Trump borrows from far right to blame unrest in France on immigration

President ignores school conditions and cost of living and says he warned Macron ‘the whole world was coming in’

Donald Trump and JD Vance deployed a familiar US playbook on Europe, claiming that immigrants were responsible for rioting in France that began as student protests against crumbling schools and the high cost of living .

The nationwide protests on Saturday were called over rising fuel prices and falling purchasing power, and in several cities they escalated into 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 .

“France is burning!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Sunday, blaming “the immigration of people from an entirely different world” for the violence and looting .

Vance, a day earlier, argued that the unrest 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”.

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.

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 Trump set off for a campaign rally in Kansas 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.