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Paris mayor hits back after Trump calls her city unsafe

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo had an amusing response to how President Trump characterized the French capital during a Friday speech.

“To @realDonaldTrump and his friend Jim, in @LaTourEiffel we celebrate the dynamism and the spirit of openness of #Paris with Mickey & Minnie,” she wrote.

Shortly before Hidalgo’s tweet, Trump described various parts of Europe as troubled and unsafe in order to support his own hard-line immigration policies.

“Take a look at what’s happened in France,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Take a look at Nice and Paris.”

“I have a friend. He’s a very, very substantial guy. He loves the City of Lights. He loves Paris. For years, every year during the summer, he would go to Paris. It was automatic. With his wife and his family.”

Trump continued: “Hadn’t seen him in a while. And I said, ‘Jim, let me ask you a question, how’s Paris doing?’ ‘Paris? I don’t go there anymore. Paris is no longer Paris.’ That was four years, four, five years, hasn’t gone there. He wouldn’t miss it for anything. Now he doesn’t even think in terms of going there.”

During the campaign, Trump frequently invoked European cities where terrorist attacks occurred as examples of why the United States should not admit Syrian refugees. The November 2015 attacks in Paris, which ISIS took responsibility for, left 130 people dead and hundreds more injured.

His proclivity for bashing Europe’s supposed crime crisis has also hit a hurdle or two. He incorrectly suggested that there was a terror attack in Sweden last Friday, puzzling the Nordic country’s leadership. It turned out that he had merely been watching a segment on the subject on Fox News that night.

But Trump nevertheless held his ground: