Inside a controversial Trump official's mission to pander to Europe's radical right

President Donald Trump's appointee Susan B. Rogers is “arguably… the public face of the Trump administration’s growing hostility to European liberal democracies,” according to a prominent British publication that accuses her of propping up far right regimes.

Rogers, who has been Trump’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs since October, has repeatedly characterized efforts to stop the rise of the far right as threats to free speech and met with marginalized extremist parties, according to a Wednesday report in The Guardian.

On the social media platform Twitter/X, Rogers has characterized German migrants as “barbarian rapist hordes,” linked Sweden’s immigration policy to sexual violence (“If your government cared about ‘women’s safety,’ it would have a different migration policy”) and claimed that “advocates of unlimited third world immigration have long controlled a disproportionate share of official knowledge production.”

The Guardian also highlighted Rogers’ meetings with members of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party, which is widely viewed as neo-Nazi in its ideology. After meeting with AfD parliamentarian Markus Frohnmaier, Rogers wrote that “unlike the Russian government (and the current German one), AfD took an anti-censorship stance in its meeting with me last week. One reason they’re gaining popularity in Germany.”

Rogers defended her meeting by telling The Guardian, “Mr Frohnmaier is the foreign policy spokesman for the most popular political party in Germany. He delivers AfD’s foreign policy positions in the Bundestag, and is the person German media call when they want a policy statement from AfD. For this reason, we talk to him in his official capacity to understand AfD’s positions.”

Yet Rogers has done more than meet with AfD. According to The Financial Times, Rogers has also scheduled meetings with far right parties throughout Europe on a mission to “fund MAGA-aligned think-tanks and charities.” According to a senior member of the UK’s far-right Reform party, Rogers has a “State Department slush fund to get MAGA-style things going in various places” and was keen to “fund European organisations to undermine government policies.”

Others in Trump’s orbit have also worked to prop up AfD. Twitter/X CEO Elon Musk, who performed a Nazi salute at Trump’s 2025 inauguration, has publicly embraced AfD as the “last spark of hope.” Meanwhile Vice President JD Vance wrote a Twitter/X post promoting Musk’s pro-AfD statements while adding, “I’m not endorsing a party in the German elections, as it’s not my country and we hope to have good relations with all Germans. But this is an interesting piece.”

Vance then added, “Also interesting; American media slanders AfD as Nazi-lite, But AfD is most popular in the same areas of Germany that were most resistant to the Nazis.”

Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, describing the Trump administration’s opposition to the pro-democracy multinational alliances that governed the post-World War II international order, argued that “the postwar global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us. Eight decades later, we are once again called to create a free world out of the chaos, and this will not be easy.”

In response to Trump’s support for the far right from Germany and the United Kingdom to Marine Le Pen in Russia and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the Munich Security Conference — widely regarded as the world’s top independent forum for analyzing foreign policy — warned that his policies could lead to global conflict.

“Transactional deals may well replace principled cooperation, private interests may increasingly trump public ones, and regions may become dominated by great powers rather than governed by international rules and norms,” the Munich Security Conference’s recent report warned.