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What Doug Emhoff Says World Leaders Whispered to Him in Paris

The Second Gentleman led the U.S. delegation to the closing ceremony of the Summer Olympics.

Although Doug Emhoff went to Paris to lead the U.S. delegation to the Olympic Games’ closing ceremony, he found the time to squeeze in some conversations with some world leaders, many of whom had a message to share with him, he said. “I cannot tell you,” Emoff told a Washington Post reporter less than a day into his trip, “how many leaders here have already whispered to me: ‘Thank you. You need to win.’” Emhoff, the Second Gentleman and aspiring first First Gentleman, had a packed schedule over last week’s trip. In addition to taking in Team USA’s basketball victory over Serbia, he commemorated the victims of an infamous attack on a Parisian Jewish deli in 1982, visiting the Rue des Rosiers to lay roses at a memorial. “Part of fighting hate is living openly and proudly as a Jew and celebrating our faith and our culture,” Emhoff said. “I love being Jewish, and I love the joy that comes with being Jewish. And I’m not going to let anyone tell me how to be Jewish.”