ArcaMax

PARIS — Donald Trump gets invited by the desperate Frenchman running the country to celebrate the newly-renovated Notre Dame cathedral — and ends up walking straight into a ménage-à-trois with a guy dressed like he got lost while trimming the shrubs.

During Trump’s first term, French President Emmanuel Macron fancied himself a “Trump whisperer” — which is really just a more flattering term for “master manipulator” — capable of selling Europe’s ideological-driven idiocy to a more pragmatic, populist Trump.

Trump’s backside hadn’t even begun to warm the presidential chair again before Macron had apparently decided to exploit a non-political event for political purposes. The reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral, after a half-decade of painstaking work to restore the world-famous monument after a 2019 fire, was transformed into a convenient backdrop for Macron’s latest attempts at psychological origami.

Photos emerged of Macron and Trump posing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, decked out as usual like he’s in a years-long audition to drive for UPS. Knowing Macron, he probably thinks that if he can just get these two in a room together, then he and Zelensky can successfully tag-team Trump into continuing to spend US taxpayer cash on war in Ukraine against Russia so that Europe doesn’t have to make up the difference with its own increasingly impoverished citizens’ cash.

Pretty sure that Trump, who has spent his career in New York real estate, can sense when someone’s trying to play him. But as single Parisian women know, a date with a Frenchman can be worth it purely for the entertainment value.

But that faint sound that you hear is millions of French citizens all rolling their eyes at yet another meddling attempt by Macron, the result of which is typically shambolic.

A couple of days before Trump’s arrival, the French government collapsed. In a national address on Thursday night, Macron blamed the populist right and left opposition for government instability, even as polls overwhelmingly indicate that the French public actually blames Macron.

He just can’t believe how they could bring down the government in a non-confidence vote, calling it unprecedented. After all he picked much of it himself, so how could they not like it? Play stupid games, win stupid (and unprecedented) prizes.

Marine Le Pen’s right-wing populist National Rally party actually won the popular vote in last summer’s parliamentary election, which Macron only triggered as the result of a tantrum after losing European parliamentary elections to Team Le Pen, challenging French voters to a “double or nothing” proposition.

Team Macron then publicly colluded with the left-wing anti-establishment New Popular Front to block National Rally from winning the most seats in French parliament in the second of two rounds of voting. The move spectacularly backfired on Macron, failing to give his group the most seats — an honor that went to the anti- establishment left with which his team overtly schemed.

So after using the left-wing New Popular Front, Macron dumped them like a one night stand and bypassed the convention of picking a prime minister from the party with the most seats in favor of choosing an establishment figure he could control but who could also pay sufficient lip service to both left and right populists to survive in the role.

The charade lasted about 90 days.

“I have the honor of tendering the resignation of the government,” were the words of Macron’s handpicked prime minister, Michel Barnier last week, as he pretended to be thrilled to be drop-kicked by an opposition non-confidence vote back into the political wilderness from whence he came.

Macron had yanked him out of there over the summer to try his hand at cosplaying a democratically elected prime minister.

Imagine not actually running at all in an election (like most of us), sitting at home watching Netflix, and suddenly the president of your country calls you up: “Hey, man, what’s up? You busy? Wanna be prime minister?” That’s basically what happened to Barnier, who’d fallen off the political radar since negotiating Brexit for the EU. He wasn’t even a candidate in the actual parliamentary election that led to his prime ministership — the one in which his old, establishment center-right Les Républicains party scored a whopping 5 percent.

So who will be the next lucky contestant in the French president’s game of “Can you mimic an anti-establishment populist well enough as a bona fide establishment hack to last in the role of French prime minister longer than the shelf life of a baguette?” This farce could feasibly repeat itself over and over again until next summer when the French are finally allowed to have another election, a year after the last one.

So what stuck the fork in Barnier’s comeback? Well, his inability to read the room, to start. He came up with an austerity budget that raised taxes on working-class French at a time when their cost of living had already exploded, with French mostly blaming French and EU Ukraine-related policies. It’s almost like Barnier was out of touch with voters — like he never actually ran for office. Maybe that’s because he didn’t.

The anti-establishment right and left each tabled a non-confidence motion last week, then fought like grade-schoolers over getting credit for the class project of bringing down the government. So who gets to be the next substitute teacher of this class that hates the establishment and also spends all its time fighting with each other? Macron spent more than 50 days coming up with Barnier — which isn’t that much less than the time that Barnier actually served.

But why even bother with this game, anyway? Isn’t it just easier to do what every other French p resident does and name a prime minister from the party that wins the most seats? Democracy is hard when you’re a control freak, I guess.

Macron’s obsessive stage-managing obscures the reality that the parties on both the right and left, and the French voters they represent, forced into a silent majority by his game-playing, are as fed up with the Western establishment as Trump is.