Far-right French politician Marine Le Pen has not proven to be as lucky as Donald Trump was in skirting consequences of breaking the law.Alexis Sciard/IP3/ZUMA
After a French court found far-right leader and former presidential frontrunner Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzlement on Monday—a conviction that will bar her from holding political office for five years—some of President Donald Trump’s closest allies are boosting baseless conspiracy theories alleging that Le Pen’s conviction is part of a global scheme to keep right-wing populists from holding office.
Le Pen is reportedly accused of wrongfully diverting $5 million in funds earmarked for the European Parliament to staffers of her nationalist, xenophobic party, the National Rally, over a 12-year period. The verdict makes her ineligible to run in the country’s next presidential election in 2027—and comes after she was polling at 37 percent, more than 10 points ahead of her closest challenger. Le Pen has run for that office three times before, and became more popular as right-wing political parties across Europe rose in prominence in recent years; in the 2022 presidential runoff, Le Pen earned 41.5 percent of votes to President Emmanuel Macron’s 58.6 percent. (Macron is term-limited.)
In addition to being ineligible to hold office as a result of the conviction, Le Pen will also have to serve two years’ house arrest and pay a fine of more than $100,000. The politician has denied wrongdoing and said she intends to appeal the charges, which she dismissed on French television Monday night as “a political decision” intended to prevent her election. “The rule of law has been completely violated by this decision,” Le Pen added. (Sound familiar?)
A variety of right-wing politicos from around the world condemned the verdict. Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán posted on X, “I am Marine!” Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—who will face a trial on accusations of inciting a 2022 coup attempt seeking to overturn the election he lost, the country’s Supreme Court ruled last week—characterized Le Pen’s conviction to Reuters as “left-wing judicial activism.” And Le Pen’s protégé, National Rally president Jordan Bardella, alleged that “French democracy…is being executed” by the verdict.
You might think Trump’s cronies would abstain from commenting and count themselves lucky that their guy managed to evade criminal conviction himself for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. But you’d be wrong.
Trump allies couldn’t help but characterize Le Pen’s conviction as evidence that the American president, too, had been unfairly targeted in his many court cases. “When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents. This is their standard playbook throughout the world,” Elon Musk wrote on X in a post Monday morning, which had more than 16 million views by that afternoon. Musk made those comments when he re-shared a post from Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department official who previously posted racist conspiracy theories online and interacted with white nationalists under a pseudonym, according to a 2023 NBC News report. The Benz post that Musk re-shared on Monday grouped Le Pen and Trump with a series of others accused, or convicted, of crimes—”[Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil, Imran Khan in Pakistan, Matteo Salvini in Italy…Călin Georgescu in Romania”—and alleged, “The criminal prosecution of every populist challenger is a dagger in the heart of the credibility of democracy.”
In response to another post from Benz boosting the conspiracy theory about the Le Pen verdict, Musk wrote: “This will backfire, like the legal attacks against President Trump.” (But Trump has not, in fact, been immune from court rulings: Several court orders have successfully halted or even reversed some of his most outlandish moves since taking office for the second time, such as his attempts to overturn birthright citizenship and fire thousands of probationary federal workers. Trump was also found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the hush-money payments he made to Stormy Daniels, and found liable by a jury of sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.)
Responding to a post from X user Alex Lorusso—executive producer of the right-wing commentator Benny Johnson’s Benny Show on YouTube —that alleged, “they’re trying the same playbook they did to Trump in France,” Musk wrote: “Same playbook everywhere.” And in response to a two-minute video posted by Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a right-wing Dutch political commentator characterizing the Le Pen verdict as “lawfare against the European right-wing,” Musk replied: “Unreal.”
Donald Trump Jr. also got in on the baseless paranoia, writing in his own post: “France is sending le Pen [sic] to jail and barring her from running?! Are they just trying to prove JD Vance was right about everything?” (He was presumably referring to the vice president’s well-documented disdain for Europe.) Trump Jr. made that post while re-posting another from Robby Starbuck—a conservative activist who brags about getting corporations to roll back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts—claiming that “the left in France” was behind the “BS charges” Le Pen was convicted of.
Trump does not appear to have publicly commented on Le Pen’s conviction yet, and spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones about whether the president supports Musk’s and Trump Jr.’s claims.
There is no evidence to support the idea that Le Pen’s conviction was politically motivated; instead, it’s a reminder that despite Trump’s successful evasion of punishment himself, nobody—not even an aspiring president—is above the law in a truly healthy and just democracy. It’s no wonder this concept triggers the Trump crowd.
