Trump Says Paris Will Be 'a Muslim City Very Soon.' France's Own Numbers Show Why.

President Donald Trump was leaving the White House on Monday afternoon for a campaign rally in Kansas when a reporter asked about French President Emmanuel Macron blaming France's unrest on the U.S. war with Iran and the fuel prices that followed, the New York Post reported. "I think that's the fake news," Trump said, per Fox News. "He's a friend of mine."

Then he turned to the border.

"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 said. "And you know, as you know, Paris is going to be a Muslim city very soon, and that wasn't the deal. That wasn't the deal."

He said he first told Macron to "close up your borders" eight or nine years ago. "We closed our borders," he said, and later: "Emmanuel should have closed his borders a long time ago. I told him to do it." The White House's rapid-response account posted the clip soon after:

He didn't stop at Paris. "If Europe doesn't close its borders and bring the criminals out, like the people that are protesting, Europe is finished," he said, according to the Post. France, he said, has to remove people who "hate the country — They hate the buildings. They hate the people. They hate the art."

Two weeks, four steps

The line capped a message Trump has been building for two weeks. On Oct. 6, as student protests over school conditions spread, he wrote on Truth Social: "What's happening in France is nothing less than out of control mass migration. ... This isn't about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!" AFP reported.

On Sunday, after a weekend of looting and arson, he wrote "France is burning!" on Truth Social. We covered that weekend in France Didn't Get Here by Accident and in the BBC's "mostly peaceful" framing. Monday morning he went shorter: "The migrants have taken over France. They must CLOSE THE BORDERS, FAST!" he posted. By afternoon, he had a forecast for the capital.

What Paris says

France's government tells a different story about who did the damage. In a Sunday address, Macron blamed "insurrectionist elements from radical far-left groups, joined by numerous criminals," Anadolu reported. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu pointed to "an ultra-left movement intent on orchestrating profound disorder" before April's presidential election, and French officials have not suggested any link between the unrest and immigration, CBS News reported.

Paris has already answered Trump once. After his Oct. 6 post, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot put him in the same sentence as Tehran: "You'll get the Iranians' version, perhaps the version from some Israelis, perhaps the version from some Americans," he told lawmakers, per AFP.

Even France's nationalist right is choosing its words carefully. Marine Le Pen, who is running for president in April, wrote last Thursday that Islam is compatible with the Republic, while promising to stand in the way of anyone pushing Sharia law. The post drew more than 7,700 replies:

What the numbers show

France stopped asking about religion in its census in 1872, INSEE notes, so there is no official count of Muslims in Paris, only surveys and estimates.

The best official survey, run by INSEE and the demographic institute Ined in 2019 and 2020, found that 10% of adults ages 18 to 59 in mainland France identify as Muslim. Among 18- to 49-year-olds, the share rose from 8% to 11% in a little over a decade, INSEE reported.

Paris itself is far more immigrant than the country. One in five residents of the city is an immigrant, and in Seine-Saint-Denis, the suburb just north of it, nearly one in three is, compared with one in ten nationally, according to INSEE. The INSEE-Ined survey found that 44% of immigrants identify as Muslim.

Looking ahead, Pew Research Center's 2017 projections put France at 8.8% Muslim in 2016. By 2050, that rises to 12.7% even if all migration stopped, 17.4% if regular migration continued, and 18% if record refugee flows did too, per Pew and The Local.

Why the numbers point one way

The underlying numbers are on his side. Pew found the median Muslim in France is 27 years old, against 43 for everyone else, and that Muslim women in France average 2.9 children, a full child more than non-Muslims. INSEE found that 91% of people raised in Muslim families keep the faith, compared with 67% raised Catholic, while 58% of French people with no immigrant background say they have no religion at all.

Demographic change works like compound interest. A few points a decade never makes the news, until the total does. And it isn't spread evenly: the Paris region holds 18% of France's people but 37% of its immigrants, INSEE says. That is where the shift is felt first.

That wasn't the deal

The heart of Trump's answer was the complaint: "That wasn't the deal." It's about consent, the sense that a country changed faster than anyone asked its voters, and it will hang over France's presidential race.

France's own surveys back his warning. Whoever replaces Macron in April inherits both the trend and the fight over what to do about it.