The gaze of the political world was locked on France this weekend as the final act of that country’s presidential election played out.
Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old former minister of the economy for unpopular President Francois Hollande, beat out far-right National Front Marine Le Pen, winning roughly 65 percent of the vote. The result was not a surprise, but the margin of victory for center-left Macron was larger than polling suggested — something which polling guru Nate Silver, whose website FiveThirtyEight gave Hillary Clinton a 71.4 percent chance of winning the 2016 presidential election in the U.S., was quick to point out.
Macron won despite an 11th-hour leak of campaign documents, which several Democrats in the U.S. tied to the WikiLeaks document dumps that they contend hurt Clinton’s chances against Trump. Even Clinton herself, while congratulating Macron on his victory, brought up election interference and shamed the media after she was criticized by some news outlets this week for pinning blame on FBI Director James Comey and Russian meddling for her election defeat.
Liberal politicians in the U.S. and pro-European leaders celebrated the Macron victory as another rejection of far-right wing parties, following the momentum from elections in Austria and Holland, in response to the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. and the successful “Brexit” vote last summer that opened the door to the United Kingdom leaving the European Union.
Trump, though he never endorsed a candidate, seemed to favor Le Pen when he complimented Le Pen for her hard-line approach to immigration, similar to his own. However, Trump did congratulate Macron for his “big win,” not suprisingly in a tweet, and said he looks forward to meeting with his future French counterpart.
Trump spent the weekend at his golf course in New Jersey after meeting with Australian Prime Minister Malcom Turnball in New York City and speaking at a World War II commemoration event aboard the decommissioned USS Intrepid on Manhattan’s West Side. He touted his cost-effective stay in New Jersey amid criticism of his expensive getaways to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, and faced another round of the press going wild with speculation about whether or not he only held meetings at a golf course or also hit the links.
Trump returned the the White House late Sunday. On Monday, he is expected to meet with his vice president, Mike Pence, along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, according to his schedule.
Though he missed the 100-days benchmark, Trump achieved a legislative victory last Thursday when House Republicans passed a bill to partially repeal and replace Obamacare. He then held a celebratory ceremony in the White House Rose Garden with House Speaker Paul Ryan and other GOP lawmakers who helped achieve the first step in undoing former President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law. The bill now moves to the Senate, where it is expected that senators won’t vote on the House-passed bill, but rather will write their own legislation instead.
On the Sunday morning talk-show circuit, Republicans in Congress and the White House defended the bill against criticisms that it doesn’t yet have a score from the Congressional Budget Office and could mean the loss of healthcare coverage for Medicaid recipients. On the other end of the political spectrum, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., complained the text of the healthcare bill was too complicated and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., argued that Democrats in the Senate know Obamacare isn’t perfect, and are willing to work with Republicans to fix, but not replace it.
Meanwhile, billionaire Warren Buffett, a support of Clinton during the 2016 campaign, criticized the Republican healthcare plan as a “huge tax cut for guys like me” while hurting the less fortunate at the Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders’ meeting Saturday in Omaha, Neb.
The man behind Obamacare, Obama, delivered his most political speech yet since leaving office Sunday evening while receiving the Profiles in Courage Award at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Democratic lawmakers who voted to pass the Affordable Care Act during his first term, knowing it might cost them their seats did the right thing, Obama argued. Turning to the present, Obama called on Senate lawmakers to have “courage” to oppose the healthcare repeal.
Moments after his speech, it was announced that Obama would be taking off for Italy on Monday, where he expected to talk about climate change, another issue which he made gains as president and now Trump has threatened to undo. Trump, who has already signed an executive order rolling back some Obama-era climate regulations, is mulling whether to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement.
