President-elect Donald Trump said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is ready for “peace” as he dished on his meetings with world leaders — and Jill Biden — during his trip to Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame.
The incoming president revealed Sunday details of his conversations with world leaders on his first trip abroad since winning a second term, including a trilateral meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and Zelensky.
“He wants to make peace,” Trump told The Post in a phone interview. “That’s new.
“He wants to have a cease-fire,” he added. “He wants to make peace. We didn’t talk about the details. He thinks it’s time, and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin should think it’s time because he’s lost — when you lose 700,000 people, it’s time. It’s not going to end until there’s a peace.”
“I’m formulating a concept of how to end that ridiculous war,” he said.
Trump also pointed to his Truth Social post in which he mentioned Russia in context of the fall of the Syrian government.
“What happened there was Russia was not able to step up to the plate because they were all bogged down in this horrible war that never should have happened in Ukraine,” he said.
Trump also revealed he spoke to Macron about NATO, reiterating that he thinks the alliance should “pay their fair share.”
“I said NATO is good as long as they pay their bills, but they gotta pay their bills, because you know, when I got involved with NATO, nobody paid, and then they paid after I got involved,” the president-elect said.
“He agrees with me,” Trump said of Macron. “He’s a good man, he did a good job. I told him, ‘You have no idea how good a job you did’ on that chapel. That’s very hard to do. Painstaking.”
The side chat inside the cathedral with first lady Jill Biden was also a positive interaction, Trump said, despite their long history of making nasty remarks about each other during the two election cycles.
“Very nice. She couldn’t have been nicer,” Trump said about their talk.
“It’s politics. You have to get used to it,” he said about their past political spats. “She was very nice and we had a very nice conversation.”
The former president dominated headlines with the firm handshake he had with Macron, in which he gripped his hand from the top.
“It’s just a firm shake. He understands that. It’s just a firm shake,” he said of the shake.
On his meeting with UK Prince William, he said he had a “great talk” about the royal family, as both Kate Middleton and King Charles are recovering from cancer.
“I had a great talk with the prince,” Trump said. “And I asked him about his wife and he said she’s doing well. And I asked him about his father and his father is fighting very hard, and he loves his father and he loves his wife, so it was sad. We had a great talk for half an hour, a little more than half an hour. We had a great, great talk.”
He then commented on the prince’s good looks: “He’s a good-looking guy. He looked really, very handsome last night. Some people look better in person? He looked great. He looked really nice, and I told him that.”
He also said he had a “great” meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whom he described as having a “lot of energy.”
“I was with her a lot,” Trump said of Meloni, noting that they had dinner together during the 60-member world leader reception. “She’s a real live wire, I will tell you. She’s great.”
“We got along great,” he said of the world leader group that visited the cathedral, noting it was a “similar group” from four years ago and that he hopes they can “straighten out the world a little bit.”
Trump said the newly reopened French cathedral “represented one of the ultimate places for religion and for Christianity” before it burned down five years ago.
“I thought it was fantastic. I think they did a fantastic job with the cathedral. Better than it was 900 years ago,” Trump said after returning to Mar-a-Lago.
“They were able to clean the stone beautifully. It was very dark. I was there, it was very dark before from 900 years of whatever. Now it’s clean and light and it’s an exact replication,” he said, arguing they made the “right decision” with the design choices in trying to preserve its authenticity.
“I thought it was a very sad day in the world when it was burning. You know, it represented one of the ultimate places for religion and for Christianity, and I thought it was a really sad day. So I was invited by the prime minister and he treated our country very nicely, and he did a great job.”
