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Trump Has a Pull-Aside with the President of France, Sep. 23, 2025

September 23, 2025 · The White House · 0:08:24

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump held a pull-aside with French President Emmanuel Macron in New York on September 23, 2025, during General Assembly week, carried on the White House channel. Macron welcomed the President’s message after his meeting with President Zelenskyy and said Europe would back Ukraine concretely given that “the Russian economy is suffering.”

The President said the war “should have ended and Russia should have stopped it. But they’ve been three and a half years and they’ve gotten not so far… It could be that Russia is a paper tiger. I don’t know what they are. But three and a half years of fighting and killing everybody, of killing 7,000 people a week for nothing.” He added: “Let him get their land back,” and said of the seven wars he counts as settled, France’s president “helped me settle some of these seven wars.”

Asked about Gaza, the President previewed his multilateral meeting with regional leaders that day: “We want to stop that. We want to get our hostages back… We’ve gotten all of the American hostages.” He also joked that the two leaders had gotten along on every subject “other than occasion on occasion wine.”

Why it matters

The “paper tiger” line and the land-recovery backing, delivered beside the French president, mark the sharpest public hardening of the President’s Ukraine position in this period — a reference point for the scoreboard’s Ukraine record and for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s European portfolio.

Scoreboard watch

This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: the President’s September 23, 2025 statement backing Ukraine to recover its territory, as stated at this meeting, to be checked against subsequent policy and battlefield diplomacy.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump has a Pull-Aside with the President of France” (official upload, embedded above; the upload’s description places the meeting in New York, NY). All figures and characterizations as stated by the participants in the broadcast.