Posted by 
Terrible news for residents of London and Paris — these once-great cities are “no longer recognizable.”
The bearer of this shocking news was none other than Donald Trump, who used a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday to bemoan what happened when European cities “opened their doors to jihad.”
“We’ve seen what happened when Europe opened their doors to jihad,” the former U.S. president said as he campaigns for a return to the White House. “Look at Paris, look at London — they’re no longer recognizable.”
Republican standard-bearer Trump admitted he was “going to get myself into a lot of trouble with the folks in Paris and the folks in London, but you know what, that’s the fact. They are no longer recognizable and we can’t let that happen to our country.”
He added that “we have incredible culture, tradition — nothing wrong with their culture, their tradition — we can’t let that happen here and I’ll never let it happen to the United States of America.”
Trump was speaking after police in New York and Los Angeles broke up protests at Columbia University and UCLA, where students had gathered to demonstrate against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Trump has form when it comes to criticizing European countries. In December 2015, shortly after Paris was hit by a deadly Islamist terror attack, he said that neighborhoods in Paris and London are so dangerous that police refuse to go there. Trump was at the time defending his plan for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
Despite being criticized for those remarks, Trump doubled down and told Good Morning America’s George Stephanopoulos: “The real Paris is a different Paris than the City of Light that you read about.
“They have areas in Paris where it is so radicalized and so vicious … that the police refuse to go there. They will not go there. That’s what’s going to happen with our country.”
He was no more polite about London at the time, telling MSNBC’s Morning Joe that, “London and other places … are so radicalized that the police are afraid for their own lives.”
A spokeswoman for then-British Prime Minister David Cameron said Trump’s comments on Muslims were “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong.” Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, at the time the mayor of London, said Trump’s comments on the dangers of London were “ill-informed” and “utter nonsense.”
Johnson added that “the only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.” Johnson would go on to change his tune about Trump, saying earlier this year there is “little doubt” that the world felt safer and more stable while Trump was in office.
In January 2016, when Trump was a presidential candidate the first time around, he said that living in Brussels is like living in “a hellhole” because of the supposed lack of “assimilation” of the Muslim population.
“You go to Brussels — I was in Brussels a long time ago, 20 years ago, so beautiful, everything is so beautiful — it’s like living in a hellhole right now,” he said in a TV interview with FOX Business Network.
By 2018, when he was president, Trump asked during a meeting on immigration with U.S. lawmakers why the U.S. admits people from “shithole countries” — and while the White House did not deny that Trump used that expression, the man himself tweeted that “this was not the language used.”
