Why does MAGA world hate Europe? | Donald Trump’s team is taking its US culture war across the Atlantic with implications for the western alliance

TLDR: part of the Trump Admin’s foreign policy is to pressure the EU to protect or cease prosecution of far-right parties and extremists

> Late last month, the US Department of State published an essay accusing Europe of waging an “aggressive campaign against western civilisation itself”.

> Some dismissed it as a sophomoric prank. The author, Sam Samson, was a little-known adviser to secretary of state Marco Rubio who only graduated from college in 2021. That his post appeared on the department’s official Substack account made the sceptics think again.

> Samson’s essay, which accused European governments of “backsliding” on democracy and having “weaponised political institutions against their own citizens”, laid bare the deepening ideological rift between President Donald Trump’s administration and the EU.
It is an estrangement with implications for the future of the western alliance.

> “Even if this is just messaging to the base . . . language like this out in the public space changes the transatlantic relationship,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, who directs the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution think-tank.

> Trump has long had a visceral mistrust of the EU, which he says was created to “screw” the US. His advisers have now turned that resentment into an ideology that is being disseminated publicly with a confidence that has sent a chill through European capitals.
The bloc is quickly becoming the latest front in a culture war Trump has unleashed against the bastions of liberalism. Most of his targets — elite universities, government agencies such as USAID, public broadcasters — have been domestic.

> But the Samson essay shows Maga’s ambitions go much further and the movement is now prepared to deploy far beyond America’s borders.

> “The people around Trump took his vague hatred of Europe and made it part of the overall struggle against liberal America,” said Jeremy Shapiro, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank.

# Examples

> That view is now more or less the Trump administration’s official line. A spokesperson for the state department said Samson had been “inspired” to write his Substack post by Vance’s speech in Munich, and it was “consistent” with the vice-president’s views.

> The Vance line also informed Washington’s outraged reaction to the recent decision by German domestic intelligence to classify the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) as an extremist organisation — a move that triggered howls of protest from Vance and Rubio.

> “That’s not democracy — it’s tyranny in disguise,” Rubio said on X in early May. “What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD — which took second in the recent election — but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes.”

> It is not just Germany and the EU that have been targeted by Trump’s team. Officials have also trained their sights on the UK authorities for prosecuting anti-abortion activists, long a cause célèbre for the American religious right.

> During a fact-finding mission to the UK in March, Samson met the British activist Livia Tossici-Bolt, who was convicted the following month of breaching a protection zone around an abortion clinic, as well as officials from the Foreign Office and Ofcom, the communications industry regulator.

> The state department’s bureau of democracy, human rights and labour (DRL), where Samson is a senior adviser, said the consultations were intended to “affirm the US commitment to defending freedom of expression, both in Europe and around the world”.

> The DRL later said it was “disappointed” by Tossici-Bolt’s conviction.

> The White House also reacted angrily to a court ruling in March that banned French far-right leader Marine Le Pen from standing for office for five years after she was convicted of embezzling EU funds.

> “Exclusion of people from the political process is particularly concerning given the aggressive and corrupt lawfare waged against President Trump, here in the US,” said Tammy Bruce, the state department’s spokesperson.

Free speech to the right wing means the free speech of the right wing.