President Trump sat down with French President Emmanuel Macron at Trump Tower on Monday ahead of the United Nations General Assembly — the annual gathering where globalist bureaucrats lecture sovereign nations while American taxpayers pick up the tab.
The meeting matters because every commitment made at this assembly — every call for "more quickly and more strongly" arming Ukraine, every promise to police the Strait of Hormuz — comes with a price tag that lands on working Americans. The UN's regular budget runs over $3 billion annually, and the United States pays roughly 22 percent of it — more than any other member state by far. What Americans get in return is an institution that routinely votes against their interests and shields authoritarian regimes.
According to the New York Post, the two leaders discussed the wars in Iran and Ukraine. Macron posted on X that they had "decided to act together to ease tensions in the energy markets, by protecting critical infrastructure in the Middle East and freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz." He also called for pooling efforts "to secure a moratorium on strikes against energy infrastructure and against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure."
Macron told reporters the meeting was "very good" and "very constructive," and stressed the "need to help our Ukrainian friends more quickly and more strongly in terms of interceptors, because that is the key issue from a defensive point of view."
There it is. Interceptors — air defense systems — cost money. Macron is asking the United States to dig deeper while European nations continue dragging their feet on their own defense spending. The Post framed the meeting as a cordial diplomatic exchange, complete with a note about the pair's "long history of intense, tug-of-war handshakes." What got buried: any mention of cost, any mention of what Americans owe versus what Europeans owe, any mention of the UN's track record of failing the U.S. interests it claims to uphold.
Breitbart, previewing the assembly, framed UNGA as a series of power plays to watch — a more skeptical read on an institution that exists to consolidate transnational authority at the expense of national sovereignty. Both Trump and Macron are scheduled to address the General Assembly on Tuesday. Trump is also set to meet with Gulf Arab leaders on Wednesday, according to Axios.
Earlier Monday, Trump met with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion. The White House did not respond to the Post's request for comment on the Macron meeting.
The open question heading into Tuesday's speeches: will Trump use the globalist stage to reassert American sovereignty and demand accountability for every dollar sent abroad — or will the UN's gravitational pull produce another round of commitments that cost Americans more than they return?
