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President Donald Trump tells a lot of untruths, but one of the untruthiest is that his movement is “national.” Again and again, in fact, Trump and his core followers seem to care a lot more about what is happening in other countries than about what is happening in the United States.
Last week, for example, Trump hosted the president of Poland at the White House. From the cordial photos, the meeting might seem a welcome change from MAGA’s usual contempt and hostility to U.S. allies. But look again.
Trump’s meeting with President Karol Nawrocki was a carefully staged insult to Poland’s elected government—and the latest move in a campaign to manipulate European political systems in favor of Trump’s ideological allies.
Like many European countries, Poland has both a president and a prime minister. Day-to-day policy, including foreign policy, is set by the government, which is headed by the prime minister, who is answerable to Parliament. The president’s role is mostly negative: He wields a powerful veto, and can use the threat of its exercise to bend the government to his will.
Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, leads a coalition strongly supportive of Ukraine in its fight with Russia. That fight has been costly to Poland. Almost 1 million Ukrainians have been displaced to Poland, where they are allowed to work and receive social benefits such as schooling and health care. Some Poles have begun to resent Ukrainians. Their votes helped elect Nawrocki in two rounds of balloting, on May 18 and June 1.
Nawrocki is an amateur historian whose work seems calibrated to inflame the historic mutual grievances between Poles and Ukrainians. He campaigned on the slogan “Poland First.” Although not as overtly pro-Russian as his political allies in Hungary and Slovakia, Nawrocki has used his powers in ways that put pressure on the Ukrainian side. He is trying to limit benefits to Ukrainians in Poland and end their right to work. He opposes Ukrainian entry into NATO.
The Trump administration blatantly favored Nawrocki during the election campaign. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem traveled to Poland after the first round of voting to endorse Nawrocki by name and insult his principal opponent as one of the “weak” leaders who have allowed in immigrants who “destroyed their civilizations.” Poland is one of the few countries in Europe where views of the United States remain generally favorable, so Noem’s intervention may have made a difference in an election decided by less than a single point of the popular vote.
The Trump administration is exploiting partisan animosities within Poland to advance its own goals of wrecking the European Union and ending the Ukraine war on terms favorable to Russia.
[Arash Azizi: A battle for the soul of the West]
Or take another example: Last month, Vice President J. D. Vance spent his summer holiday in the United Kingdom. He fished with the British foreign minister, visited U.S. service personnel, and made a side visit to Scotland to play golf on a Trump course. The first two of those activities would be normal for any U.S. vice president. The third is the kind of corruption that’s just a normal day’s business under President Trump. But Vance also made time for something out of the ordinary: a personal intervention in Britain’s internal politics.
Unlike in Poland, the Trump administration is highly unpopular in the United Kingdom. Only about one-fifth of Britons have a favorable view of Donald Trump. Vance polls even lower than that. But on the British right, Trump and Vance command attention and support—and Vance’s summer project was to lever that attention to shift British conservatism in a Trump-like direction.
The British right is now contested between two parties: the familiar Conservative Party and a new Reform Party. Reform has pulled ahead in the polls. The situation is volatile. Emotions are running strong. Resolving the impasse might seem a matter best left to the British.
Yet Vance’s itinerary seemed designed to insert and assert himself into the middle of the melee—and to favor the most extreme anti-immigration, pro-Russian factions. Vance deputed as his “British sherpa” a Cambridge academic disdainful of Ukraine and those Conservatives who have supported its cause. Vance met with Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-immigration Reform Party, and with Robert Jenrick, an anti-immigration activist seeking to topple the faltering Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch.
Vance tried to muscle his way into German politics in the same way earlier in the year. On February 14, scarcely a week before Germany held its federal elections, Vance delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference that sounded to German ears like an outright administration endorsement of the Alternative for Germany, another anti-immigration, pro-Russian far-right party. Vance scolded Germans for excluding the Alternative for Germany from public forums like the one where he was speaking. And indeed, Germany for obvious historical reasons restricts some forms of expression by the anti-democratic extremes of far right and far left. These German rules differ from American conceptions of free speech. Yet the recent American practice where the president of the United States threatens media corporations with reprisals unless they make multimillion-dollar payoffs to the president and his family must seem equally alien to German ideas of rights and liberties. German politicians don’t come to the United States to criticize the Trump shakedown system on American soil. Vance did not return the courtesy. In this case, at least, his intervention failed. While the AfD gained 20 percent of the popular vote, it did not do well enough to block the traditional parties from forming a center-right coalition committed to European unity and the defense of Ukraine against Russia.
[Helen Lewis: The global populist right has a MAGA problem]
In Australia in May and in Canada in June, anti-Trump sentiment defeated mainstream conservative parties that were tainted and discredited by Trump’s attacks on Australian and Canadian sovereignty and trade.
Proper conservatism has always been rooted in the local. But as conservatism has transmuted into Trumpism, that sense of the local has been lost. MAGA has developed into a truly global political movement, as ready to be franchised across national lines as a fast-food chain.
Far-right parties copy Trump’s slogans and Vance’s sarcastic, trollish rhetorical style. The message is everywhere the same, regardless of local conditions: blame immigrants for crime, disorder, housing prices, and anything else voters might be discontented about; reject vaccinations and promote quack remedies; back Russia and vilify Ukraine. The globalist quality of MAGA authoritarianism is powerfully symbolized by the willingness of the American Conservative Political Action Conference to lease its brand to far-right movements across Europe and Asia who want to host their own events in Budapest, Tokyo, or Warsaw. And everywhere, the message is amplified by social-media channels that seem to regard extremism as the pathway to engagement—and fear retaliation from Donald Trump if they ever try to diminish the volume of anger and disinformation.
Americans often try to seek the origins of Trumpism in their unique national past: episodes like McCarthyism in the 1950s or the overthrow of Reconstruction after the Civil War. It’s at least equally important to recognize what is not unique about Trumpism. The United States is not the only society confronting reactionary authoritarian grabs for power. The Trump movement, as the biggest and richest, acts as a kind of patron to all the others. But the smaller movements contribute to the common project. So much of what Trump and Vance say, so much content from their mass-media and social-media allies, originates not in the United States, but from their Hungarian, British, and German movement affiliates.
Those movements appreciate that they have a lot in common. They are learning to cooperate against their common adversaries. Those adversaries need to develop at least equal awareness, before it’s too late.
