EPA/REUTERS Donald Trump will launch a scathing attack on Angela Merkel

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The Republican frontrunner will say Mrs Merkel has damaged her own country beyond repair, adding Germans thought it was the "greatest place on Earth" two years but is now a "sad, sad shame". Mr Trump, who has made repeated interventions in the debate over the European migrant crisis, will brand the German leader's asylum policy mad and say he "doesn't know what happened to her" in a blistering attack.

He will make the comments during a TV interview with British presenter Piers Morgan, to be broadcast later tonight. In a revealing interview the controversial billionaire will also lay into his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, who he describes as "close to incompetent".

REUTERS Mr Trump says Germany will never recover from Mrs Merkel's migration policies

EPA Mrs Merkel controversially invited all Syrians to settle in Germany

And he will express his view that November's Paris terror attacks could have been averted if France and the rest of Europe had lax gun laws like America. But probably the most damning invective is reserved for Mrs Merkel, whose reputation as an accomplished stateswoman has taken a battering over her handling of the migrant crisis. The criticism focusses around her controversial rallying call to migrants last year when she invited all Syrians to settle in Germany in a move which unleashed millions of people from across the Middle East on Europe. Since then there have been two major Islamic State (ISIS) terror attacks in Paris and Brussels, with fears that thousands of jihadis have exploited the chaos to smuggle themselves into the continent.

EPA More than a million migrants have flooded into Europe already

EPA Mr Trump also laid into Hillary Clinton during his TV interview

Tonight Mr Trump will say: "What Merkel did to Germany is a shame, it’s a sad, sad shame what’s happened to Germany. "I have friends in Germany, they want to leave Germany. These are people that two years ago were telling me that it’s the greatest place on Earth and now they want to leave. "I don’t know what happened to her, I don’t know what her thinking was, but I don’t think they are going to recover from it very easily if at all." The controversial tycoon offers a similarly scathing review of Mrs Clinton, who is likely to be his opponent in the race for the White House next year.

He will say: "Well she's close to incompetent. Look, every decision she's made, she's made such bad decisions, including the emails and including Whitewater [real estate scandal] and including everything. "So I think she's close to incompetent as far as decision making is concerned. She's not a leader and I don't think she has the strength or the energy to be President, you need tremendous strength and tremendous energy and I don't see it with Hillary.” Asked about how he would tackle the horrific death toll from shootings in the US, Mr Trump said he would invest more money in mental health services to help troubled people rather than tighten up regulation on who can buy guns. He controversially claimed that America's love of guns would have helped prevent the Paris massacre. But it did not help during the San Bernardino massacre, when ISIS fanatics Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik went on the rampage, and there are almost no instances of armed civilians successfully stopping a mass shooting.

Angela Merkel in pictures Tue, August 8, 2017 Angela Merkel has served as German Chancellor since 2005 and Leader of the Christian Democratic Union since 2000. We take a look at her political career in pictures. Play slideshow AFP/Getty Images 1 of 83 Angela Merkel through the years