Marine Le Pen is well aware of the risks involved in too openly lauding an authoritarian and illiberal foreign leader. Indeed, she is still struggling with the consequences of her stated "admiration" for Russian President Vladimir Putin, which she stood by and repeated for over a decade, right up to the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Yet this lesson in caution hasn't stopped the French far-right leader from showing indulgence toward Donald Trump since his return to the White House. No matter the diplomatic, commercial and ideological assaults that the American and his administration have waged against Europe, Le Pen has stuck to a permissive silence. It represents a clean break with the anti-American tradition of the far-right Front National party (FN), which Le Pen renamed the Rassemblement National (RN) in 2018.

Yet it would not be the first time the party holds up an American president as a model. In the 1980s, Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, made himself out to be the "French Ronald Reagan," hailing the former president and B-movie actor's visceral anti-communism, one of the FN's driving obsessions, and neoliberalism, which suffused its policy platforms. More than mere inspiration, it was also appropriation: At the time, the elder Le Pen stole Reagan's slogans against taxation and government.

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