President Donald Trump has done his best to curry the favor of Europe’s far right, but after seeing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán go down to humiliating defeat despite Trump’s support, the far right now wants to put daylight between itself and America’s leader.
“President Donald Trump’s offensive behavior toward Christians and his unnecessary and unpopular war in Iran isn’t just splitting his political base at home — it’s also alienating his allies abroad,” wrote MS NOW’s Zeeshan Aleem on Sunday. “Right-wing nationalists in Europe are becoming more and more wary of association with Trump and growing inclined to keep him at a distance to protect their own political projects. The trend marks a blow to Trump’s aspirations of creating an international bloc of right-wing nationalist states that work in concert to quash the left.”
Aleem ticked off a number of prominent Italian conservatives who are denouncing Trump including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a number of German lawmakers from the far-right Alternative for Germany party, Romania’s European Parliament member Diana Sosoaca and French far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Their criticisms have ranged from his meddling in European domestic politics, his invasion of Iran and his attacks on Pope Leo XIV.
“Those bold criticisms speak to how incredibly damaging Trump’s war on Iran has been for his standing within his movement,” Aleem observed. “The surge in global oil prices is politically radioactive; far-right leaders and parties in Europe affiliated with Trump risk becoming associated with the energy crisis unless they take steps to create distance from him.”
Indeed, as recently as last week, the United Kingdom’s Brexit champion Nigel Farage downplayed his relationship with Trump, who he once said was ushering in “the beginning of a golden age,” by instead saying “I happen to know him, but that’s by the by.”
Overall, this pattern speaks to how Trump’s brash approach to governance has alienated America’s European allies.
“Trump, for so many people, epitomizes the ugly American — somebody who is bumptious and vulgar and ignorant about foreign cultures,” former Time Magazine editor Rick Stengel said in a recent podcast appearance on The Bulwark with former Daily Beast editor-in-chief John Avlon on Sunday. “So I think people sort of have come to the end of their patience with America.”
Ironically, Trump has aggressively courted the European far right as his natural ideological allies. Trump appointee Susan B. Rogers was selected as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in large part to ingratiate herself to the far right, such as by describing German migrants as “barbarian rapist hordes,” falsely claiming Sweden’s immigration policy has caused sexual violence (“If your government cared about ‘women’s safety,’ it would have a different migration policy”) and incorrectly stating that “advocates of unlimited third world immigration have long controlled a disproportionate share of official knowledge production.”
Rogers even met with members of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party, which espouses an ideology widely perceived as neo-Nazi.
