Trump tells a Kansas crowd that America will burn like France if the Democrats win the midterms

The president brought a new exhibit to the stump on Monday night: France.

Speaking in Park City, Kansas, at a rally for Republican Senator Roger Marshall, Donald Trump told the crowd that the riots that have swept French cities since Saturday are a preview of an America run by Democrats. “We are not going to let that happen to this country,” he said. “When you see burning steeples and raging fires in France, just remember that is what the radical Dumocrats want to do to America.” Trump offered no evidence that Democrats want rioting in the United States. The line is an argument about where each party's policies lead, delivered in the middle of a Senate race Republicans expected to be safe.

“I love you Kansas, but I am here for a guy named Roger Marshall,” Trump said at the top of the speech. Marshall is defending his seat against Adam Hamilton, a Methodist megachurch pastor, in a race that has drawn national money and attention. Kansas has not elected a Democratic senator in 94 years, and Trump carried the state by 16 points in 2024. That the president is spending a Monday night there, two weeks before the election, says what the internal numbers say: Republicans are on defense in states they expected to hold, with voter frustration over the Iran war and the cost of living cutting into their support. The campaign has launched a 32 day blitz of rural areas where its own polling shows soft support among men aged 55 and under.

The anxiety at the rally was economic before it was anything else. Petrol stood at 3.98 dollars a gallon in Kansas and diesel at 5.78 dollars, up about 45 percent, according to the motoring group AAA figures cited in reporting from the rally, as of October 20. Voters interviewed at the event talked about the cost of living in the same terms French protesters used before their marches turned violent.

The Kansas stop came on the worst polling day of Trump's presidency. A Reuters Ipsos poll released on Monday put his approval at 31 percent, the lowest that survey has recorded in either of his terms, with Democrats leading the generic ballot by 12 points among registered voters. Republicans hold the House 218 to 214 and the Senate 53 to 47, so Democrats need a net gain of four seats in each chamber on November 3 to take Congress for the last two years of his term. France, burning on every screen in the country, is now part of the case Trump is making against that outcome.

The picture with this story is an illustration.