There is a specific brand of exhaustion that comes from watching the French far-right attempt to navigate the concept of 'consequences.' It is a performance as old as the Fifth Republic itself, yet Marine Le Pen manages to imbue it with a fresh layer of oily, self-righteous indignation. Currently, the matriarch of the National Rally is holding court—literally—at an appeal trial regarding the alleged embezzlement of European Parliament funds. The accusation is simple, even by the standards of political grift: using EU money, intended for parliamentary assistants, to pay for party workers who were busy doing things like polishing the party’s image or perhaps just making sure the fleur-de-lis was straight on the office walls. But in the world of BUCK VALOR, simplicity is just a mask for the profound, systemic stupidity that governs our species.

Le Pen’s defense strategy is a fascinating study in the 'Who, Me?' school of jurisprudence. According to her testimony, she is the victim of a grand, cross-continental conspiracy involving the European Parliament, former colleagues who clearly didn't get the memo on loyalty, and perhaps the very concept of arithmetic itself. To hear her tell it, she was far too busy 'saving France' to notice that a few million Euros were being diverted to keep her party’s lights on. It is the classic populist paradox: she is simultaneously the only strong leader capable of rescuing the nation from the clutches of globalism, yet she is also a confused administrator who can’t be expected to know where her own staff’s paychecks are coming from. It would be funny if it weren’t so tedious.

The European Parliament, that bloated, shimmering monument to bureaucratic excess, is her favorite target. She treats the institution like a personal ATM while simultaneously decrying its existence as an affront to French sovereignty. This is the hallmark of the modern political grifter—biting the hand that feeds you, but only after you’ve chewed through the fingers to get to the marrow. The EU, for its part, is hardly a sympathetic victim. It is a labyrinthine mess of regulations and taxpayer-funded lunches that practically invites this kind of petty larceny. If you leave a golden calf unattended in a room full of politicians, you shouldn't be surprised when you return to find nothing but a pile of hooves and a 'Voted for Sovereignty' sticker.

But let’s look at the broader comedy. The trial isn’t just about the money; it’s about the 2027 presidential election. If convicted and barred from public office, Le Pen’s lifelong dream of moving into the Élysée Palace—where she could presumably find even more creative ways to mismanage public funds—might be extinguished. The French Left is currently vibrating with a sort of performative glee, as if her downfall would somehow cleanse the Republic of its sins. They forget, of course, that their own ranks are filled with the same brand of ideological narcissism, just dressed in better scarves and flavored with the bitter tang of failed socialist utopias. The Right, meanwhile, is busy painting her as a martyr, a Joan of Arc for the age of wire fraud. They don’t care if she’s a thief; they only care that she’s *their* thief.

This entire spectacle confirms what I have long suspected: humanity has no interest in governance, only in the theater of governance. We don't want leaders; we want protagonists in a long-running soap opera about the decline of Western civilization. Le Pen is a perfect lead for this drama. She possesses that uniquely Gallic ability to look down her nose at the law while claiming to be its greatest defender. She blames her former colleagues, painting them as incompetent or treacherous, proving that in the National Rally, 'solidarity' is just a word you use on campaign posters before throwing your subordinates under a moving bus.

The tragedy here isn't the embezzlement—a few million Euros is a rounding error in the grand scheme of governmental waste. The tragedy is the utter banality of the excuse. She didn't even have the decency to come up with a creative lie. It’s just 'I didn't know' and 'they're out to get me.' It is the intellectual equivalent of a child with chocolate on their face insisting they haven't seen the cookies. And the French public, God bless their cynical hearts, will continue to play along because the alternative is to admit that the entire political class is a collection of parasitic entities feeding on the corpse of a dying empire. Whether she is convicted or not is irrelevant. The grift will continue, the rhetoric will sharpen, and the voters will keep waiting for a savior who isn't trying to pick their pockets while they aren't looking. It's not a trial; it's an encore for a play that should have closed decades ago.