Macron Still Recovering From Wife’s Slap; Trump Mocks French President
United States President, Donald Trump, has publicly mocked French President, Emmanuel Macron, in a video, making disparaging remarks about the French leader’s personal life while also questioning France’s commitment to international military operations.
The video, which began circulating widely on Thursday morning, captured Trump speaking at a recent event where he appeared to recount a supposed exchange with Macron regarding support in the Gulf region.
“So he gets off public, says, man, that was easier than I thought. Then I call up France Macron, whose wife treats him extremely badly and he’s still recovering from the right to the jaw,” Trump said.
“And I say, Emmanuel, we’d love to have some help in the Gulf, even though we’re setting records and knocking out bad people and knocking out ballistic missiles.
“We’d love to have some help. If you could, could you please send ships immediately? No, no, no. Cannot do that,” he added in a mocking tone.
This latest comment from Trump has revived memories of a widely reported 2025 incident involving Macron and his wife during an official visit to Southeast Asia.
In May 2025, footage captured by journalists showed Brigitte Macron placing both hands on the French president’s face and appearing to push him as they prepared to disembark from a plane in Hanoi, Vietnam.
The brief moment, caught on camera through the aircraft door, quickly went viral and sparked intense debate in French media and on social platforms.
A headline by French newspaper Le Parisien at the time encapsulated the confusion, asking whether the interaction was a “slap or squabble,” as commentators and the public speculated about the nature of the exchange.
In the footage, Macron could be seen recoiling slightly before quickly regaining composure, smiling, and waving upon realising he was in public view. As the couple descended the aircraft stairs moments later, Brigitte Macron declined to take the president’s offered arm, further fuelling speculation.
However, Emmanuel Macron swiftly dismissed any negative interpretation of the incident, insisting that it had been blown out of proportion.
“We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” Macron told reporters, criticising what he described as an overreaction and warning against turning a trivial moment into “a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”
The French presidency also issued a statement downplaying the episode, describing it as a light-hearted moment of “complicity” between the couple as they relaxed before the start of official engagements.
“It was a moment where the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around,” the statement said, adding that the footage had been seized upon by conspiracy theorists and misinterpreted online.
Despite these clarifications, the incident has remained a recurring subject in online discourse, often resurfacing in political debates and social media commentary, a trend that Trump’s latest remarks appear to have amplified.
As of the time of filing this report, neither Emmanuel Macron nor the French government has issued an official response to Trump’s comments.
Similarly, there has been no clarification from Trump’s camp regarding the accuracy of the alleged conversation he described.
