Staff Report
French President Emmanuel Macron directly confirmed that President Trump was among the foreign leaders he was criticizing for “unacceptable” and “stupid” comments about the unrest gripping France, telling reporters bluntly: “Among others, but he is part of it.”
The rebuke came after more than a week of protests over the cost of living that began in September as demonstrations about education and living costs before escalating into nationwide rioting, with more than 2,000 people arrested over the most recent weekend alone.
Trump had claimed without evidence that France was being “conquered, looted and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists and communists who hate Christianity,” and separately urged Macron to “close your borders and take control before it is too late.”
Macron pushed back forcefully on that framing, telling reporters, "We've had people claiming that we were invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, which is completely false," directly disputing the narrative Trump and others had advanced about the cause of the unrest.
By naming Trump specifically rather than leaving the criticism implicit, Macron escalated what had initially appeared to be a veiled swipe into an open, on-the-record disagreement between the two leaders over both the facts and the politics of France's domestic crisis.
The exchange highlights how quickly a domestic unrest situation in one country can become entangled in another nation's political narratives, with Macron now explicitly pushing back on having his country's crisis used as a talking point in debates over immigration abroad.
