Macron rejects Trump's migrant claims about French riots as "stupid"

President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday rejected claims by President Trump and other foreign leaders that immigration was responsible for more than a week of rioting across France, calling the remarks "as unacceptable as they are stupid" and accusing unnamed governments of exploiting the unrest for domestic political gain.

Speaking to reporters in Doha at the end of a tour of Gulf energy suppliers, Macron was asked directly whether he was referring to Trump. "Among others," he replied, according to NBC News and ABC News Australia, which both reported the exchange. Trump had posted on social media days earlier that "France is burning" and urged Macron to "close your borders and take control before it is too late," blaming migrants for the violence. Vice President JD Vance made similar comments the day before.

Macron said France was contending with more than domestic anger over living costs. "We've seen AI-generated images depicting scenes that never actually happened in France," he said, adding: "We've had people claiming that we were invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, which is completely false." He said leaders "in the middle of election campaigns," including some "on the other side of the Atlantic," were "using our country for their own political campaigns."

A week of riots, by the numbers

The unrest began as a student-led movement in September over classroom conditions, before labor unions and farmers angered by the cost of living joined in. It escalated sharply after a nationwide day of protest on October 17, which drew more than 500,000 people by the Interior Ministry's count and turned violent in dozens of cities.

• Nearly 2,400 people were arrested in the initial wave of violence; Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said by Monday the figure in custody had risen to 2,513, with 67 people imprisoned.
• Roughly 3,000 businesses were looted or vandalized, according to Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu.
• Almost 1,000 police officers and firefighters were injured, with no deaths reported.
• A 143-year-old town hall in Limoges was set ablaze and largely destroyed; city halls in Lille and Angers were also broken into, and a historic tourist office was burned in Lyon.

Lecornu asked prefects to impose narrow, localized curfews rather than a blanket measure for Paris, a step described in detail by PBS NewsHour; curfews covering parts of Paris, Bordeaux, Nice and Lyon took effect on consecutive nights last week. Macron has stopped short of declaring a nationwide state of emergency, and Nuñez offered to resign over the government's handling of the violence; Macron refused the resignation.

Scrutiny at home, a dispute abroad

The French Senate's law commission announced on October 19 that it would open a cross-party inquiry into "the events of October 17 and 18," according to an official Senate press release. The commission, whose mission was proposed by its chair, Muriel Jourda, said the violence had exposed serious shortcomings in how the policing operation had been anticipated and prepared, and said it would establish the sequence of events, evaluate the law-enforcement and judicial response, and determine administrative, institutional and political responsibility. Rapporteurs for the inquiry were to be named the following week.

Macron's complaint about "foreign manipulation of information" was not the first such accusation to surface around the unrest. On October 7, before the violence escalated, France's foreign ministry summoned Iran's ambassador in Paris, saying in an official statement that Iranian state accounts had spread "absolutely unacceptable" false content about the government's handling of the student protests; Tehran had separately summoned France's ambassador, a move Paris called unfounded. Asked about Macron's later remarks, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said his ministry was prepared to offer countries "the necessary clarification" to help them avoid amplifying false information on social media, according to ABC News Australia's account.

"The fact is, all the people who are speaking ill of our country right now are people who don't love our country."

Macron made the remark, along with his other comments, from Doha, where he had just concluded a swing through Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf states aimed at securing fuel supplies. France's energy market has been strained in part by the war involving Iran, and the Élysée Palace said the trip secured commitments for roughly 295,000 additional metric tons of diesel per month from Gulf partners — more than a tenth of France's monthly consumption. A joint statement issued by the French presidency after Macron's meeting with Qatar's leadership says the two countries agreed to expand energy-security cooperation "in light of the escalation in the region" and backed keeping the Strait of Hormuz open to shipping without constraints.

Who is affected, and what comes next

The dispute has drawn in officials well beyond France's borders: Trump and Vance in Washington, Iranian officials in Tehran, and European governments watching a wave of cost-of-living frustration that French officials say has echoed, in smaller form, in neighboring countries. Within France, the political fallout is immediate — Lecornu's government, already under pressure, now faces a Senate inquiry examining whether the state failed to anticipate the violence, while Macron's Gulf diplomacy has drawn domestic criticism for its timing, even as it yielded fuel-supply commitments the government says it needs.

No date has been set for the Senate inquiry's findings. French authorities have said they are preparing a large security deployment for a new round of demonstrations planned for this coming Saturday, and officials have not ruled out further measures, including an eventual state of emergency, if the unrest resumes. Macron's remarks are unlikely to be the final word in his exchange with Trump; the two leaders have sparred publicly before, and neither the White House nor Trump had issued a direct response to Wednesday's comments as of Thursday.