The Reactions to French President Macron Getting Slapped by His Wife Were Social Media Gold

French President Emmanuel Macron is on a Southeast Asian tour, though I’m sure he didn’t want this moment to be publicly viewed by the press. Brigitte Macron was caught slapping the French president as the aircraft's door opened. Macron tried to spin the moment, claiming he was teasing his wife. I don’t think a lot of people are buying it, even if it is true (via French 24):

Macron manhandled by his wife on camera.

Complete and total embarrassment. pic.twitter.com/PBveJX6pvs
— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) May 26, 2025

French media on Monday tried to decipher the interaction that cameras spotted through the just-opened door of the plane as the couple disembarked in Hanoi Sunday for the start of a tour of Southeast Asia. The headline of a story on the website of the daily Le Parisien newspaper asked: “Slap or ‘squabble’? The images of Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron disembarking in Vietnam trigger a lot of comment.”
Macron later told reporters that the couple — married since 2007 after meeting at the high school where he was a student and she was a teacher — were simply joking around.
“We are horsing around and, really, joking with my wife,” he said, adding that the incident was being overblown: “It becomes a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”
He added that other videos had been misinterpreted, like ones purportedly showing him sharing a bag of cocaine or confronting the Turkish president. “None of these are true,” he said, and “everyone needs to calm down”.
[…]
His office earlier offered a similar explanation.
“It was a moment where the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around. It’s a moment of complicity. It was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists,” his office said.