President Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron shared a firm and lengthy handshake outside the Oval Office on Monday ahead of a bilateral meeting dominated by Russia’s war on Ukraine.
After the initial grip-and-grin, accompanied by mutual pats on the shoulder, the American president pulled his French counterpart close in to continue the greeting.
Trump, 78, and Macron, 47, then waved to the assembled media before ducking inside the West Wing.
Inside the Oval Office, the two leaders shook hands twice more — at one point grabbing each other’s mitts in the “thumb war” formation familiar to millions of schoolchildren around the world.
The relationship between the two leaders has been intensely studied dating back to April 2018, when the two exchanged the traditional French “bise” on both cheeks during Trump’s first term in office.
Monday’s meeting was Trump’s first in-person appearance with Macron since the two met in Paris this past December alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the reopening of the historic Notre Dame Cathedral.
During that Paris meeting, Trump surprised Macron with the strength of his handshake, almost dragging the French head of state along with him.
Once Trump and Macron got down to business, the US president said his priority was ending Europe’s largest and deadliest war since World War II in a matter of “weeks” — and claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin said there is “no problem” with having European troops serving as peacekeepers in Ukraine whenever the war ends.
The president also said he was interested in “trying to do some economic development deals” with Moscow, which is currently under sweeping US sanctions as a result of the invasion of Feb. 24, 2022.
“We’re trying to do some economic development deals. They have a lot of things that we want, and we’ll see. I mean, I don’t know if that will come to fruition, but we’d love to be able to do that, if we could,” Trump said, noting that Russia, like Ukraine, has massive reserves of rare-earth minerals.
The president then said he wanted to visit Moscow once the war is over — after flatly denying a report by a French magazine last week that he would take part in V-E Day celebrations May 9 alongside the Kremlin tyrant.
Macron said in a video last week that he would use the Oval Office meeting to try and convince Trump to keep distance from Putin and to continue supporting Ukraine.
“You can’t be weak in the face of President Putin,” Macron said he would relay to Trump. “It’s not you, it’s not your trademark, it’s not in your interest. How can you then be credible in the face of China if you’re weak in the face of Putin?”
