They told us it was a fluke. They told us it would fade. The globalist establishment, the legacy media talking heads, and the Brussels bureaucrats all assured the world that the wave of populist nationalism that swept Donald Trump into the White House was a temporary spasm — a blip that would be corrected, managed, and quietly smothered. Nearly a decade later, that wave hasn’t receded. It’s still building. And now, France may be the next domino to fall.
President Trump took to Truth Social this week to highlight what the mainstream press refuses to acknowledge with any honesty: the America First movement didn’t stay in America. It became a template. A proof of concept. A permission slip for citizens across the Western world who were tired of being told by their own governments that their borders, their culture, their economic security, and their national identity were secondary concerns to the whims of unelected international bodies and the donor class that funds them.
A Global Revolt the Establishment Can’t Explain Away
Look at the map of the last several years and the trend is undeniable. Italy elected Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party on an unapologetically nationalist platform. Argentina’s Javier Milei — a self-described anarcho-capitalist who carried a chainsaw as a campaign prop — dismantled decades of socialist economic policy virtually overnight after his stunning 2023 election. The Netherlands saw Geert Wilders surge to the top of parliamentary elections. In Germany, the AfD has continued to gain ground despite relentless efforts by the political establishment to delegitimize and legally suppress the party. In country after country, ordinary working people are choosing candidates who put their own nation first.
The legacy media’s preferred explanation for all of this is that voters are being manipulated — by disinformation, by social media algorithms, by shadowy foreign influence. What they can’t bring themselves to say is the obvious truth: people are voting this way because the globalist consensus failed them. Open borders strained public services and changed communities faster than residents could absorb. Trade deals gutted manufacturing towns. Energy policies drove up costs for working families while enriching connected elites. And when citizens complained, they were called racists, extremists, or simply dismissed as too unsophisticated to understand the benefits of the system that was hollowing them out.
Sound familiar? It should. That’s the exact story that elected Donald Trump in 2016, re-elected him in 2024, and has kept the America First agenda at the center of global political conversation ever since.
France: The Establishment’s Last Stand?
Which brings us to France, and to Marine Le Pen. The leader of the Rassemblement National — the National Rally party — has been a persistent thorn in the side of the French establishment for years. She came agonizingly close to the French presidency in both 2017 and 2022, losing to Emmanuel Macron in the final round of voting each time. The globalist media celebrated those victories as proof that France had “rejected” the nationalist tide.
But Macron’s France has not been a success story by any honest measure. His government has faced repeated waves of civil unrest. France has grappled with serious challenges related to immigration, integration, and public safety that Macron’s centrist technocratic approach has been unable to resolve. His approval ratings have been battered. The French establishment’s response to Le Pen has largely been to attempt to use the courts to sideline her politically — a move that, regardless of its legal merits, looks to many observers like exactly the kind of political persecution that only makes nationalist movements stronger.
Le Pen and the Rassemblement National have remained a dominant force in French polling. With another electoral opportunity potentially on the horizon, the question the establishment press doesn’t want to ask out loud is now unavoidable: Is this finally France’s moment?
Why This Matters for America
Some readers might ask why Americans should care about French elections. The answer is straightforward: the same globalist institutions and ideological networks that fought Trump for a decade are the same ones propping up failing centrist governments across Europe. When nationalist, sovereignty-first governments gain power abroad, it strengthens the broader case for the America First agenda and creates natural allies for U.S. interests on the world stage.
President Trump understands this intuitively, which is why he has consistently celebrated like-minded leaders around the world — not because he’s directing some coordinated international movement, but because he recognizes that working people in Warsaw, Rome, Buenos Aires, and Paris are responding to the same broken promises from the same class of globalist managers that American voters repudiated at the ballot box.
A nationalist France would mean a France more skeptical of NATO mission creep, more protective of its own borders and industries, and more willing to push back against the unelected bureaucracy in Brussels. That’s not a threat to America. That’s an opportunity for genuine partnership between sovereign nations acting in their own interests — exactly the kind of international order Trump has always advocated for.
Bottom Line
The political revolution that Donald Trump sparked — or more accurately, that he gave voice to — is not slowing down. It is accelerating. The elites who convinced themselves that the 2016 election was an aberration have spent years getting it wrong, and they are getting it wrong again now. France may not be the last chapter of this story. It may just be the next one. The America First wave went global, and no amount of establishment hand-wringing, media spin, or lawfare is going to stop it. Voters across the free world are waking up to the same truth American voters already know: when you put your country and your people first, you win.
