(CNN) — French President Emmanuel Macron was prepared to present a unified case for Europe when he arrived at the Oval Office on Monday, at a moment when transatlantic ties have rapidly deteriorated.
When it came time to talk, however, there was little to indicate President Donald Trump was coming around to Macron’s point of view.
At one point, Macron attempted to correct his US counterpart on the nature of European support for Ukraine, interrupting Trump as he was speaking to suggest he was misstating the facts.
The extraordinary moment underscored the strained dynamics of Monday’s talks. While Trump and Macron otherwise appeared convivial and willing to engage on the future of Ukraine, the backdrop to the talks has been Trump’s sometimes false statements about the war effort.
“Just so you understand, Europe is loaning the money to Ukraine. They’re getting their money back,” Trump began as he was preparing to make the case for a new deal to secure Ukraine’s mineral revenues.
That is when Macron reached over to grab Trump’s arm to interject.
“No, in fact, to be frank, we paid. We paid 60% of the total effort. It was like the US: loans, guarantees, grants,” he said, as Trump smiled ruefully.
Trump did voice openness to a European peacekeeping force in Ukraine, a plan he’s expected to learn more about later this week when he receives the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He even said he’d discussed the idea with Vladimir Putin, and that the Russian president was also open to the idea.
He also said he was prepared to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy soon to finalize a deal that would allow US access to Ukraine’s mineral revenues.
“It looks like we’re getting very close,” Trump said.
But he was adamant that the Ukraine war could end within weeks, would not call Putin a dictator — a word he’s used to describe Ukraine’s leader — and reiterated his goal to visit Moscow at some point in the future.
Even before the two men sat down for their formal talks, Macron had already spent more than two hours at Trump’s side for a virtual meeting of the Group of 7. Both beamed in from the Oval Office, Trump behind his desk and Macron next to him, for the call marking the third anniversary of the Ukraine war.
“Everyone expressed their goal of seeing the War end, and I emphasized the importance of the vital ‘Critical Minerals and Rare-Earths Deal’ between the United States and Ukraine, which we hope will be signed very soon!” Trump wrote afterward on his Truth Social platform.
The G7 meeting came against a tense backdrop. Ahead of the talks, US officials had resisted inclusion of a reference to “Russian aggression” in a final leaders’ statement. Trump has also renewed his push to allow Russia to rejoin the group, reviving an argument he had in 2019 with Macron and other leaders at the summit the French president was hosting in Biarritz.
After Monday morning’s meeting, however, both men suggested the two-hour virtual summit went well. Departing the West Wing on foot, Macron called the talks “perfect.” Arriving back two hours later, he and Trump greeted each other warmly, with wide smiles and laughter.
Macron’s strategy of spending most of the day in front of Trump appeared intentional. Aside from the lengthy G7 talks, the pair is holding a meeting in the Oval Office, sitting with their teams for a working lunch in the Cabinet Room and addressing reporters at a joint news conference.
For the French leader, whose complicated history with Trump dates to 2017, Monday’s meetings are intended to employ what he believes is a unique rapport with the American president in order to advocate Ukraine and Europe’s case.
Macron said somewhat hopefully last week he thought Trump viewed him with high regard.
“He is someone I respect,” Macron said, “who I believe respects me.”
How much that matters in Monday’s talks isn’t entirely clear. Ahead of the meeting, Trump bemoaned what he said were lackluster efforts by both Macron and Starmer to end the war, insisting they “haven’t done anything,” despite significant contributions from both countries to Ukraine’s war effort.
In their talks, Macron may try to correct Trump on that point, one person familiar with the matter said. But what he is most intent on doing is managing the way forward, providing his view on how Europe can help ensure Ukraine’s security, as long as it is incorporated into talks to end the war.
Macron has already used his position to press Trump on support for Ukraine, arranging a surprise three-way meeting in Paris last December with himself, Trump and Zelenskyy around the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral. Trump was respectful and “in listening mode” during the meeting, one official said, as Zelenskyy laid out the necessity of security guarantees for Ukraine once the war ends.
Macron tried explaining to Trump that Putin had changed since the US president was last in office. And he warned that if Ukraine was defeated, the US could look weak to its other rivals — namely, China.
Two months later, those talks do not appear to have left a lasting impression on Trump, who in the past week has lashed out at Zelenskyy and suggested it was Ukraine that started the war.
European officials acknowledge it will be an impossible task to persuade Trump to abandon his erroneous views of the conflict, including that it was provoked by Ukraine or that the United States was conned into supporting a man he claims is a dictator.
Instead, officials involved in preparations for this week’s meetings say it will be more useful to look ahead, as Trump prepares to sit down soon with Putin and as the contours of a peace agreement in Ukraine come together.
Starmer, who meets Trump on Thursday, is expected to brief his US counterpart on an emerging plan to deploy as many as 30,000 European peacekeeping troops to Ukraine, hoping to demonstrate Europe’s commitment to shouldering more of the burden for the country’s security going forward. He may also reveal the date by which he wants the United Kingdom to raise defense spending to 2.5% of the GDP.
For his part, Macron intends to focus more on the bigger picture, appealing in part to his sense of how Trump views himself.
“I’m going to say to him, ‘Deep down you can’t be weak in the face of Putin, it’s not you, it’s not your trademark,” Macron said ahead of his departure for the United States.
Ahead of their travels, Macron and Starmer coordinated over the phone Sunday and agreed to “show united leadership” in their separate meetings with Trump, according to Downing Street.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
