“You need to dazzle him and suck up to him,” said a European official, noting that Macron and Trump “have already done the Eiffel Tower … What’s left, if not the Hall of Mirrors at the Versailles Palace?”
European leaders have observed that the most successful Trump visits have involved detours with royalty — preferably in palaces — such as dinner with the king and queen of the Netherlands during last year’s NATO summit in The Hague. Similarly, Trump appeared genuinely impressed by his royal welcome at Windsor Palace in the U.K.
Macron learnt those lessons early on. As host of the G7 summit in the Atlantic seaside resort of Biarritz in 2019, the French president appeared to avert disaster when he improvised a private lunch with Trump, who had arrived threatening fresh trade tariffs against France.
Expect the unexpected
But in the wake of Trump’s global tariff war and his disregard for the opinions of allies on the wars in Iran and Ukraine, there are doubts in Europe over whether France’s diplomatic tradecraft and Macron’s finesse may actually achieve anything.
“Flattery is effective only as part of a power dynamic,” said the same European official quoted above, noting that Europeans got Trump to back down on Greenland with a mixture of adulation and power moves. “Or if there is some sort of immediate gain for the United States, or the Trump family.”
“And that’s one thing we can’t do,” added the official. “We can’t give Trump a château in France.”