As he continues on his crusade to make enemies and influence people, Donald Trump welcomes French president Emmanuel Macron.
Macron is the first European leader to visit during Trump’s second term – and he will be swiftly followed by UK prime minister Keir Starmer, who will land in the US on Thursday.
It couldn’t be a stranger time to meet. The Conservative Political Action Conference – otherwise known as CPAC, the star-studded annual event that caters to the most far-right of the right wing in the US – wrapped up on Saturday, with an hour-long speech by Trump himself in which he announced that the US Department of International Aid would effectively no longer exist (it will, instead, become an entity run by customs and border officials.)
The war in Ukraine, he said during the same speech, “affects Europe. It doesn’t really affect us”. That echoed what he’d tweeted two days earlier: that the outcome in Ukraine is immaterial to America, considering “we have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation”.
Of all the weird things that happened at CPAC – Elon Musk waving around a chainsaw; Steve Bannon doing one of those, ahem, Roman salutes we seem to be seeing everywhere these days (Bannon claims it was “just a wave”) – Trump’s speech was still unfathomably weird. He delighted in deliberately misspeaking Kamala Harris’s name, claimed that he was cheated in the 2024 election (yes, the election he won), made strange, false claims about autism, and went off on a tangent about American deaths during the construction of the Panama Canal in the early 1900s.
Good luck to Macron, whose own social media timelines are full of announcements that he’s discussed Ukraine with another European leader, or just wrapped up his fourth phone call that week with Volodymyr Zelensky. As Trump rides high off the far-right fumes of CPAC, he’ll no doubt arrive to the negotiating room emboldened and more egotistical than usual.
Because that’s what it will be: a negotiating room. For both Macron and Starmer, these meetings are unlikely to be friendly sitdowns aimed at forging lasting ties between leaders at the beginning of a new administration.
Of course, we don’t know everything that will be discussed behind closed doors – especially since The Donald has a reputation for meandering conversation (phone calls between Trump and the two prime ministers who served during his first term, Boris Johnson and Theresa May, reportedly often devolved into rants about wind turbines and Scottish golf courses.) But ending the war in Ukraine, and the possibility of US-imposed tariffs on European countries, are supposed to be high on the agenda. And those are not going to make for easy conversation.
One of the problems is that the president, who used to be dangerously isolationist – America First, no more forever wars and all that jazz – has now done a full pendulum swing to dangerously neocolonial. The aside about the Panama Canal at CPAC is part of a grievance campaign aimed at taking control of the busy waterway.
And it’s not the only part of the world he has his eye on. Greenland is in his sights – Donald Trump Jr even did a showy day-trip to the island in early January, despite Denmark making it clear that Greenland is not for sale – and so is Canada, or at least its resources. He infamously talked about the US “owning” the Gaza Strip and turning it into “the Riviera of the Middle East” after a recent meeting with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Oh, and he wants half of Ukraine’s precious earth minerals, too (it seems likely now that he will get them.)
All of this in just over eight weeks, and that’s without mentioning a back-and-forth over global tariffs that battered the US economy almost immediately. There was a meme that got shared a lot in the early days after Trump’s 2024 victory, parodying American Horror Story: “There’s not going to be cheap groceries, you stupid slut!” And there certainly are not cheap groceries. Which is shocking, really, considering the richest man in the world teamed up with a trust-fund billionaire president because they cared so much about the working class, and they absolutely promised that everything would become cheap immediately.
The past few weeks of Trump’s second stab at the presidency have been more volatile than even I, a devoted pessimist, could have imagined.
A podcaster for the deputy head of the FBI; thousands of federal employees laid off by a group named after a dog meme and populated with 19- to 24-year-olds, many of whom haven’t even graduated college yet; sudden, bizarre claims that Zelensky is to blame for the war in Ukraine and is a “dictator”; more than 70 executive orders, some so hastily written that they amount to nonsense; meetings with Putin in the desert.
Even right-wing Republicans have expressed some discomfort about what Trump’s been saying about Putin, but it doesn’t matter. If you’re planning to govern via executive order rather than putting anything through Congress, why listen to the people in your party?
Of course, there will be challenges. The most egregious developments – things like taking away birthright citizenship, something guaranteed in the 14th Amendment – are so legally flimsy that they’re unlikely to stick. But the sheer amount of work needed to be done to untangle these orders will tie up challengers for months, perhaps years. This is shock-and-awe governance: targeted troublemaking devised by men for whom the United States’ guardrails are a plaything.
Trump convinced a lot of people that he’s a consummate dealmaker who can solve tricky problems with his outside-of-the-box thinking. We saw how true that was during his last administration, when he promised to bring North Korea back into the fold and actually ended up holding some very public talks that started off promising, then deteriorated into name-calling and ultimately failed. He has since shown himself to be naive and easily manipulated.
Putin knows that flattery gets you everywhere with Trump – that if you let Trump think he’s won a concession or that you personally admire his business acumen, you can get whatever you want from him. It’s clear that that approach has worked in the past few weeks, where the US president has emerged as one of Putin’s greatest defenders – and Zelensky’s greatest detractors.
Both Macron and Starmer are put in impossible positions. If you push back too hard on Trump, you get the ire of a petulant bully combined with the might of a global superpower. Both centre-left figures have tried their hardest not to outright insult the president in the past few weeks. And it’s highly unlikely that Keir Starmer is about to stand up and do a Hugh-Grant-in-Love-Actually moment where he publicly pushes back against “the friend who bullies us”.
Much as many would love to see that, it could be a catastrophic error, considering Musk is lurking in the background, talking incessantly about overthrowing the UK government and somehow (presumably through financial backing) putting the far right in power. He did the same with Germany, and one can draw one’s own conclusions from the results of last week’s German elections.
Europe is now having to reorient itself, in a world where a special relationship has become an abusive relationship. The simple fact is that Europe has tied itself to the US so strongly – in terms of trade, in terms of culture, in terms of military protection – that it cannot simply freeze it out.
Trump must be navigated, his fluctuating moods must be managed: don’t mention his name when you talk about the damage his policies have done, make sure to call him a great dealmaker on social media even if the opposite is true, take a selfie if you can, do the thumbs-up, take the phone calls, tiptoe around the tantrums and try to gently guide him toward the right solution.
When it concerns a wayward toddler, we call this approach parenting. When it’s a president, we call it tough diplomacy. But either way, it demands a lot of emotional labor — and it sucks a lot of energy out of your day that could have been committed to building, fixing and creating other things.
Just over eight weeks in to the second Trump term, no doubt Macron and Starmer both feel like it’s going to be a long four years.
