Trump was right about Paris

Donald Trump is in Paris today to attend the official reopening of the renovated Notre Dame cathedral. The president-elect has what could be described as a love-hate relationship with the French capital. He loves the place but it — more precisely its mayor and most of its right-on residents — hates him.

This contempt first manifested itself days after he defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Paris, banging pots and pans and chanting “No Trump, no hate, no KKK” and “Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go.” The organizers of the rally listed why they believed Trump would be bad for the world: “racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, homophobia and transphobia, antisemitism, ableism, xenophobia and white nationalism.”

The situation in some quarters has deteriorated to the extent that even male residents are now frightened

Another demo was organized in November 2018, when Trump was in France to commemorate the centenary of the end of the Great War. There is also a protest planned for today, the brainchild of the pro-Palestine International Solidarity Movement.

Trump has never hidden his affection for Paris, but nor has he concealed his sorrow over its steady decline in the last decade. In December 2015, when he was the Republican presidential candidate, Trump explained why he had called for an end to all Muslim immigration to the US. “Look at what happened in Paris, the horrible carnage, and frankly… Paris is no longer the same city it was.”

He was referencing the triple terror attacks of 2015, all perpetrated by Islamic extremists, which targeted Charlie Hebdo, a Jewish kosher store and the Bataclan theatre.

In February 2017, Trump again mourned the state of Paris, using a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland to tell the audience about his friend Jim. “For years, every year during the summer, he would go to Paris,” explained the president. But no more. “Paris is no longer Paris,” Jim had told Trump.

In response, the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, tweeted a photo of herself with Mickey and Minnie Mouse, dedicating it to Trump and “Jim,” and adding: “We celebrate the dynamism and the spirit of openness of Paris.”

A few weeks after Hidalgo’s childish tweet, an elderly Jewish Parisian called Sarah Halimi was beaten to death by a man screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’. Less than a year later another Jewish woman, Mireille Knoll, was murdered in similar circumstances.

These were isolated incidents but the antisemitism that motivated them is not. Paris has arguably become the most antisemitic city in Europe: this century, thousands of Jews have either moved out of the city or left the country altogether. In the last year, antisemitic acts have soared in France by nearly 200 percent and over half of these incidents occur in the Paris region.

It’s not just Jewish women who live in fear in the French capital. In May 2017, weeks after Hidalgo had told Trump about the spirit of openness in Paris, the city’s tabloid Le Parisien reported from a northern suburb where women were afraid to go out because of the aggression they faced from the large number of mainly migrant men.

Little has changed in the seven years since, although the situation in some quarters of the capital has deteriorated to the extent that even male residents are now frightened. A report earlier this year from the Stalingrad district discovered residents cowering in their apartments from the crack users below. “We can’t go out in the evenings any more, it scares us, it worries us,” explained André. He’d complained to the town hall, the police and the Prefect, “but no one has replied.”

Things are now so bad in the 19ème that a well-known bank employs security guards to escort its staff from their workplace to the train station. A teacher friend of mine whose school is in the area says these guards are needed to ward off the drug addicts hassling passers-by for money.

Earlier this year, the Paris metro opened its first “safe space” on the network, promoting it as a place women could alight if they felt under threat during their journey. Many do. Official figures released last week revealed that sexual violence had increased on the Paris transport system by 15 percent in 2023.

Most of these incidents don’t make the news. These days it takes something particularly horrific to attract the attention of the media, like the brutal murder of a nineteen-year-old student in the Bois de Boulogne on a warm late summer’s day. The man charged with her killing is a twenty-two-year-old Moroccan, who should have been deported after raping a young woman in 2019.

In the days after the death of Philippine, posters began appearing around Paris, bearing an image of the murdered woman along with the details about the suspect’s background. Hidalgo said the posters “chilled her” because of their racist message.

Were the posters racist? Or did they simply tell the truth, in the same way Donald Trump often tells the truth, however uncomfortable it may be to a Progressive left? He was certainly right about Paris. It is no longer is the city it was.