There Are Better Things in France for Trump to Emulate Than a Military Parade

The French have better health care, better benefits, and better elections

In July 2017, President Trump joined French President Emmanuel Macron to watch the Bastille Day military parade from the reviewing stand. (Photo: White House)

During his first term as president, Donald Trump was so impressed by the Bastille Day military parade he saw in Paris in July 2017 that he ordered the Pentagon to plan an even bigger one for Washington, D.C., prompting visions of a Soviet Red Square-style extravaganza.

“It was one of the greatest parades I’ve ever seen,” Trump told reporters. “It was two hours on the button, and it was military might, and I think a tremendous thing for France and for the spirit of France. We’re going to have to try to top it.”

Trump’s proposal, which presidential historian Douglas Brinkley at the time said “smacks of something you see in a totalitarian country,” was shot down by members of Congress, military leaders and D.C. government officials, who estimated it would cost the military $92 million and the city millions more to repair local streets ripped up by tanks and other heavy vehicles.

Now Trump is at again, but this time he’s surrounded by sycophants who won’t say no. The Washington City Paper reported earlier this week that he has set June 14, which is his birthday as well as the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary, for a massive military parade. (For its part, the White House has denied it plans to hold a parade in June, but local area officials told Politico they have been in contact with the administration about it.)

As for topping the French, it’s too bad Trump was so distracted by the Bastille Day parade. If he had taken the time to check out other “tremendous” French accomplishments, he would have learned there are much more important things that the United States would do well to emulate. Below is a just a sample of what the French (and other European social democracies) do better.

They have better health care

France’s public-private hybrid health care system is consistently rated among the best in the world. In 2023, France placed 20th in the health category in the Legatum Institute’s Prosperity Index, which ranked 167 countries on health outcomes, economic performance, education quality, and nine other categories. The United States health care system, meanwhile, came in 69th, and that designation came well before the new Trump administration bulldozed the Department of Health and Human Services and slashed funding for medical research.

Like every other industrialized nation besides the United States, France has universal health coverage. All French citizens are covered by the government’s Assurance Maladie, and most also have private insurance through their job or the private market. The government sets prices for appointments and procedures and reimburses them at 70 percent. It’s similar to Medicare and Medicaid, but because the system covers the entire population, the French government has more leverage to keep prices low.

In less than three months in office, Trump has already widened the gap between the United States and the rest of the industrialized world. On his first day, he signed an executive order designed in part to reverse several Biden administration health care-related executive orders, including ones that augmented the Affordable Care Act and lowered the cost of prescription drugs for Medicare and Medicaid recipients.

The United States spends more than twice per capita on health care than France, but French babies have a better chance of staying alive and living longer than American newborns. France’s infant mortality rate, according to 2022 World Health Organization data, is 3.3 deaths per 1,000 live births. At 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births, U.S. infant mortality is higher than in any comparable industrialized democracy, but we spend the most on health care. And at the end of life, France boasts a combined male and female life expectancy of 83.58 years, putting it in 13th place according to this year’s United Nations estimates. The United States, by contrast, ranked 48th, with a combined life expectancy of 79.61 years.

They eat better

France’s obesity rate is only 10 percent. By contrast, nearly 43 percent of American adults are obese, including President Trump, who apparently fudged his height in 2016 to avoid being classified that way. It’s a serious problem for American children, too. Roughly 20 percent of U.S. children are obese, while the obesity rate for French kids is only 4 percent.

French and U.S. statistics on food and farming tell a similar disparate story. In 2021, France ranked 12th overall in the Food Sustainability Index, which graded 78 countries in three categories: nutrition policies, food loss and waste, and sustainable agriculture. The United States ranked 30th overall, mainly because of policies that cultivate bad eating habits and destructive industrial farming practices.

France’s best score was for its nutrition policies. It ranked 4th on the strength of its programs that promote healthy diets. The United States ranked 46th, largely because Americans consume a lot of meat, saturated fat and sugar.

They have better higher ed prices

Most schools of higher education in France are state-subsidized, which keeps tuition relatively low even by European standards.

In 2020, the average public university in France annually charged $188 (€170) for a bachelor’s degree program, $268 (€243) for a master’s degree program, $420 (€380) for a doctorate program, and $664 (€601) for an engineering program. The average bachelor’s degree takes three to four years, so students spend $564 to $752 for their entire undergraduate tuition. There are pricier options, but compared to the cost of higher education in the United States, they are still a bargain.

The United States is home to the most prestigious colleges and universities in the world, but they also are among the most expensive. The average cost of tuition and fees for the 2024–2025 school year was $43,505 at private colleges, $24,513 for out-of-state residents attending public universities, and $11,011 for state residents at public colleges, according to U.S. News & World Report data. The University of Southern California, whose tuition and fees for the 2024-2025 school year cost $71,647, was the most expensive school in the country. Brown University was a close second, with tuition and fees totaling $71,312.

