First there were prohibitive customs tariffs with regard to its main allies: Mexico and Canada. Then, it was around the annexation of Greenland, a vast territory belonging to Denmark – an allied country of the United States – and the Panama Canal. And this Wednesday, February 5, Donald Trump promised to transform the Gaza Strip into “New Côte d’Azur” under the dumbfounded gaze of Susie Wiles, her former campaign director recently promoted to cabinet. Eur every day, Europe wakes up with a new shock declaration from the American president. And each time, many questions arise: is he really aware of what he says and the destabilization that these media outings imply? What repercussions could these geopolitical upheavals have for us, on the other side of the Atlantic?
For European journalists, Donald Trump’s return to the White House is an important pool of possible subjects. In recent days, there are no more daily newspapers or magazines dedicated to the billionaire – and its new close guard. Including, with us, at L’Express. Our file of a This week precisely deciphers the underside of the Donald Trump – Elon Musk relationship and gives the floor to many experts who believe that their romance will not last.
There is no doubt that Donald Trump and his new advisers saturate the French media space today. In his news barometer 2025the INA points out that within four months preceding the European elections last June, they have been “four times less mentioned” in the French audiovisual media than the American presidential election. A surprising observation, which would almost make us forget that the phenomenon is not new. During his first mandate already, the New York magnate had an alarming resonance fund in France.
On its dedicated site, the INA allows you to carry out research in more than a million hours of recent archives of 16 major French audiovisual media. We thus learn that between March 1, 2017 and January 31, 2021, the name of the French Prime Minister was almost systematically mentioned than that of Donald Trump – the notable exception remaining the year 2020, during which Edouard Philippe And Jean Castex benefited from major media exposure due to the COVVI-19 pandemic. The first two years of his mandate, the billionaire even had around 80 % additional media appearances as the head of the French government.
If we are interested in the past year, things seem slightly more balanced. During the first six months of 2024, Gabriel Attal was more regularly mentioned in the French audiovisual media that Donald Trump, then a simple republican candidate for the presidential election. Things seem to be reversed from July: Attal being suspended following the dissolution, and Trump having survived an assassination attempt on July 13, the future American president begins to increase his media presence in the ‘Hexagon.
This seems clearly lower than that of the various preconceptions in the fall, but beware of the effects of scale: there are still almost 9,000 occurrences of the name “Donald Trump” on the month of September alone, while that the average number of monthly occurrences in 2020 – another electoral year – was around 5,400.
For the moment, the INA has not made the analysis accessible beyond December 31, 2024, but the coming figures certainly promise new surprises. What new planetary upheaval is simmering in the mind of Donald Trump? And when will the next striking news come to hit our old continent? Only it knows the souls that roam the corridors of the White House.