In France, Trump-like TV pundit rocks presidential campaign

A rabble-rousing television pundit and author with repeated convictions for hate speech is rocking the early stages of France's race to replace President Emmanuel Macron

PARIS -- A survivor of the terrible journey to Auschwitz remembered how the youngest wailed. There were 99 children squeezed among 751 adults gasping for air, crazed by thirst and hunger, aboard convoy No. 63 that departed Paris at 10 minutes past midday on Dec. 17, 1943.

The 828 murdered at the death camp from that trainload alone included 3-year-old Francine Baur, her sister Myriam, 9, their brothers Antoine and Pierre, 6 and 10, and their parents Odette and André.

All born in France, their French citizenship proved worthless under France's wartime Vichy regime that teamed up with the country's Nazi occupiers and their extermination of Jews.

So when André Baur's great-nephew, a Paris mayor, was catching up on his Twitter feed recently and saw a claim reported in French media that Adolf Hitler's Vichy collaborators safeguarded France's Jews from the Holocaust, he was revolted. Worst still in the eyes of Ariel Weil, mayor of the French capital's city center, was that the debunked assertion came from a pretender for the French presidency who is himself Jewish.