Analysis: Paris invite shows power is fast flowing from Biden to Trump
There’ll be a strong sense of déjà vu when French President Emmanuel Macron lays 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. 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.
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