When Donald Trump first visited Paris when President in 2017, he appeared as something of a passing curiosity; the apparent manifestation of America’s inexorable decline, captured in all its spray-tanned vulgarity. Seven years later he has returned to Paris as emperor, crowned by his client kings in none other than the spiritual home of modern Christendom: Notre-Dame. “It was a coronation,” as one European diplomat put it to me, laughing with incredulity at the spectacle.
