President at Kansas rally tries to turn protests into cautionary tale for US as Republicans face midterm losses
Explainer: why are people protesting across Europe?
As Republicans confront mounting political headwinds ahead of November’s midterm elections, Donald Trump is attempting to turn unrest in France into a cautionary tale for American voters, recasting the demonstrations that began as student protests against crumbling schools and the soaring cost of living as evidence of the dangers of immigration and the erosion of western civilization.
At a rally in Kansas on Monday evening, Trump described France as a once-great nation that had been “conquered, looted, and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists, and communists”.
“If you want to see what is at stake in this election, just look at what’s happening in France,” he said.
Nationwide protests in France on Saturday were called over rising fuel prices and falling purchasing power, and in several cities they erupted into looting and clashes with police that left a historic town hall torched and led to 1,800 arrests. On Monday, overnight curfews were issued for a number of French cities, including parts of Paris.
“This is what’s happening to France – they want to happen to our country. It’s never happening here,” Trump declared, drawing loud cheers from the thousands-strong crowd in ruby-red Kansas where the Republican senator, Roger Marshall, is facing a surprisingly tough challenge from Democrat Adam Hamilton.
Earlier in the day, Trump repeated his baseless claim that migrants had “taken over” France, writing on Truth Social that the country’s leaders must “CLOSE THE BORDERS, FAST!”
The rhetoric echoes France’s far-right National Rally, whose president, Jordan Bardella, described the violence as a convergence of ultra-left extremism and delinquent populations from the suburbs. Trump and Vance have both publicly backed Marine Le Pen, and the unrest has added pressure on Emmanuel Macron six months before an April election to choose his successor.
As Trump set off for the Kansas rally on Monday, the US president told reporters at the White House that he had warned Macron he was “making a big mistake”.
“The whole world was coming in, and as you know, Paris is going to be a Muslim city very soon, and that wasn’t the deal,” he said, adding: “We closed our borders. He didn’t.”
Before Trump arrived on stage in Park City, Kansas, giant TV screens played about 10 minutes’ of Fox News coverage of the unrest that has gripped Paris and other cities, which included commentary blaming the trouble on the French government’s immigration policies.
The demonstrations in France began weeks ago, when high school students began marching for teacher shortages, crumbling classrooms and an opaque university admissions system. The CGT, one of France’s largest unions, has backed the movement and called for lower prices, higher pensions and better wages. The anger has since widened to fuel prices, which have climbed since US strikes effectively shut the strait of Hormuz, and other economic grievances.
As the midterms loom, the unrest in France offers Trump a familiar politcal opportunity: the chance to transform a crisis on the other side of the Atlantic into an argument in favor of the hard-line immigration policies that helped propel Trump’s return to the White House.
“If you import the third world, you become the third world,” the official White House X account posted earlier in the day..
JD Vance and array of Republican politicians have lined up to make a similar argument.
Sharing a video that showed the historic city hall in Limoges alight, vice-president JD Vance argued that the rioting was the result of what he called a liberal failure. “Western liberals imported the third world into France,” he wrote on X, adding that the country had “ignored fundamental questions about assimilation and compatibility”.
House Speaker Mike Johnson posted: “France is descending into chaos because they wanted OPEN BORDERS — just like the socialist Democrats in America. What we are witnessing is a chilling warning for all Americans of what happens if the radical Marxist insurgent left gets their way.” Senator Eric Schmitt added: “The anti-civilization Left is devouring France. It will devour America if we let it.”
Not all protests have drawn the same attention from Washington, as young people have taken to the streets across Europe, in Spain, Portugal and Italy, over underfunded schools, housing costs and a wider squeeze on living standards.
Neither has the president commented on protests in Albania, where demonstrators have targeted both the government and a luxury tourism development backed by an investment firm founded by Trump’s close familyson-in-law, Jared Kushner.
But Republicans are eager to keep the attention on France, as they warn of threats to the national identity and seek to rally support for Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.
The vice president said he hoped Americans were paying attention as they cast their ballots.
“This is the future congressional Democrats seek for your country,” Vance concluded.
