President-elect Donald Trump will attend France’s Notre Dame Cathedral’s reopening ceremony during his first foreign trip since he won a second term in the White House.
Trump announced on Monday evening he would travel to the ceremony in Paris, France. The cathedral’s grand reopening is scheduled for Saturday. It comes after an intensive yearslong restoration process launched after the European landmark suffered over $770 million in damage during a devastating fire in 2019.
“It is an honor to announce that I will be traveling to Paris, France, on Saturday to attend the reopening of the Magnificent and Historic Notre Dame Cathedral, which has been fully restored after a devastating fire five years ago,” Trump said in a post to Truth Social.
He celebrated France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, for doing 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 concluded.
After winning his first term in office in 2016, Trump’s first meeting as president-elect with a foreign leader was with the leader of Japan, then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Trump’s praise for Macron, and his decision to grace the prime minister’s country with his first trip as president-elect, comes as he has had a relationship full of ups and downs with the French leader.
Ahead of Macron’s state visit to Washington, D.C., in 2018, when he addressed a joint session of Congress, Trump repeatedly touted his relationship with the French president and said his speech to United States’s lawmakers would be “great.”
But the next year, Trump called Macron a “pain in the ass.”
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However, Macron congratulated Trump after he clinched a second term in early November, saying he was ready to work together with “respect and ambition” like “we managed to do for four years.”
Trump’s scheduled trip to Paris follows his move to nominate Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as the U.S. ambassador to France.