Senior Trump official extends a hand of friendship to Europe’s far right

As Donald Trump redoubled his war of words on the European Union and Nato in recent weeks, a senior state department official, Sarah B Rogers, was publicly attacking policies on hate speech and immigration by ostensible US allies, and promoting far-right parties abroad.

Rogers has arguably become the public face of the Trump administration’s growing hostility to European liberal democracies. Since assuming office in October, she has met with far-right European politicians, criticized prosecutions under longstanding hate speech laws, and boasted online of sanctions against critics of hate speech and disinformation on US big tech platforms.

Rogers is undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, a top-10 state department role that was created in 1999 to strengthen relationships between the US and foreign publics, as opposed to foreign governments and diplomats.

Rogers, however, appears to be concerned with winning over a particular slice of foreign public opinion.

Her recent posts on Twitter/X have included a characterization of migrants in Germany as “barbarian rapist hordes”, a comment on Sweden apparently linking sexual violence to immigration policy (“If your government cared about ‘women’s safety,’ it would have a different migration policy”), and the recitation of the view that “advocates of unlimited third world immigration have long controlled a disproportionate share of official knowledge production”.

The Guardian emailed Rogers a detailed request for comment on this reporting.

On her social media posts, Rogers wrote that “it would be defamatory to call” her post on German migrants “a description of all ‘German migrants.’ Instead, it describes the ones who assaulted hundreds of victims in Cologne,” and that “among the limited vocabulary options, ‘barbarian rapist horde’ is a reasonable way to describe the Cologne attackers–and certainly shouldn’t be illegal to say.”

Rogers added that the context for the comment on Sweden was “a series of media engagements in which ‘women’s safety’ was proffered as an excuse to censor the Internet”, and that by “‘official knowledge production’ I mean prestige-media, academia, key NGOs and their bureaucratic funders”.

Expert observers of the European far right said that commentary such as Rogers’s reflected a Trump administration decision to support those movements.

Léonie de Jongea, professor of research on far-right extremism at the University of Tübingen who has published extensive research on the European far right, said: “The Trump administration has a vested interest in strengthening anti-democratic movements abroad, as doing so helps advance its own agenda while lending legitimacy to these actors and their activities.”

Georgios Samaras, a lecturer in public policy at Kings College London who has published extensive research on the European far right, said that after the January 6 Capitol riot, Trump’s “contempt for mainstream institutions stopped being tactical and became a governing identity. Over the four years outside the White House, it hardened into a posture that treats constraint, scrutiny, and pluralism as enemies.”

Samaras added: “His warmth towards far-right movements in Europe sits inside that same logic. It is culture export and it is power projection.”

AfD alliance

Since taking up her position, Rogers has extended a hand of friendship to the European far right.

Last week, the Financial Times reported that Rogers had met with rightwing opposition parties across Europe on a mission to “fund Maga-aligned think-tanks and charities across Europe”.

The newspaper quoted a senior member of the UK’s far-right Reform party who had attended one such meeting as saying that Rogers “had 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”.

On 13 December, she met with the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) parliamentarian Markus Frohnmaier, according to a post on Frohnmaier’s X account.

According to X’s translation of Frohnmaier’s post, his “exchange with Under Secretary Sarah Rogers on the new national security strategy of the Trump Administration has made it clear that Washington is seeking a strong German partner”.

On 14 December, in the face of criticism over her meeting with Frohnmaier, Rogers wrote: “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 told 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.”

In 2019, Der Spiegel reported that Frohnmaier was the subject of a strategy paper “sent from the Russian Duma to the highest levels of leadership in the presidential administration”, which argued for supporting his candidacy in the 2017 German federal election, on the basis that “we will have our own absolutely controlled MP in the Bundestag.”

Frohnmaier has frequently visited Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea since it was invaded in 2014. In 2016 he reportedly attended the Yalta International Economic Forum in Yalta on the southern coast of the Crimean peninsula, where he met his wife, Daria, who was then writing for the Russian pro-government newspaper Izvestia.

On Frohnmaier’s Russian ties, Rogers said: “Allegations of ambiguous provenance that various media and political figures are ‘Russian assets’ have been a fixture of western politics since 2016,” and: “I sought guidance within the state department and determined” that the claims of Russian ties were “unsubstantiated – and in any event, not a bar to a meeting”.

In 2019, Frohnmaier told the BBC that he was not controlled by Russia, and that the documents cited by Der Spiegel were “fake”.

Asked whether this meant she disputed reporting of those ties, Rogers wrote: “I’m not denying the existence of the Der Spiegel reporting, but formed the view based on guidance that the allegation in the reporting (‘controlled’ by Russia) remained unsubstantiated in the seven years since it surfaced.”

