The most-read item in Germany on Friday was a picture of a bird. On Wednesday afternoon the White House posted, without comment, a photograph of a bald eagle — the official emblem of the United States — pinning a Canada goose to the ice. It followed a longer post announcing a hard line in the tariff dispute with Canada, which said Canada had been taking the United States for a ride for decades and that President Trump was tired of it getting away with it, and added that Canadians think they have a right to something but are not a state and will not have that right any more. Newsweek gives that post's title as President Trump Is Finally Ending Canada's Free Ride.
Online, the reply was that the picture does not end the way it looks. Users pointed out that encounters between bald eagles and Canada geese do not necessarily go badly for the goose, and pointed at a series taken by the Canadian amateur photographer Mervyn Sequeira, who made headlines in Canada in early 2025. In that sequence the eagle attacks over roughly twenty minutes, the goose keeps getting back up, and at the end the eagle gives up and flies off. "There were moments when we thought it was over for the goose," Sequeira told CBC at the time. He said he had posted the photographs without attaching political meaning to them, and that many people had read them politically anyway.
Where the two accounts we hold part company is whether that is the same photograph. Newsweek says it is — that the image was taken during the encounter Sequeira documented on Lake Ontario, and that the White House had shared it before, in 2025, in reply to a post by Justin Trudeau. Der Spiegel says it is not: the colouring, the background, the plumage and the angle differ from Sequeira's pictures. Der Spiegel located the White House image in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's database, where it is credited to Derek Stoll and dated 17 January 2022, in New York State. The White House gave no photographer at all. Der Spiegel adds an editor's note saying it identified the image after publication and added the database's details then.
Der Spiegel ends on the people mocking the post rather than the post: Trump's opponents online, it argues, are falling into exactly the distorted seeing they accuse him of — noticing only what fits.
The tariffs underneath the picture are Newsweek's line: fifty percent duties on roughly twenty billion dollars of Canadian exports, from wine, furniture and dairy to cement, clothing, fishing tackle and hockey gear, after trade talks collapsed.
Why it is on the board
Top of Der Spiegel's most-read list when we collected. A one-lens entry: Germany is the country where our video and search lenses were thinnest this round. The killing of two people at a school in Brandenburg ran on all three German lists we read — Der Spiegel's, Die Zeit's and n-tv's — and the photograph was still the single most-read item.
확인: Der Spiegel · Newsweek