Paris Is Not a Metaphor, and It Is Certainly Not Yours, Mr. President
There is a particular genre of political analysis, practiced chiefly by people who have read neither a French newspaper nor a single page of EPRS reporting on European youth unemployment, in which an entire nation’s policy history is compressed into a slogan and then waved at an audience in Kansas. President Trump performed this genre at a rally in Park City on Monday, describing France as a country “conquered, looted, and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists, and communists,” and informing reporters, with the confidence of a man who has never once been asked to show his work, that “Paris is going to be a Muslim city very soon, and that wasn’t the deal.”
One must, as always, gently complicate this. The protests began as high-school students marching over teacher shortages, crumbling classrooms, and an admissions system so opaque that French families have litigated it for years. The CGT, one of France’s largest unions, then broadened the mobilization to prices, pensions, and wages. Fuel costs have climbed since American strikes effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, a detail with a certain ironic load-bearing capacity the president has declined to acknowledge. Saturday’s nationwide demonstrations produced looting, a torched historic town hall in Limoges, some 1,800 arrests, and now overnight curfews in parts of Paris. That is a genuine crisis. It is also, in the technical vocabulary we use in my field, a multi-causal economic and institutional phenomenon, not an episode of Great Replacement theater.
But the complication is precisely the point, is it not? A material grievance is difficult to campaign on when your own policy portfolio contributed to it. An immigrant, by contrast, is infinitely portable. Hence the White House X account posting “if you import the third world, you become the third world,” hence Vice President Vance explaining that “western liberals imported the third world into France,” hence Speaker Mike Johnson warning that “the radical Marxist insurgent left” will do all this to America, hence Senator Eric Schmitt’s contribution, “the anti-civilization Left is devouring France,” which at least has the virtue of brevity if not of referents. The right-wing press has helpfully supplied a supporting cast, with the Washington Examiner promoting claims that a Muslim student group involved in the protests is a “Muslim Brotherhood front,” an allegation resting substantially on a French parliamentary report of the kind that French parliaments of every stripe produce about Muslim organizations with tedious regularity. The evidence base is, to put it in the language of peer review, thin.
What is not thin is the pattern. Trump and Vance have publicly backed Marine Le Pen; National Rally president Jordan Bardella has diagnosed the unrest as “ultra-left extremism” converging with “delinquent populations from the suburbs,” which is the same argument in a beret. The transatlantic far right has, for at least a decade, operated as a single discursive market, and the president has now simply removed the middleman. Ten minutes of Fox News coverage of French riots played on giant screens before he took the stage in Kansas, where Senator Roger Marshall faces a surprisingly competitive Democrat. Six months before France chooses Macron’s successor, and five weeks before America’s midterms, everyone involved has found the same crisis equally useful.
Meanwhile, students are marching in Spain, Portugal, and Italy over underfunded schools and housing costs, and demonstrators in Albania are protesting a luxury tourism development backed by a firm founded by Jared Kushner. The president has commented on none of these, for reasons that I trust require no literature review.
The scholarly consensus on substitution theory, I would note, is unambiguous: immigrants do not, in any dataset anyone has managed to peer-review, replace cities. What does replace a city’s capacity for self-government is a political class that looks at a protest about classroom ceilings and pension arithmetic and sees only a demographic ghost story. Bardella and Trump are running the same campaign in two languages. Only one of them is doing it competently.