Since winning the 2024 presidential election nearly a month ago, President-elect Donald Trump has maintained a relatively low profile as compared to his near-daily media appearances during the campaign.
In recent days, however, Trump has reasserted himself on the world stage – and world leaders appear to be taking notice.
Within a 24-hour period, Trump on Monday announced plans to make his first trip overseas since his reelection – attending the reopening celebration for the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on Dec. 9 - and separately threatened “hell to pay” if the Israeli hostages held by Hamas are not released prior to his inauguration.
“Those responsible [for holding the hostages] will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!”
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Despite many global leaders’ private misgivings with Trump’s approach to foreign affairs, some have nonetheless been quick to praise the incoming president, as the international order prepares for a second Trump administration.
"I want to thank President Trump for his strong statement yesterday about the need for Hamas to release the hostages, the responsibility of Hamas,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday. “This adds another force to our continuing effort to release all the hostages. Thank you, President Trump.”
Trump’s upcoming visit to Notre Dame, meanwhile, comes as part of the star-studded reopening ceremony, following the devastating 2019 fire that destroyed the 850-year-old edifice. On his social media site, Trump wrote it would be an “honor” to attend the ceremony, praising French President Emmanuel Macron for doing a “wonderful job ensuring that Notre Dame has been restored to its full level of glory, and even more so. it will be a very special day for all!”
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First Lady Jill Biden is scheduled to attend the ceremony on behalf of the Biden administration, following stops in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar to close out her final foreign trip in office.
When the Notre Dame fire broke out five years ago, then-President Trump watched aboard Air Force One. Now, he’ll attend the reopening as a guest of Macron – who also happens to be the first foreign leader to congratulate Trump on his reelection.
The visit highlights how, even well before he is sworn in as president, power has already started shifting from the White House toward Trump.
The President-elect's Monday comments on France and the Israel-Hamas conflict came during President Biden’s visit to sub-Saharan Africa, at times overshadowing the president’s final foreign trip in office.
Trump has hosted several foreign leaders at his Mar-a-Lago club since his election, among them Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Netanyahu’s wife Sara.
The Trudeau meeting came not long after Trump threatened to impose sweeping tariffs on products imported from Canada as well as Mexico and China, a move that would have major implications for all the nations’ economies.
Shortly before his meeting with Trump, Trudeau spoke to his concerns with the President-elect's tariff proposal: “Our responsibility is to point out that in this way he would be actually not just be harming Canadians, who work so well with the United States; he’d actually be raising prices for American citizens as well and hurting American industry and businesses,” he said
Following his dinner with the President-elect, however, Trudeau told reporters the two had an “excellent conversation,” ignoring questions about whether and how the tariff issue was addressed.
Trump, for his part, described the conversation as “productive” and said the two discussed issues such as fentanyl drug trafficking and energy development, though he made no mention of any backtracking on tariffs.
