“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” Donald Trump said on the day in 2015 that he announced he was running for president. During his tenure in office, Trump took many different steps to limit immigration, and not just the illegal sort. In fact, in 2020, he reduced the number of legal immigrants to the U.S. by 49 percent.

Le Pen certainly would have approved. And so do U.S. voters in general, not just Republicans. Nearly 60 percent of those who participated in a recent Gallup poll said there was too much immigration into the country. That makes anti-immigrant sentiment mainstream. Le Pen’s platform also proposed that non-citizen immigrants arrested for any crime be sent back to their country of origin. This fringe position in France is the law of the land in America and has been for years.

National Rally is also famously skeptical of international alliances, especially those with NATO and the European Union. France is one of the founding members of the EU, and along with Germany, forms its heart. For France to leave the Union would gut it, and possibly bring an end to the “European project” of peace and economic cooperation for the continent. But such actions don’t send a shudder down the spine of Americans; Trump for his part killed a major trade deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, threatened to undo America’s free-trade deal with Mexico and Canada, pulled out of the Paris climate treaty, and came closer than we ever knew to essentially pulling the U.S. out of NATO — all to the applause of many Republicans.