US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron walk to the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Wednesday.
Among the memorable (click here) images captured during French President Emmanuel Macron's state visit to Washington is a series showing US President Donald Trump leading Macron along the White House colonnade, their hands clasped.
In France, the photographs were hardly seen as the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Those who oppose Macron's efforts to engage with Trump saw a child following his father on the first day of school.
Perhaps predictably, the most outspoken critiques came from the political fringes. "The new world: Atlantic version," France's Communist Party tweeted. "Following, illustrated in an image," wrote Florian Philippot, a prominent member of France's far-right.
But disdain for Trump is not a fringe phenomenon in France, where opinion polls consistently show that the US President is deeply unpopular - much more so than Russia's Vladimir Putin, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan and China's Xi Jinping....
There may be a reason Trump is so enamored with France's Macron. Immigration. France has passed a bill that would take far more drastic measures to control immigration.
...Some in France have also started using the evidence of the increasingly tactile relationship between Macron and Trump to point out what they consider to be uncomfortable similarities between the two presidents, especially on immigration.
On Tuesday, the same day Macron arrived in Washington, France's National Assembly passed his hotly contested migration bill, which would, among other things, allow authorities to imprison illegal immigrants for one year and double the amount of time during which asylum seekers could be detained by police, from 45 days to 90.
In the aftermath of the vote, one parliamentary deputy from Macron's party went so far as to announce he would be leaving the President's centrist faction.
Macron's immigration policy had already alienated some of his supporters in recent months....
France's immigration experience is different than the USA's. November of 2015 found 130 dead and even more wounded when militants opened fire on a nightclub. Among the terrorists was a recent migrant from the Greek islands that was accepting refugees from Syria. To some extent, the young men claiming to be migrants from the Syrian civil war were actually terrorists to bring about the destruction of the civilized world.
The attacks in Paris (click here) on the night of Friday 13 November by gunmen and suicide bombers hit a concert hall, a major stadium, restaurants and bars, almost simultaneously - and left 130 people dead and hundreds wounded.
But, for some reason, Trump seems more interested in the French President than he is any other European leader. The only common ground I could come up with is France's new immigration legislation which is supposed to be President's Macron new focus.
The experience of the USA with illegal immigrants is very different and there is no reason for the USA to require that level of control. Europe is different and the experience it had with Greece and Turkey in regard to Syria's refugees is worrisome.
