawmakers in Berlin are littered with criticisms of Merkel, echoing the era before she became chancellor when a cabal of conservative men worked behind the scenes to undermine the protestant pastor's daughter from communist East Germany.
Last week, former Saxony justice minister Steffen Heitmann became the first prominent member of the CDU to announce he was leaving the party. In a letter to Merkel which was leaked to the media, he said he had never felt "so foreign in my own country".
The atmosphere could not be more different than it was back in 2012, when at a CDU congress in Hanover, Merkel was re-elected party leader by 98 percent of delegates, a score so high that German reporters jokingly likened it to the sham elections of East German leaders during Merkel's youth.
"The mood among conservative members of parliament is really catastrophic right now," said one senior CDU lawmaker, declining to be named. "Merkel is totally isolated."
"She needs to wake up," said another top ranking party member. "Merkel's solution to this crisis depends on the goodwill of people like (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and (Turkish President Tayyip) Erdogan. It simply won't work."
And now, ironically enough, Donald J. Trump