As for Merkel, she used her own statement to issue a veiled scolding for Trump, who previously said she was “ruining” Germany with a “catastrophic mistake” of an open-door refugee policy. “I've always said it's much, much better to talk to one another and not about one another, and I think our conversation proved this,” Merkel said.

Perhaps that is so, but there was little talking to each other during the press conference; instead, Trump shot from the hip and Merkel sought to either smooth things over or stay out of the way. It wasn’t an easy task.

Trump got several questions about his continued, inexplicable insistence that President Obama surveilled him prior to the election. He ignored the first, which came from a German reporter, but answered it the second time, when a second German reporter asked if it had been a mistake for Sean Spicer to read a story in the White House briefing room on Thursday that accused the British intelligence agency GCHQ of helping to surveil Trump.

The president started off with an uncomfortable deadpan remark—joke?—about the 2013 revelation that Merkel had been the subject of NSA wiretaps.

“As far as wiretapping I guess by this past administration, at least we have something in common perhaps,” Trump said, to somewhat incredulous laughter in the room.

“And just to finish your question, we said nothing,” Trump continued. “All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind who was the one responsible for saying that on television. I didn't make an opinion on it. That was a statement made by a very talented lawyer on Fox. And so you shouldn't be talking to me, you should be talking to Fox.”

Trump’s claim of having tendered no opinion was a lie. In a series of March 4 tweets lodging the allegation, and he most certainly did “make an opinion,” calling it “McCarthyism” and “Nixon/Watergate” and calling Obama a “Bad (or sick) guy!” And in pinning the story on Andrew Napolitano, a onetime New Jersey judge who is a Fox legal analyst, Trump implied that it didn’t matter whether he gave a platform to baseless accusations, much less endorsed them, because he hadn’t originated them. The buck doesn’t stop in Trump’s Oval Office.

The problems with this approach became clear with Britain’s fury about the GCHQ accusation. After complaints from U.K. officials, the White House issued a statement saying, “Ambassador Kim Darroch and Sir Mark Lyall expressed their concerns to Sean Spicer and [National Security Adviser H.R.] McMaster. Mr. Spicer and General McMaster explained that Mr. Spicer was simply pointing to public reports, not endorsing any specific story.”

If that explanation was intended to soothe tensions with America’s closest ally, Trump did all he could to throw things back into chaos during the press conference, managing to poke sore spots for both Britain and Germany at the same time.