Far-right racist French Presdential candidate Eric Zemmour’s campaign told French news outlets the Donald called him to encourage his challenge to incumbent President Emmanuel Macron, Politico EU reports. “Donald Trump told Eric Zemmour ‘never give in, hold on, be brave, it’s tenacity and endurance that end up paying at the end of a campaign,'” Zemmour’s spokesman Guillaume Peltier told France 2. Peltier separately told BFMTV the Fat Orange Bastard warned Zemmour on the call that “The media will think you are brutal, don’t give in.”
Trump’s team have not confirmed the call, but it wouldn’t be especially surprising if Donald were to endorse Zemmour publicly, as last month he did so for Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban’s reelection campaign. Zemmour, a former TV host in the mold of Tucker Carlson who uses all the same tropes about a nation in decline because of Muslim immigrants and identity politics, has been charged and convicted of inciting racial or religious hatred with his comments three times – the most recent coming last month. Despite being the son of Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Algeria himself, Zemmour is an apologist for the World War II Vichy regime, having published a book in 2014 which sought to exonerate Philippe Pétain and other collaborators for the deportation of French Jews to Holocaust death camps in Nazi Germany. So definitely Trump’s kind of guy.