French President Emmanuel Macron came to the White House this week and his old pal President Donald Trump didn't even greet him at the door as the protocol requires for visiting world leaders. It's not the most important norm that Trump has thrown in the garbage can in his first month in office but it's a telling one. The president doesn't consider it necessary to show respect to America's traditional allies anymore. Macron might as well have been a door-to-door salesman.
They didn't hold hands as much as they did in Trump's first term but they did hold a couple of fairly congenial press avails in which the two leaders pretended to be friends and Macron very gently corrected Trump on a couple of his most egregious lies about Ukraine, namely that the U.S. had spent more than Europe on military aid to the war-torn country and that Ukraine had started the war. Overall, it didn't seem to accomplish much since Trump has come to believe that he will be seen as a great peacemaker if he forces Ukraine to surrender to Russia while America's erstwhile allies are coming to understand that he could not care less what they think about anything.
