Trump has finally ditched Macron for Le Pen

It’s official, the bromance between Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron is over. It had always been a rocky relationship but on Thursday it ended in a spectacular fashion.

The French president, reacting to Trump’s decision to impose 20 percent tariffs on all EU products, announced: “Investments to come or investments announced in recent weeks should be suspended until things are clarified with the United States.”

A few hours later the President posted a message on social media in which he reflected on the sentence handed down to Marine Le Pen on Monday. Trump had commented little on her four-year suspended prison sentence and five-year political ineligibility for misusing EU funds, but riled by Macron remarks he gave France both barrels. “The Witch Hunt against Marine Le Pen is another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech, and censor their Political Opponent,” he wrote.

Likening Le Pen’s plight to his own legal troubles in recent years, Trump continued:

I don’t know Marine Le Pen, but do appreciate how hard she worked for so many years. She suffered losses, but kept on going, and now, just before what would be a Big Victory, they get her on a minor charge that she probably knew nothing about – Sounds like a “bookkeeping” error to me. It is all so bad for France, and the Great French People, no matter what side they are on.

He ended his message by declaring in capital letters: “FREE MARINE LE PEN!”

Trump’s comments are headline news in the French media this morning, as are those of J.D. Vance, the Vice President, who said in an interview on Thursday night: “They’re trying to throw her in prison and throw her off the ballot. Look, that’s not democracy.”

It is a familiar theme for Vance, who outraged Europe’s political elite in February when in a speech in Munich he warned of the continent’s growing authoritarianism. On that occasion he referenced Romania and the disqualification of Calin Georgescu from the presidential election.

The comments from America will infuriate Macron. Le Pen’s sentence has split France down the middle between those who believe, like Trump, she is a victim of a witch-hunt and those who believe justice has been served. A poll published this morning revealed that 49 percent of French want Le Pen to contest the 2027 presidential election, an increase of 7 percent since a similar poll one month ago.

Macron falls into the camp who believes justice has been served, and on Wednesday he declared that France’s justice system is ‘independent’. Is it? Last year, shortly before the parliamentary elections, one magistrates union – to whom 30 per cent of the judiciary belong – issued a statement calling ‘on all judges… to mobilize against the extreme right coming to power.’

This is the same union who a decade ago constructed in their office a mur des cons (wall of arseholes) in which they pinned photographs of their ideological opponents.

This is why many on the center-right have been supportive of Le Pen following her sentence. Laurent Wauquiez, one of the leading figures in the Republican party, called her conviction ‘heavy-handed and exceptional. In a democracy, it is unhealthy for an elected representative to be banned from standing for election. Political debates must be decided at the ballot box, by the French people.’

Wauquiez, like the rest of his party, remember the fate of Francois Fillon, whose 2017 presidential bid was wrecked by revelations in a left-wing newspaper of malfeasance. Last month another Republican grandee, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, was in court to answer charges of illegally funding his 2007 campaign. The prosecutor criticized his ‘personal ambition’ and demanded he be sent to prison for seven years.

In an interview on Thursday evening the interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, a member of the Republicans and a friend of Fillon, contradicted Macron, his president. He referenced the mur des cons as proof that there are some ‘red magistrates’.

While the right increasingly claim they are victims of a biased judiciary, the left reply that perhaps the truth is they are more susceptible to financial impropriety.

The dilemma for Le Pen and her party is how best to harness this sentiment of right-wing persecution, prevalent among her voters and many on the center-right.

The same applies to the remarks overnight of Trump and Vance. Her pursuit of respectability has got her and her party nowhere, so would she be better served becoming an anti-system disruptor à la Trump?

The French media, overwhelmingly hostile to Le Pen, believes that in criticising her conviction she has already made her choice. ‘By preferring the path of French-style Trumpism, Marine Le Pen is admitting above all that she is not a citizen like the others,’ declared one newspaper editorial this week.

The truth is that Le Pen has been forced to take that path by the French elite. They will never accept her as a fellow citizen, nor her voters.

Now that Trump has a vacancy for a new French friend Le Pen should seek to fill it. For her 11 million voters, the American is far more to their taste than their own president.