Donald Trump announced his arrival at the ceremony organized for the reopening of Notre-Dame de Paris. A monument for which he had surprising ideas.
It’s official, Donald Trump will indeed be present at the reopening of Notre-Dame de Paris, this Saturday, December 7. He announced his arrival on December 3 on Truth Social, the social network he launched in 2021, via his company Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG): “I have the honor to announce that I will be visiting on Saturday in Paris, France, to attend the reopening of the magnificent and historic Notre-Dame cathedral, which was fully restored after a devastating fire five years ago,” the Republican elected official said on Tuesday December 3, greeting the “wonderful work” of restoration, under the initiative of Emmanuel Macron.
For the future president of the United States, this announcement is not insignificant. Indeed, this week, he will make his first trip abroad since his victory in the presidential election on November 5. In the eyes of the world, he will already appear like a head of state who has come to join his French counterpart. He will also meet Jill Biden, the current first lady of the United States, in Paris, as the Élysée announced at the end of November.
But this is not the first time that Donald Trump has shown an interest in the cathedral. On April 15, 2019, seeing the cathedral ravaged by flames, he was still President of the United States when he suggested sending water bomber planes to put out the fire. “It’s horrible to see the fire. We probably have to send flying tankers to put it out. We have to act quickly!”, he wrote.
The firefighters dispatched for the occasion openly mocked this comment, deemed “laughable”. According to many experts, if “bomber planes” had been used, the cathedral would undoubtedly have collapsed due to the age of the structure.
Dropping a single payload from a bomber used to fight forest fires on Notre-Dame would be the equivalent of “dropping three tons of concrete at 250 kilometers per hour” on this masterpiece of Gothic art of the 12th century, Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Bernier told The Guardian. This is why “it was technically impossible, unfeasible and above all completely useless” to extinguish the flames from the air.