U.S. President Donald Trump has weighed in on the growing chaos in Emmanuel Macron’s France, calling it “very sad” and suggesting it is time the scrap the Paris climate agreement and “return money back to the people in the form of lower taxes”.
Macron, who has became a hero to left-liberals and something of a globalist poster boy after he bucked a populist surge on both sides of the Atlantic to win the French presidency, saw his poll rating crumble to 18 percent and his people out on the streets in their tens of thousands after he imposed a “green” fuel tax which fell heavily on rural people and the working class.
The essentially leaderless Gilets Jaunes, better known as the “Yellow Jackets” or “Yellow Vests” to English-speakers, have blocked roads and come out onto the streets of Paris in their thousands four weekends in a row now, and already forced the French leader to abandon the tax rise — but this has not been enough to mollify an increasingly revolution-minded populace, requiring him to deploy thousands of regular and paramilitary police to try and contain protests which have begun to take on the appearance of a civil insurrection.
“Very sad day [and] night in Paris,” observed the U.S. leader. “Maybe it’s time to end the ridiculous and extremely expensive Paris Agreement and return money back to the people in the form of lower taxes?”
President Trump suggested the United States was “way ahead of the curve” in rejecting the supposedly anti-climate change accord, noting that his country — despite its refusal to sign it — is “the only major country where emissions went down last year!”
President Macron has emerged as the global establishment’s major champion for the agreement, as the electoral star of the left-liberal mainstream’s former alternative “leader of the free world” — Germany’s Angela Merkel — has been decisively dimmed.
Macron even threatened to veto a trade deal between the European Union — which negotiates trade agreements on its member-states’ behalf — and the South American trade bloc Mercosur, after “Tropical Trump” Jair Bolsonaro suggested he could follow his North American counterpart’s lead in exiting the Paris accord.
As the situation in his home country continues to slide out of control, how much longer the embattled French president will remain able to throw his weight around in this manner remains to be seen.
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