Donald Trump is anything but a Francophile. No doubt, the president wouldn’t enjoy steak tartare, understand the Bayeux Tapestry, or remember the words to the “La Marseillaise.” But no matter the side of the Atlantic, the populist gets elections.
Weighing in on Twitter, Trump predicted that yesterday’s Paris terror attack would have a “big effect” on the looming French presidential election. If history’s a guide, he’s probably right.
Reverberations of fear and uncertainty lent Trump credibility after the November 2015 terror attack, giving his campaign a boost of momentum ahead of the GOP primary. Almost overnight, it transformed Trump from a niche candidate slightly leading a crowded field to the national security candidate and clear frontrunner.
Seizing on the Syrian refugee crisis and the Paris attacks, Trump warned that terrorists would take advantage of American humanitarian aid. And when President Barack Obama announced plans to resettle 10,000 refugees from that conflict in the United States, Trump warned of a Trojan horse situation.
“You can’t let them in,” Trump told a Trenton crowd the day after the attack. “When I look at that migration, I see a lot of very strong, young men. And I see far fewer women and children. I say, ”What’s going on over here?'”
Opponents called it xenophobic fear mongering. Supporters cheered it as smart foreign policy. And now history remembers it as a winning strategy. After Trump talked tough on terrorism and pledged to ban all Muslim immigration, his numbers in national polls jumped from around 25 percent to 35 percent, and they didn’t come down. After that, no one could catch him.
Now the pundits who said Trump couldn’t win the presidency are sneering at his electoral analysis. The uncouth idiot who eats steak well-done with catsup, they sneer on Twitter, is too stupid to understand a sophisticated French election. But again perhaps, they’ve dismissed Trump too quickly.
Far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen hasn’t just been following Trump’s populist playbook, she’s been expanding it. She called for a crackdown on immigration, deportation of all foreigners on terror watch lists, and the shuttering of Muslim places of worship. “Hate preachers must be expelled,” La Pen wrote on Twitter, “Islamist mosques closed.”
No one can with exact certainty what impact the most recent attack will have in the end. How populism will translate into French remains unclear. But even if Trump is irredeemably outré, he may prove a political savant.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
