The Democrats want to set America alight like France, say MAGA supporters

Paris. With two weeks to go until the mid-term elections, and with polls showing his popularity at an all-time low, US President Donald Trump is attempting to exploit the chaos in France as an electoral weapon. “France is burning,” said the White House occupant during a rally in Kansas on Monday evening. And if the Democrats win, the United States too will “burn”, added Trump, speaking of “church towers ablaze” and “migrants who have taken control” of the country: “Remember that this is exactly what radical Democrats want to do to America”.

During the rally, Trump also accused Emmanuel Macron of fleeing the country at the worst possible moment with his three-day trip to the Persian Gulf to secure concrete commitments on oil and diesel supplies. “The French witnessed the arrest of 2,400 of their fellow citizens and the destruction of the plinth of the statue of Marianne, and the president’s reaction was to hop on a plane,” Trump lashed out. On social media, footage of the violence, looting and devastation that struck several French cities over the weekend has been widely shared and commented on within the MAGA sphere, fuelling a narrative linking public disorder to France’s progressive migration policies. This narrative was taken up and amplified by Vice-President J. D. Vance: “Western progressives have imported the Third World into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion,” he wrote on X, sharing a photo of Limoges Town Hall in flames (yesterday, French police special forces arrested the main suspect in Saturday’s arson attack: Hodei Docampo Ciarra, a 34-year-old with links to the far-left and already listed under ‘S’, the register of individuals considered a threat to national security). “They have ignored the fundamental issues of assimilation and compatibility. We warned them about what would happen, but they did not listen to us,” added Vance, who, in Germany at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, had accused European leaders of laxity on immigration.

Ahead of the mid-term elections on 3 November, Trump is placing great emphasis on the fight against illegal immigration, an issue on which public opinion is largely in agreement, despite criticism of the methods employed by ICE federal agents. In particular, the Republicans claim to have put an end to the migration crisis on the border with Mexico, which erupted during Joe Biden’s presidency, whilst in countries such as France, immigration is said to be out of control. “France is sinking into chaos because it wanted open borders, just like the Democratic Socialists in America,” thundered Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives. According to Justin Vaïsse, a French historian specialising in the United States, “since the beginning of the MAGA movement, Europe has become an extension of the battlefield of American domestic politics”.