President Trump said Paris is on track to become a Muslim city very soon and pressed France to close its borders after mass protests flipped into looting, fires, and attacks on police.
Speaking to reporters Monday as he left the White House for a campaign rally in Kansas, Trump tied the unrest directly to open borders and urged French President Emmanuel Macron to reverse course. He said he had warned Macron for years that letting the world pour in was a mistake, and that the deal for France never included watching its capital transform.
The New York Post reported Trump’s blunt assessment as smaller groups peeled off from large demonstrations, looted stores, struck officers, and set fires across the country. Trump framed the choice for Europe in plain terms: shut the borders and remove people who hate the host nation, or lose the country.
About 500,000 people turned out across France on Saturday. What began last month over school conditions had widened into anger over cost of living and inflation. Then smaller packs looted as many as 2,000 stores, attacked police, and started fires. Trump rejected the idea that the disorder was mainly about classrooms or prices.
Trump said he had delivered the same message to Macron long before the latest violence. “I told him a long time ago, ‘You’re making a big mistake in France. You’re letting everybody from the world come in. The whole world was coming in,'” he told reporters.
“As you know, Paris is going to be a Muslim city very soon, and that wasn’t the deal. That wasn’t the deal. I told Emmanuel, ‘You should close up your borders.'”
He added that Macron’s borders remain a problem and that Europe as a whole is finished if it refuses to close them and remove criminals among the protesters. Trump has made the same case for a decade, and he pointed again to people who “hate the country,” the buildings, the people, and the art. France, he said, must “take those bad people out.”
On Oct. 6 he had already described the mounting protests as “Islam wanting to take over a once great Country.” Roughly 10 percent of France is Muslim, with a slightly higher share in Paris; most are immigrants or descendants from formerly French-ruled parts of Africa and the Middle East. Trump’s remarks came after a reporter noted Macron blaming French discontent on Trump’s war with Iran and the resulting fuel costs. Trump answered by shifting the focus back to migration.
Readers tracking his latest moves will also see him pressing other fronts, including when Trump says he still could pursue criminal cases against longtime political opponents.
The Breitbart account added hard numbers from the weekend chaos: more than 2,330 people taken into custody and nearly 1,000 security personnel injured. Those figures sit beside Trump’s insistence that the core driver is immigration policy, not schools or living costs. He has contrasted Europe’s open approach with the harder line he has pushed at home.
Vice President JD Vance struck a similar note, arguing that Western liberals imported large numbers from developing nations without demanding assimilation and then watched French landmarks burn. The Washington Examiner carried both Trump’s warning and Vance’s critique of elites who treated borders as optional. Trump put it more directly: what is happening in France “has to do with immigration, not schools, not anything,” because leaders “let people into their country that don’t love their country.”
That foreign-policy through-line fits other recent decisions, such as when Trump freezes Graham Act Russia sanctions before penalties take hold.
Marine Le Pen, the populist conservative candidate in France’s April election, has tempered broad criticism of Muslims. On Thursday, ahead of the surge in violence, she wrote on X: “Islam is compatible with the Republic; I’ve said it ten times.” The timing underscored the gap between carefully worded political statements and the reality of looted storefronts and injured officers.
Footage from the unrest showed looters and rioters from various racial and ethnic groups. Trump’s point was not demographic charts; it was incentives and consequences. Leaders who refuse to control entry and remove those who openly hate the host society invite disorder that ordinary citizens then pay for. French police became targets. Shop owners lost inventory. Neighborhoods watched fires burn.
His willingness to speak without the usual filters also shows up in how he handles the press, including when Trump launches a streaming channel as networks suspend White House coverage.
Fox News labeled the Paris warning controversial and highlighted the “Muslim city” phrasing as the center of the dispute. The controversy itself is the tell: stating the demographic trajectory and the policy failure that produced the riots is treated as more dangerous than the riots. Trump’s answer remains the same one he says he has given Macron and other European leaders for years, close the border and remove people who hate the country, or watch the country finish.
Campaign stops keep the same theme of drawing clear lines, the way Trump backs Husted and Ramaswamy in Youngstown while hammering opponents who paper over hard choices.
Europe’s leaders can keep blaming fuel prices, school budgets, or foreign wars. Or they can admit that mass migration without assimilation produces streets full of people who do not love the country they entered. Trump is not waiting for permission to say it. Nations that refuse to defend their borders and their culture do not stay free, prosperous, or recognizably themselves.