Speaking to POLITICO before his second event on Monday, Zemmour framed his trip to Washington as a kind of rallying cry for the transatlantic right. “Our principal message is that it is not only France that is committing suicide,” Zemmour, speaking through a translator, told POLITICO. “I’m calling upon all Western peoples to not follow the seductive path that the French followed and instead to wake up and see what’s happening.”
Zemmour, who arrived at both of his public appearances wearing a conspicuously bright red tie, also used his remarks in Washington to link himself to Trump’s recent accomplishments — in particular, the U.S. president’s sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration. “When he talks about anti-migration politics, I see the same ideas that I talked about even before Trump entered onto the scene,” said Zemmour in his remarks at the American Moment event. “This isn’t something that is just the exclusive purview of MAGA and the Trump administration.”
Zemmour’s pilgrimage to Washington came at a particularly difficult moment for the global right. As recently as last year, MAGA-sympathetic conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic were speaking in grandiloquent terms about building a global alliance — a “nationalist international” dedicated to combating mass migration and the runaway forces of globalism.
In the past year, however, those international ambitions have run into the reality of nationalist politics, as MAGA-aligned politicians from Canada to Hungary have failed to turn the U.S. president’s support into electoral victories — and, in some cases, have been punished by voters for cozying up to him. In response, many of Europe’s most prominent nationalist figures — including Zemmour’s primary far-right rivals in France’s National Rally party — are now going out of their way to keep the U.S. president at arm’s length.
Zemmour, meanwhile, has taken the opposite tack, playing up his connections to Trump and the MAGA movement. Last year, he touted the fact that it was he — rather than his rivals in National Rally — who had scored an invite to Trump’s inauguration, which he attended alongside his romantic partner and primary political ally, Sarah Knafo, a member of the European Parliament. (The invite came from the conservative Claremont Institute, where Knafo had been a summer fellow.)
In Washington this week, Zemmour downplayed the potential political dangers of associating with Trump, casting National Rally as the party that had strayed from the right’s true mission by embracing statist economic policies. “National Rally is a party led by populists and socialists of the left, so it’s normal that they would feel out of tune with the American right,” he said. “Western peoples are engaged in a revolt of identity. Trump incarnates this in the United States, and I embody this in France.”