The German state has determined that AfD is a threat to democracy. Last May, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), designated AfD as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” force, enabling them to step up surveillance of the party.

That designation drew immediate fire from the Trump administration, including Rogers’s boss Marco Rubio, who called it “tyranny in disguise”. Earlier in the year, JD Vance used a speech at the Munich Security Conference to castigate Germany over the so-called “firewall” that has seen mainstream parties refusing to enter into coalitions with far-right groups.

AfD’s legal challenge to the designation is ongoing.

In meeting with the AfD, Rogers followed in the footsteps of her predecessor, Darren Beattie, who was acting undersecretary last October when he likewise posted about a meeting with Fronhmaier, saying they had discussed “shared priorities on cultural exchange and migration”.

Beattie was fired as a speechwriter in the first Trump administration after attending a white supremacist gathering and speaking on a panel alongside the white nationalist commentator Peter Brimelow.

In a 2024 post on X, Beattie wrote: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”

He is now listed on the state department website as “Senior Bureau Official, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs”.

Samaras said that contacts between the administration and parties such as AfD “function as legitimation. They also show a transatlantic alignment between the US far right and the German far right that should not be understated, especially given Germany’s place in European power and in the memory of fascism.”

‘As mass migration disrupts societies, liberal political freedoms lose out’

Rogers has also amplified the messaging of far-right activists in the UK, sometimes reproducing their preferred narratives.

On 24 January, she posted a screenshot of a GB News broadcast and headline, Met Police bans ‘Walk with Jesus’ march to avoid provoking local Muslim community. She captioned it with: “As mass migration disrupts societies, liberal political freedoms lose out,” adding: “UK freedom of assembly is a recurring example.”

That march was organized by UKIP, a far-right party, which in the years since Brexit has been accused of becoming an Islamophobic political party. Its organizers reportedly described the demonstration as “a ‘crusade’, urging supporters to ‘reclaim Whitechapel from the Islamists’”.

UKIP’s previous effort to organize a march in the plurality-Muslim Tower Hamlets borough in London last October was called “The Mass Deportations Tour”. And UKIP were expressly invited by the Metropolitan police to stage their march in another part of the city.

Asked about her comments on the Tower Hamlets march, Rogers emailed: “My tweet combined references to two marches: one march protesting immigration policy, and one Christian evangelical ‘walk with Jesus’ march. I understood that both marches were organized by UKIP, and that illiberal-left commentators might view UKIP as undeserving of free-assembly rights.”

Other moves from Rogers suggest that the grievances of the far-right abroad have informed US posture towards its ostensible allies.

In a 2 December post, Rogers wrote: “As with America’s Somali fraud crisis, Britain’s rape-gang problem has been obfuscated by gaps – sometimes willful ones – in data collection. The same issue exists elsewhere in Europe. We’re going to help fix that.”

Replying to a question on this post, Rogers said it was corroborated by the UK’s 2025 Casey Report on child exploitation and abuse, and media reports on “the Minnesota fraud matter”.

Her post was a repost of a video of the self-styled independent journalist Jack Hadfield advancing claims about higher rates of sexual assault among “foreigners” in the UK.

Hadfield’s arguments drew on figures generated by the anti-immigrant organization Centre for Migration Control, figures that critics have described as “dodgy”, disputed or debunked.

Hadfield, a former Breitbart writer, often writes for rightwing UK outlets like GB News. In 2017, however, he was exposed by the anti-fascist non-profit Hope not Hate as the administrator of a secret Facebook group, the Young Right Society, which he described in posts in the group as “a Fascist-Juggalo group with traditionalism interest”, and which featured openly racist and antisemitic commentary from about 200 far-right activists.

In 2017, when his role in the Facebook group was discovered, Hadfield told the UK newspaper the Independent that he considered himself to be “on the moderate right” but that he “strongly believe[s] that all ideas, including those of the so-called ‘alt-right’ must be debated”.

On Hadfield, Rogers wrote: “I don’t know what ‘Fascist-Juggalo traditionalism’ means, but this sounds like a joke?” and “I do not excavate the undergraduate Facebook history of every reporter I retweet. Looking at it now, contemporaneous articles concede that Mr. Hadfield ‘may not have posted some of the more controversial content’.”

The November video of Hadfield was taken at an anti-immigrant “Pink Ladies” event at Chelmsford in Essex, which was the center of protests last autumn over the UK government’s policy of accommodating asylum seekers in hotels. The protest included “stars of the rightwing fringe”, including Lucy Connolly, who told the crowd: “Keep fighting – I’m so proud of you all.”

