French senator paints grim picture of US under Trump, calls him 'dictator' and Musk a 'jester high on ketamine'
Trending | World | French Senator Malhuret criticises US President Trump, likening him to the Roman emperor Nero, and paints a grim picture of US politics under Trump's leadership.
Claude Malhuret, leader of France's centre-right party, called US President Donald Trump a dictator, comparing him to Nero, the brutal emperor of ancient Rome.
In an over eight-minute-long speech addressing the French Senate recently, Malhuret painted a grim picture of the US under Trump. Slamming the US president and one of his closest allies, Elon Musk, Malhuret said that the DOGE chief was a "jester high on ketamine" while Trump was nothing more than an "incendiary emperor".
Trump or Nero?
Malhuret compared Trump to Nero, a Roman emperor known for murdering his mother and wife and prosecuting Christians for a fire that devastated the empire. The French minister compared the Trump administration to "Nero's court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service."
His criticism comes after Trump and his Vice President JD Vance verbally attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy during an Oval Office meeting that was supposed to help improve US-Ukraine relations and put a stop to the Ukraine-Russia war.
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Calling Zelensky a "war hero," Malhuret said that the "draft dodger was giving moral and strategic lessons to the war hero Zelensky, before dismissing him like a stable boy, ordering him to submit or resign".
Here, 'draft dodger' refers to Trump dodging military enlistment during the Vietnam War because of a "timely" diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels.
Watch the speech here:
Labelling Musk a "traitor" for blindly backing Trump's rhetoric, he said that Europe needs to "stand firm".
"Ukraine's defeat would be Europe's defeat," he noted, adding that "Baltic countries, Georgia and Moldova are already on the list."
"Putin's goal is to return to Yalta, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin," he remarked.
Also read | Donald Trump asks Congress to applaud DOGE chief Elon Musk as Democrats hold signs 'Musk steals'
France criticises Trump
His comments come as earlier this week, Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, told French newspaper Le Figaro earlier that Trump's decision to freeze US aid to Kyiv was "brutal" and "cruel". It was "highly critical not to give Ukraine a reasonable period of time to figure something out," she said.
(With inputs from agencies)
