There’ll be a strong sense of déjà vu when French President Emmanuel Macronlays the flattery on thick for Donald Trump in Paris this weekend.
Few foreign leaders did more to woo Trump when he was the 45th president. In fact, Macron treated him with such deference at a Bastille Day parade on the Champs-Élysées that Trump came home wanting a military parade of his own — on July Fourth.
As Trump prepares to become the 47th president, Macron has surpassed himself, inviting Trump to attend the year’s most vaunted opening — the unveiling of the newly restored Notre Dame Cathedral five years after a savage fire.
Putting Trump at the center of the star-studded VIP event, which will mark his big return to the global stage, says everything about the power fast flowing back to the president-elect six weeks before he begins his second term.
Trump isn’t waiting until January to launch his new foreign policy — he’s already threatened a trade war with Canada and Mexico and showed who is boss when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rushed to Florida to appease him last week. And on Monday, he warned that there will be “ALL HELL TO PAY” in the Middle East if Hamas doesn’t release hostages in Gaza before Inauguration Day.
Trump’s starring role in Paris will also mark a poignant contrast with Joe Biden’s increasingly ignominious long goodbye. The president came under fierce criticism Monday, even from within his own party, after he pardoned his son Hunter, undercutting a core principle of his term — that everyone is equal before the law.
“He didn’t need to tell the American public, ‘I will not do this’ and he did … and when you made a promise, you gotta keep it,” Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine told CNN’s Manu Raju. Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney added: “It was a terrible decision and it just made me heart sick.”
The announcement of Trump’s trip to Paris came as Biden landed in Angola for an official presidential visit that is sure to include far more substance than Trump’s journey. The president seeks to highlight US commitment to sub-Saharan Africa in the face of China’s investment-led regional power play. Trump never made it to Africa as president and seemed more interested in insulting the continent than helping it. Biden’s visit will also showcase one of the most successful US global policies in decades – the massive program fighting HIV/AIDS in Africa that faces an uncertain future when Trump returns to the White House.
But the president-elect’s far more visible jaunt to the City of Light will stress how he is again the American that foreign leaders want to court as Biden increasingly fades from the international scene.
Trump’s win presented every global leader with a dilemma
Perhaps most significantly, Trump’s trip will highlight the dilemma with which every world leader is wrestling: how to deal with a new American president who is certain to be more aggressive and capricious on the world stage than he was even in his first turbulent term — and who often prefers the company of tyrants over allies.
The president-elect is reveling in his return to the international spotlight after news broke of Macron’s invitation Monday. “President Emmanuel Macron has done a wonderful job ensuring that Notre Dame has been restored to its full level of glory, and even more so. It will be a very special day for all!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
The trip promises all that the president-elect most appreciates. A chance to seize the spotlight; the adulation of being an honored guest; and the fanfare of being part of a unique spectacle likely to attract millions of eyeballs across the globe.
It’s also the kind of eye-catching gambit for which Macron is known — but that sometimes comes unstuck. The French president’s impulsive gesture earlier this year, for example, to call snap parliamentary elections backfired spectacularly and plunged the country into a governing crisis.