At that time Connolly had been recently released from prison after serving just 40% of a 31-month sentence after pleading guilty to stirring up racial hatred in a July 2024 post on immigrants which read in part: “Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care.”

The post came in the wake of a murder that was falsely attributed to illegal immigrants, and ahead of widespread anti-immigrant riots across the UK.

Connolly became a cause celebre on the right after her release, describing herself as a “political prisoner” and was championed by rightwing allies like the pro-Trump leader of Britain’s rightwing Reform party, Nigel Farage.

Rogers has specifically defended Connolly in recent podcasts, in terms remarkably similar to those presented by Farage.

On the tech right podcast All In on 22 January, Rogers said that Connolly’s post had been “pretty inflammatory, but it would have been unambiguously legal in the United States”, and characterizing her as “a bereaved mother who’d lost a child. She saw three little girls murdered for no reason.”

On her podcast comments, Rogers wrote: “Those comments are accurate. For more on why Connolly’s tweet would be legal in the United States, see Brandenburg v Ohio,” referring to a 1969 supreme court decision that an Ohio law used to charge a Ku Klux Klan leader was unconstitutional.

De Jong commented: “Complaints about hate speech legislation are a familiar trope among far-right actors. Such laws are routinely framed as evidence that liberal institutions are suppressing free expression, a narrative that reinforces their broader claims of political victimhood.”

Samaras wrote that advocacy for free speech on the far right “was never a neutral commitment to open debate. It is a claim to special permission. The move is to turn a buzzword into a crusade so they can dominate public discourse while framing any limits on harassment and incitement as censorship.”

‘This global censorship regime’s apparatchiks’

Rogers has also been the face of the new administration’s placement of visa sanctions on members of what she and Marco Rubio have described as the “censorship-industrial complex” – individuals who have also attracted the ire of Elon Musk and high-profile Republicans.

In doing so she has revealed that the European Digital Services Act (DSA) and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are also in the administration’s crosshairs, as was also reported in the Financial Times.

On 23 December, Rubio announced visa sanctions on “five individuals” who he claimed had attempted “to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose”, and whose “entry, presence, or activities in the United States have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.

Rogers soon named those individuals in a thread on X, where along with allegations about their actions, characterized the DSA and the OSA as efforts to “expand censorship in Europe and around the world”.

One of the individuals named was Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and a US permanent resident, who Rogers accused of being a “key collaborator with the Biden Administration’s effort to weaponize the government against U.S. citizens”.

Also that day, Rogers appended a Christmas tree emoji to a repost of a post by the British media producer Alex Webster featuring a digitally altered photo of Rogers wearing a Santa hat with the caption: “Hey McSweeney. Merry Christmas,” an apparent reference to Morgan McSweeney, then chief of staff to the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, and a former CCDH director.

Both posts became exhibits in a lawsuit filed on Christmas Eve by Imran Ahmed, which named Rogers as a defendant alongside other Trump officials including Rubio.

On 24 December, federal judge Roberta A Kaplan issued a temporary restraining order preventing Ahmed’s deportation.

On 22 January, a justice department lawyer representing Trump administration defendants including Rogers asked Kaplan in a filing to delay discovery and announced that the defense would dispute the venue and the court’s jurisdiction.

In a statement to the Guardian, Ahmed wrote: “America is a great nation built on laws, with checks and balances to ensure power can never attain the unfettered primacy that leads to tyranny.” He added: “I believe in this system, and I am proud to call this country my home. I will not be bullied away from my life’s work of fighting to keep children safe from social media’s harm and stopping antisemitism online.”

The visa sanctions came just a week after the hard-right Missouri senator Eric Schmitt wrote directly to Rogers about the OSA and the DSA, characterizing them as “a full-scale bid for control of American public discourse, seeking to impose hard-left ideological strictures on our nation from abroad”.

Schmitt encouraged visa restrictions against “this global censorship regime’s apparatchiks”, and specifically asked “the state department to consider revoking the visas of foreign censors, such as Imran Ahmed, who is reportedly here on a visa”.

The Guardian previously reported that Schmitt last February employed Nate Hochman, the subject of a string of scandals over his far-right connections, including being fired from Ron DeSantis’s unsuccessful presidential campaign after making a video containing neo-Nazi imagery, and later peddling far-right conspiracy theories in a Marco Rubio-linked thinktank.

Samaras, the KCL academic, said that Rogers’s statements and outreach from the US government should be seen as strategic.

“If Project 2025 is a domestic template, this is the exportable version. Attack European governments, destabilise, cheer on the most reactionary forces, and you increase the odds of electoral change that benefits the far right in France, Germany, the UK, Spain and elsewhere.”