President Trump to attend ceremony in Paris marking 100th anniversary of America’s entry into WWI

By Angelique Chrisafis
via the Guardian (UK) web site

The U.S. Army's Sixteenth Infantry Regiment 2nd Battalion colors and band led the regiment on a 5 mile march to Picpus Cemetery in Paris, France on July 4, 1917.Donald Trump will attend France’s Bastille Day celebrations in Paris on 14 July, after accepting an invitation from the French president, Emmanuel Macron.

Macron’s office said on Wednesday that the US president would attend the traditional Paris military parade as part of the commemoration marking the 100th anniversary of the entry of the United States into the first world war. US troops will join French soldiers in the annual display of military might on the Champs Elysées.

Trump’s Paris visit will be his first trip to France since he became US president. The two men met for the first time in Brussels last month, with a notorious white-knuckle handshake which the French president later said “wasn’t innocent” and was meant to show he wouldn’t “let anything pass”.

The two men were swiftly at odds over climate change after Trump said he would pull the US out of the 2015 Paris climate accord and Macron hit back with an English-language appeal to “make our planet great again”, a riff on Trump’s own promise to “make America great again”.

But the two presidents have since spoken by phone about offering a common response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria as well as joint work on counter-terrorism.

Last week, in his first interview since becoming president, Macron told the Guardian he wanted to work with Trump on counter-terrorism and hoped to bring the US president back into the Paris climate accords. Macron said France would be “perfectly aligned with the US” on responding to chemical weapons use in Syria.

Read the whole article on the Guardian web site.

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