Emmanuel macron

Donald Trump’s tweet today, au dessous will annoy many people, including me, who are forced to admit he is right. France and the rest of the EU do make it hard to sell American wines in France, and it’s easy for the French to sell wine to the Americans. I’ve a mate here who sells two million bottles a year in the USA and he drives a smart car and lives in a very big house. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1062331024426913792 Mr Trump is famously a teetotaler, yet he can in this instance be said to speak with some authority since he is the proud owner of the Trump Winery, near Charlottesville, Virginia.

Are you enjoying the latest episode of the Trump-Macron show? It’s the most intriguing bromance in modern politics: two leaders from different and opposing political worlds who nonetheless fell for each other. It was self-love-à-deux from the moment they met. And they consummated their love by bombing Syria last year. They even bicker and make up like a passionate couple. Today they are in Paris to mark Armistice Day, and Trump may be pleased to have left behind the Washington brouhaha following the midterms and his firing of Jeff Sessions. Yet the broader and more remarkable point is the extent to which Trump and Macron’s fortunes have reversed.

‘It could be argued that getting out of the office to beat up some leftists is a good way to work up an appetite for lunch,’ one of France’s more cynical millionaires tells me, admiring Alexandre Benalla, 26, a recently fired security aide to President Emmanuel Macron. Benalla had rushed from his office at the Elysée Palace to brawl with members of La France Insoumise, the tattered remnants of the French left, who were demonstrating outside. Tally-ho! Right on. Except that you really are not allowed to do that, especially in the age of camera phones. And the more that comes out about this story, the weirder it becomes. What did Macron know and when did he know it? Who protected Benalla? Who leaked the story to Le Monde?