US President Donald Trump has attributed the widespread student protests in France to “mass migration” and Islam, advancing his global right-wing message as difficult midterm elections loom at home.
“What’s happening in France is nothing less than out-of-control mass migration. This isn’t about schools; this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great country!” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
Since late September, French students have blocked the entrances of hundreds of high schools nationwide, demanding better conditions in protests that have occasionally erupted into clashes with security forces.
On Tuesday, a quarter of a million demonstrators marched through the streets of France.
Yet Trump and his administration have for a long time attributed European social problems to migration, urging Europe to close its borders and echoing far-right parties by warning of what they describe as civilizational decline.
Prominent figures in Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement have seized on the French protests to drive home their points about immigration before next month’s US midterm elections.
MAGA commentators have repeatedly shared videos of the French unrest, with Trump ally Glenn Beck declaring on Monday that the “riots in France are a clear warning to the rest of the West.”
Republicans are intensifying their focus on migration and anti-transgender rhetoric, fearing that Trump’s unpopularity and his Iran war could cost them control of Congress.