The high cost of a college diploma saddles American grads with debt that can dog them for much of their adult life. At the end of 2024, there were nearly 43 million borrowers with $1.6 trillion in federal student loan debt, according to the Department of Education.

They have better working conditions

The national minimum wage in France is €11.88 an hour, the equivalent of $13.13 an hour in the United States. The U.S. national minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour, although Georgia and Wyoming peg it at only $5.15 and a handful of states and counties now require as much as $16.50. (An outlier, Washington, D.C.’s minimum wage is $17.50 an hour.)

The official work week in France is 35 hours, so a French employee making minimum wage would gross the equivalent of $23,897 a year and is guaranteed health care coverage, a minimum of five weeks paid vacation and 10 national holidays, as many as 90 days paid time off, and a maximum of three years of medical leave pay, which is covered by the state social security system. Maternity leave, which is at least six weeks before childbirth and 10 weeks afterward, is paid.

Most minimum wage employees in the United States working 40 hours a week gross $15,080 a year. Employers with more than 50 employees are required to offer health care benefits or pay a penalty, and most provide only two weeks paid vacation along with 10 federal holidays. Employers with 50 or more employees also are required to grant up to 12 weeks of unpaid maternity (or adoption) leave or family sick leave.

At the other end of the pay scale, U.S. CEOs make considerably more than their counterparts in other industrialized countries when compared to what average workers earn. In 2023, the ratio between CEO and average worker pay in the United States was 290 to 1, meaning that for every dollar an employee got paid, the head of the company made $290. In France, the ratio was 68 to 1.

They have better environmental protection

Two recent studies ranked France ahead of the United States when it comes to environmental protection. In the aforementioned Legatum Prosperity Index, France placed 14th out of the 167 nations surveyed. The United States was 28th. The second study, published annually by the Bertelsmann Foundation’s Sustainable Governance Indicators program, ranked France 8th out of 30 countries, largely because of its leadership in international climate diplomacy. The United States came in 15th, but keep in mind that Bertelsmann published the rankings last year, when the Biden administration was still in office. Given the incoming Trump administration’s anti-environmental policies, the United States today would surely be ranked lower.

France’s climate leadership is evidenced by its binding commitment as a signatory to the Paris climate agreement to reduce its domestic emissions by at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. As part of its plan to meet its Paris agreement targets, the French government announced in July 2017 it will ban the sale of gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles by 2040.

Like other developed countries, however, France is falling short of its climate goals. It cut its carbon emissions by only 1.8 percent in 2024. But U.S. emissions dropped only 0.2 percent last year, and now that Trump is back in office, U.S. climate policy is in free fall.

During Trump’s first term in office, his administration rolled back or eliminated more than 100 environmental protections, and his second time around promises to be even worse. Since his first day in the White House, when he pulled the United States out of the Paris accord (again), Trump has been on a crusade to wipe out even more U.S. environmental safeguards on behalf of his fossil fuel industry benefactors. So far, Trump and his minions have gutted the Environmental Protection Agency, blocked wind development on federal land and waters, illegally withheld appropriated funds for clean energy projects, dismantled programs that assist polluted communities, deleted the term “climate change” on numerous federal websites, and plan to weaken vehicle emissions and fuel economy standards—and that’s not a complete list. Earlier this week, Trump signed a series of executive orders to revive the coal industry.

They have better elections

Unlike the U.S. system of legalized bribery, French campaign finance laws keep special interest money out of politics. French citizens can contribute as much as $8,271 (€7,500) to one or more candidates for a specific election, but corporations, unions and advocacy groups are not allowed to donate to political campaigns or parties. In addition, the government has placed limits on campaign expenditures pegged to the office level. Electoral campaigns are relatively brief, and national television and radio stations air political ads free of charge for all candidates during the three months preceding an election. All paid political ads during that time are prohibited. Citizens are automatically registered to vote when they reach the age of 18, and elections are held on a Sunday to make it easier for people to vote.

Restraining corporate influence in elections is one of the key reasons France outpaces the United States in many of the categories cited above. While special interests—from the health care industry to fossil fuel polluters to Wall Street banks—keep U.S. politicians on a tight leash, French elected officials are freer to represent the interests of their constituents, not the narrow interests of deep-pocketed campaign contributors and unregulated super PACs.

So, instead of squandering $92 million on a military parade so a tinhorn tyrant can beat his chest, why don’t we try to top some of these much more “tremendous” French accomplishments? America has proven time and time again that it can outperform the rest of the world, but history also has shown that it takes leadership to do it. Unfortunately, we are not going to get that kind of leadership from Donald Trump.

Elliott Negin, Money Trail’s executive editor, was previously the managing editor of American Journalism Review, the editor of Public Citizen and Nuclear Times magazines, a news editor at NPR, and a regular contributor at HuffPost.