Trump Publicly Backs French Far-Right Leader Le Pen After Her Legal Conviction

On 04 April 2025, CNN report­ed that US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has pub­licly thrown his sup­port behind French far-right leader Marine Le Pen fol­low­ing her con­vic­tion and polit­i­cal ban. The arti­cle begins:

US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has thrown his sup­port behind anoth­er embat­tled far-right Euro­pean leader, back­ing Marine Le Pen after French pres­i­den­tial hope­ful was con­vict­ed of embez­zle­ment and barred from polit­i­cal office. “FREE MARINE LE PEN,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Fri­day, call­ing the court rul­ing a “Witch Hunt.” The mes­sage is the lat­est high-pro­file endorse­ment from his admin­is­tra­tion of a far-right par­ty in Europe and comes as Trump upends decades of post-World War Two secu­ri­ty guar­an­tees towards the con­ti­nent with his “Amer­i­ca First” for­eign and trade poli­cies. Le Pen’s hopes of becom­ing France’s pres­i­dent in 2027 were cut short on Mon­day when a Paris court blocked her from stand­ing for office for five years, after she was found guilty of embez­zling Euro­pean Union funds. The fig­ure­head of the far-right Nation­al Ral­ly (RN) par­ty had been seen as the front-run­ner for the next elec­tion, and the rul­ing has thrown French pol­i­tics into disarray…

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Key Points:

• Le Pen was con­vict­ed of embez­zling EU funds and banned from polit­i­cal office for five years, derail­ing her 2027 pres­i­den­tial ambitions.
• Trump com­pared Le Pen’s legal trou­bles to his own, call­ing the con­vic­tion a “Witch Hunt” by “Euro­pean Left­ists using Lawfare.”
• The Trump admin­is­tra­tion has increas­ing­ly backed far-right Euro­pean polit­i­cal fig­ures, includ­ing con­tro­ver­sial cas­es in Roma­nia and Germany.
• Trump advi­sor Elon Musk also pub­licly con­demned Le Pen’s sen­tence, claim­ing it rep­re­sent­ed legal sys­tem abuse by “the rad­i­cal left.”

In April 2002, a GIOR inves­ti­ga­tion found that Russ­ian state-backed media was ampli­fy­ing far-right can­di­date Marine Le Pen ahead of the French pres­i­den­tial elec­tions. Most Russ­ian reports empha­size Le Pen’s crit­i­cism of West­ern sup­port for Ukraine and NATO, which she promised to leave if she had won the election.

Dis­claimer: The GIOR uti­lizes AI to gen­er­ate sum­maries of news items, includ­ing the intro­duc­tion and the key points that fol­low. Any text fol­low­ing the key points is con­text added by GIOR edi­tors. Please ver­i­fy all infor­ma­tion before using. Images are also AI-gen­er­at­ed and are for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es only—they are meant to rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als con­cerned but should not be under­stood as “real-world” photography.