Newsman: The Trump administration will not entertain a French politician’s request to return the Statue of Liberty to France.
“Absolutely not. My advice to that unnamed low-level French politician would be to remind them that it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in a press briefing Monday, likely referencing an American-French allyship during World War II that snuffed out Nazi Germany. “They should be grateful.”
The statement comes a day after a French member of the European Parliament, Raphaël Glucksmann, said at a party convention that America under the Trump administration no longer embodied the spirit of the monument, which France gifted the U.S. in the 1880s to formalize diplomatic ties and enshrine the concept of American independence from Great Britain and the end of slavery.
“We’re going to say to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants, to the Americans who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom: ‘Give us back the Statue of Liberty,’” Glucksmann said.
If the United States doesn’t intend to restore these positions and funds, France, Glucksmann said, would gladly absorb the United States’ research sector.
France country cannot take the statue back at its whim because it is the property of the U.S. government.
