President-elect Donald Trump has accepted an invitation from French President Emmanuel Macron to attend the reopening of Paris’s cathedral, Notre Dame, on Saturday. Trump will also meet Macron at the Elysee Palace, likely meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shortly thereafter.
Devastated in a 2019 fire, the Catholic cathedral has seen its major repairs recently finished. Notre Dame was originally completed 764 years ago, at a time when Native American tribes were only beginning to develop formative cultures in North America. Notre Dame most certainly is a place to behold. Describing the cathedral during a visit in 1785, Thomas Jefferson assessed, “It bids defiance to description.”
Trump is right to honor this heritage and the French nation responsible for it. As America’s oldest ally, France was indispensable to the creation of the United States. France remains an important U.S. ally. After years of neglect and related hot air from Macron, the French military is beginning to get proper investment. Macron is also embracing greater European leadership against Russian threats to the continent. By appearing in Paris, then, Trump reminds the world that he values historic alliances even as those alliances face contemporary difficulties — difficulties such as Macron’s wooing of China at high cost to critical U.S. security interests, difficulties that extend to U.S. relations with the European Union and even to relations with the United Kingdom.
Yet, that Trump, so sensitive to perceived criticism, accepted this invitation at all underlines an enduring truth. Namely, that Macron is a chameleon seducer for the ages.
I’ve previously suggested that Macron is a kind-of modern day Talleyrand: smart, duplicitous, and silver-tongued. Nonetheless, amid Macron’s apparently genuine willingness to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin more effectively, that description seems unfair. And it remains true that Macron has the right to be at least somewhat angry with America over the AUKUS submarine deal. There’s no question, however, that Macron’s latest wooing of Trump is remarkable.
On first entering the Oval Office in Jan. 2017, Trump was quickly seduced by the then-boyish French president. Hosting Trump as his guest at honor at the Eiffel Tower’s magnificent Jules Verne restaurant and at Paris’s annual Bastille Day military parade, Macron made Trump believe that the leader of America’s oldest ally was his truest international friend. Trump was so enamored by the French military parade that he briefly sought to replicate it in Washington. Later hosting Macron for a state visit, Trump kissed the French president on the cheek, offering the beaming endorsement, “I like him a lot.”
But the bromance didn’t last.
Trump and the White House foreign policy staff later came to consider Macron as overly manipulative in pursuing his own interests at the expense of the U.S. And once Trump had left office, Macron and his diplomats shamelessly derided the departed president. President Joe Biden recalls how he used an early G7 summit to state that “America was back.” Biden says that Macron responded, “For how long?” Assuming Biden isn’t inventing this anecdote, and Macron has never denied it, Macron’s implication was clear: Trump’s America was not one that Macron could ever truly respect.
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To be sure, it is positive that Macron and Trump are now meeting up. Both countries are better served by an honest dialogue and, where possible, cooperative engagement. It’s also true that Trump’s nomination of an election fraud felon as the ambassador to Paris is an undue insult to this oldest ally. But just as Macron will be understandably wary of Trump’s ego and unpredictability, so also should Trump pinch himself amid the par excellence Elysee fanfare.
Macron might not share the hostile intent of Iago in William Shakespeare’s Othello. But Iago’s warning warrants Trump’s attention nevertheless: “I follow him to serve my turn upon him. We cannot all be masters, nor all masters Cannot be truly followed.”