President Donald Trump will attempt to “rig” the upcoming midterm elections in the United States, former French ambassador to America Gérard Araud has claimed.
Araud, a longtime diplomat who previously served as French ambassador to Israel, the representative of Paris at the United Nations, and, finally, as ambassador to the United States from 2014 to 2019, has long been a critic of President Donald Trump.
However, the outspoken 73-year-old former ambassador drew attention for his outlandish predictions about American politics in the coming months.
Appearing on the France Inter public broadcaster this week, Araud said that he expects President Trump to “rig the midterm elections… for example, by establishing a state of emergency under the pretext that there is violence.”
The former ambassador then imagined that President Trump would deploy his “anti-immigration militia, ICE, at the door of the polling stations” so that Black and Latino voters would be discouraged from voting.
Commenting just days after another attempted assassination against President Trump, the ex-diplomat suggested that the American leader was encouraging the violent reaction from the left through his rhetoric.
He said that President Trump “expresses violence, brutality… He himself becomes the almost sole target of all the hatred that this administration fuels.”
Araud also accused the president of fostering an environment akin to a civil war, saying: “He doesn’t talk about his adversaries but about his enemies.”
“So there is this whole atmosphere, all these speeches which are almost speeches of virtual civil war. We are in a state of virtual civil war in the United States… Today, you have a very serious debate where we wonder if the country is not going to slide towards civil war.”
It is not the first time that Araud has targeted President Trump. Indeed, as he was leaving his post as France’s ambassador to the United States in 2019, he compared his first administration to that of Louis XIV’s court.
“You have an old king, a bit whimsical, unpredictable, uninformed, but he wants to be the one deciding,” he said in 2019.
The ex-ambassador has also previously courted controversy over his undiplomatic comments about the United States, causing an uproar after he used the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks in 2017 to complain that America did not sufficiently confront Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
He wrote: “In this Pearl Harbor day, we should remember that the US refused to side with France and the UK to confront the fascist powers in the 30s.”
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