Trump tweeted later, but the “Secret Service said NO.” White House Chief of Staff John Kelly did attend the ceremony, at the site of a battle in which 1,800 Americans died. Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid their respects to the war dead under gray skies at another ceremony the same day. Later in the trip, Trump sat stonily as Macron delivered a rebuke of his “America First” politics. In a speech, Macron branded nationalism a “betrayal of patriotism” and warned against “old
demons coming back to wreak chaos and death.” Trump blasted Macron with a series of incendiary tweets, mocking his low approval ratings and even the Nazi occupation of France. “How did that work out for France? They were starting to learn German in Paris before the U.S. came along,” Trump wrote.
The “crumbling” of America’s alliance with Europe couldn’t have been any clearer in Paris, said Robin Wright in NewYorker .com. As European leaders marched together in the rain toward the Arc
de Triomphe on Armistice Day, Trump chose “the dry comfort of his limousine.” Russian President Vladimir Putin was “the only leader that the president seemed to connect with.” Putin also arrived
at the ceremony alone, and “gave Trump a thumbs-up.”
Trump showed “contempt” for America’s service members by skipping the memorial at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, said Max Boot in The Washington Post. Instead, he holed up at the U.S. ambassador’s residence. This is par for the course. “He still has not visited U.S. troops deployed to a war zone,” and is now using troops as “political props” at the Mexican border. That’s not to say he didn’t sacrifice anything by skipping the ceremony. “Odds are that his room didn’t have Fox News.”
Macron “chose an odd occasion” to lecture an American president, said Steve Cortes in RealClearPolitics.com. It was American nationalism that “animated our mighty republic” to save
Europe—not once, but twice. Religious liberty, pluralism, freeenterprise economics, “respect for our Constitution, and reverence for our great flag” define America’s “enlightened” nationalism. Conflating it with Nazi ethno-fascism misses the mark. When such ideals were endangered in Europe, we demonstrated our “historic commitment” to defending them by fighting overseas.
