By admin 
- President Donald Trump, notably, didn’t leave this year’s Group of 7 summit early or rip up any joint statements.
- He arrived in France with a lingering sense of triumph at having brokered a preliminary deal with Iran, which was praised by his fellow leaders.
- French President Emmanuel Macron engineered the lakeside summit to keep Trump engaged, culminating in a late-night dinner at Versailles.
For the first time in his two presidencies, Donald Trump attended a Group of 7 summit this week without blowing it up.
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Sure, he complained when the temperature of the meeting room was too warm. He joked, upon arriving an hour late to one session, that he was his fellow leaders’ boss. The summit’s host, French President Emmanuel Macron, was caught on a hot mic describing an al fresco first-night dinner with Trump as a “difficult discussion.”
Yet Trump didn’t leave early, as he did last year in Canada, which was a baseline success for Macron, who had engineered the lakeside summit to ensure the US president stayed for the entire program.
And instead of ripping up a joint leaders’ statement upon his departure, as he did after a particularly acrimonious summit in 2018, Trump endorsed surprisingly tough language in a group statement about Russia’s war in Ukraine, vowing “unwavering support” for Kyiv.
“This was something very special,” Trump declared when the summit had ended.
Perhaps it was the alpine air. Perhaps it was the lingering sense of triumph at having brokered a preliminary deal with Iran, which received undiluted praise from his fellow leaders despite their lingering questions about how it will all be implemented.
Or maybe it was the anticipation of dinner at Versailles, tacked onto the schedule by Macron to ensure Trump remained in France for the summit’s conclusion. Louis XIV’s symbol of regal excess (and, eventually, revolutionary class resentment) is “not gold leaf,” Trump explained this week, but the “real deal.”
When he arrived to the checkerboard marble courtyard at the oh-so-French dinner hour of 10 p.m., Trump was greeted with a bise on both cheeks by Brigitte Macron — who Trump claimed a few months ago was mistreating her husband.
“This is so beautiful,” he said after marveling at the classical facade with its gilded dormers. “Brigitte is an amazing woman.”
Dinner was, by French standards, a simple affair: black pork from Bigorre to start, asparagus from the Loire, poultry from Bourbonnais and a regional cheese plate.
His table pour trois with the Macrons, situated in the Lower Gallery, was surrounded by statues commissioned by the Sun King himself.
Trump has now attended five G7s (or six, if counting the one he halfheartedly hosted virtually during the Covid pandemic in 2020). Unlike his earlier outings, Trump is now a senior member of the exclusive club. Most of the other leaders were elected within the last few years, and aside from Macron, no one else in the group has attended as many.
That has lent Trump’s recent outings on the world stage a different tone. Unlike his first term, when advisers said Trump felt the need to demonstrate power and confidence to his more seasoned counterparts, Trump is more muted, even as he continues to drive a wedge with traditional allies.
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He’s also older, a fact that was somewhat inescapable this week. After leaving Washington at 2 a.m. Monday following his 80th birthday UFC fight on the White House South Lawn, Trump flew overnight and began an afternoon of meetings at the Hôtel Royal, his voice sounding hoarse. Over the next two days, he met for hours with individual leaders and fielded questions multiple times a day. By the time he emerged for a 70-minute press conference two days later, he was visibly and audibly fatigued.
Behind the scenes, Trump was forceful in defending his Iran agreement to fellow leaders, according to officials familiar with the conversations. He framed the terms as a major win not only for the United States but for his fellow leaders as well.
Some meetings were periodically tense, including a one-on-one with Macron the day he arrived, according to a European official. But leaders lavished praise on the American president for his Iran agreement, which has the potential to end a months-long energy crunch that has affected Europe far more than the United States.
“I think it’s a gamechanger,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has spent the last several months jousting from afar with Trump, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “It allows us, and this is what’s happened in the meeting, to step back, look anew at Ukraine.”
Carney is one of several leaders who entered the summit looking for make-nice moments with Trump after he’d insulted them this year. Approaching the president at one meeting, Carney detailed an electric vehicle provision in a new trade deal with China.
“I thought you’d actually like that,” Carney offered. (Trump, who said he did like it, later said he didn’t remember the conversation).
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz waited until all the leaders were seated around their meeting table to stand up and present Trump — who he claimed a month ago was being humiliated in Iran — with a white soccer jersey bearing the number 47.
“We’re on the same team,” Merz wrote later under a picture of the moment.
Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — once Trump’s top ally in Europe whom he derided in April as “unacceptable” and weak — held a “clarifying” meeting with the president this week, according to the European official.
Later, she appeared unfazed when a fellow leader declared she was “friends again” with Trump.
“We have always been friends,” she said cheerfully. Later, she revealed she’d given up smoking.
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