Allies of US President Donald Trump have long sought to build bridges with European counterparts. They have a close relationship with supporters of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, hosting conferences together, such as CPAC, in Budapest. Elon Musk campaigned for Alternative for Germany (AfD) ahead of last year’s federal elections while he was working in the White House. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage regularly features at MAGA-themed events in the United States. One of Trump’s 2024 campaign managers even worked for a right-wing candidate in Albania last year.
Now that Trump is back in office, his allies want to make those relationships official: the US government is set to fund MAGA-aligned parties and think tanks in Europe, drawing funds from a pot linked to the US’s 250th birthday celebration. Ironically, one of the parties in line to receive some of those funds is Reform UK, a hard-right British party.
“This is about the United States wanting Europe to be stronger,” Dr. Keegan McBride, director of Science and Technology Policy at the Tony Blair Institute, told GZERO. “I think that's something that Europe should want as well.”
It’s not clear how large the pot is, nor which MAGA-aligned groups will receive funds.
The move comes at a time when US-Europe tensions are spiking. Divisions over Greenland’s sovereignty, tariffs, and funding for Ukraine – to name but a few – have driven an Atlantic Ocean-sized wedge in the Western alliance. What’s more, the Trump administration excoriated Europe in its National Security Strategy, warning of “civilisational erasure” if “current trends continue” on the continent.
The timing is also sensitive, arriving just before this year’s Munich Security Conference. It was at last year’s MSC that US Vice President JD Vance slammed European parties for refusing to form coalitions with hard-right groups. As such, tensions are high going into the conference.
Who is behind the push? US State Department official Sarah Rogers has led the effort. Her raison d’être – in her telling – is free speech: Rogers and other members of the Trump administration have been highly critical of European laws that they believe curtail speech online, like the UK’s Online Safety Act and the European Union’s Digital Services Act. She even toured some of Europe’s biggest cities – London, Paris, Rome, and Milan – in December to advocate against these laws.
Yet US interests in Europe go far beyond online speech and spreading MAGA ideology, something that can be easy to forget given the current strains in the relationship. A large part of it relates to military spending, with the US pushing its NATO allies in Europe to invest more in their defense – many are now doing so. There are other aspects of the relationship too, McBride noted.
“Europe is 450 million people. They have the world’s largest integrated single market. They’re home to amazing manufacturing and robotics capabilities. … You have some of the world’s best universities,” said McBride. “There’s the shared cultural and historical ties there as well.”
The idea, per McBride, is that boosting Europe will also boost the United States.
Will it work? Money can help in campaigns, but there is a major flaw in the strategy: Trump isn’t too popular in Europe. Take, for example, the UK: just 16% of its citizens have a favorable view of Trump, even though Farage’s Reform UK party leads election polls. The numbers are similar in France, which will hold its presidential election next year, and even worse in Germany, where only 11% hold a favorable view. Even in Italy, where a right-wing Trump ally is prime minister, just 15% approve of the US president.
A pair of Reform UK figures told the Financial Times they might be reluctant to accept money from the US government if it means associating with MAGA initiatives.
What’s more, the initiative is bound to ignite a backlash, according to Eurasia Group’s Europe expert Jan Techau. It’s one thing to pressure Europe to boost defense spending, he noted – which Trump has done – but it’s another to support anti-establishment European parties that have espoused hard-right positions, even if it’s framed as a defense of free speech.
“There is nothing that gives most Europeans a bigger sense of being betrayed by the US,” said Techau, “than the open support for extremist parties that aim at undermining open society and its institutions.”
For a video breaking down Europe’s conundrum, watch this report from GZERO’s Zac Weisz.
