MAGA wants Europe – but does Europe want MAGA?

Britain is turning back towards Europe. And MAGA won’t like it.

Speaking at Labour conference this week, Andy Burnham declared Brexit had done “more harm than good” and promised a new approach to Britain’s relationship with the EU.

Announcing a UK-EU summit later this year, the PM said he would set out the options for Britain’s long-term relationship with its European partners.

“We will not give Britain the clear path we need into the rest of this century until we decide on a long term relationship with what is still our largest market,” he said.

Burnham has long argued for closer European ties. As mayor of Manchester, he said Britain should eventually rejoin. During a meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron last month, he pledged to work on Britain’s “drive to get closer to Europe”.

Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband was equally as integrationist, telling conference that Britain’s future was “at the heart of Europe.” Ministers meanwhile suggested that putting EU membership back on Labour’s political agenda is increasingly a question of how, rather than whether.

“The mood has completely changed on this subject,” said one senior minister.

As Britain is edging back towards Europe, MAGA is trying to drag it in the opposite direction.

Donald Trump’s movement is pursuing an ambitious project to reshape Europe in its own ideological image. Britain’s renewed Europeanism is therefore more than a Brexit reset. It’s a direct challenge to the direction MAGA wants Europe to take.

MAGA’s mission to “save” Europe

“I’ve been worried for a long time, for the better part of two decades, that Europe was committing civilisational suicide,” said Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that helped draw up the agenda for Donald Trump’s second term.

“The civilisation that we’re defending is 3,500 years old,” he added, tracing its roots through Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London and Philadelphia.

Roberts is part of a MAGA movement that believes Europe needs saving from itself.

Its proponents argue that mass migration, the surrender of national sovereignty and restrictions on free speech threaten not only the transatlantic relationship but the foundations of European civilisation itself.

Yet this is hardly new.

Who can forget Vice President JD Vance’s notorious 2025 speech in Munich, when he attacked European democracies and argued that the greatest threat facing the continent was not Russia or China, but “from within”?

Rather than focusing on the expected discussion of Ukraine and ending the war, Vance spent much of his address accusing European governments, including the UK government, of abandoning their values and ignoring voters over migration and free speech.

He accused EU “commissars” of suppressing free speech, blamed Europe for mass migration and claimed its leaders had abandoned “some of its most fundamental values”.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, subsequently accused Vance of “trying to pick a fight” with Europe.
But MAGA’s interest in Europe is not confined to speeches.

Exporting the MAGA agenda

The Trump administration has been preparing to channel millions of dollars towards like-minded organisations in Europe, supporting groups pursuing what it describes as a fight against “censorship” and an effort to strengthen “civilisational bonds” between America and Europe.

Among the proposed grants reported by the Financial Times was $2m to “counter censorship” arising from EU regulations, including the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.

A further proposed $12m package would go to UK organisations founded by prominent Conservatives Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young.

Documents seen by the Guardian included $7m for 878, a British-American think tank dedicated, in its own words, to “the rediscovery of our ancient culture” and “ending mass immigration.”

Another $5m was earmarked for Free Speech Union International, an offshoot of Young’s Free Speech Union, while $3m was proposed for the Jobs Foundation to “counter overregulation” and advance American investment.

Right-Wing Watch readers will be more than familiar with the perennial culture warrior and Tory peer Toby Young, as well as the innocuously-named Jobs Foundation, a “charity” formed by prominent business leaders and political figures to “unleash the power of business.” Its campaign against “woke capitalism” bears similarities to the broader US right-wing assault on corporate environmental and social policies, driven by conservative political operatives, fossil-fuel interests and free-market climate-sceptic think tanks.

MAGA figures and American right-wing donors have embraced far-right activist Tommy Robinson, providing financial backing for his anti-immigration campaigning. A Guardian investigation found that, ahead of Robinson’s “Brexit betrayal” march in 2018, he received funding from a US tech billionaire and a Philadelphia-based think tank. Two other US think tanks, part-funded by some of the biggest names in right-wing philanthropy, have also published a succession of articles supporting Robinson.

More recently, Robinson acknowledged that wealthy American backers helped fund his “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London in May, citing $200,000 from Republican donor Andy Miller and a further $100,000 from businessman Robert Shillman. Shillman has a long history of funding right-wing and populist figures and causes internationally.

American money and political networks aren’t simply exporting a culture war to Europe. They are helping to finance, amplify and connect its European counterparts.

But does Europe want MAGA?

Europe might not be perfect, and its governments disagree profoundly over migration, economic policy and the limits of state power. But the European project is rooted in international cooperation, human rights, social solidarity, managed migration and respect for diversity, a world apart from MAGA’s nationalist, “America First” worldview.

For MAGA, Brexit was supposed to liberate Britain from Brussels.

But the experience has produced a rather different lesson, that cooperation between neighbouring countries can be more useful than retreating behind national borders.

And that’s the direction Britain appears to be taking.

Brussels or America?

Burnham’s European reset puts Britain on a potential collision course with the Trump administration.
Closer alignment with the EU would mean complying with European standards and rules, including those governing food and agricultural products, that the US has long criticised as protectionist.

Trump’s trade representative has already accused Britain of choosing “Brussels over America,” arguing that the UK has failed to make full use of Brexit by continuing to align itself with EU rules and restricting access for American goods.

That exposes an obvious tension. The closer Britain moves towards European standards, the less room there is for the deregulatory, Americanised Brexit that Trump’s administration appears to favour.

And the tension is not confined to Britain.

Europe isn’t America’s political playground

The European far right has certainly made gains in some countries. Yet its relationship with MAGA is more complicated than a simple alliance of ideological soulmates.

Germany’s AfD has advanced, while Sweden’s far-right Sweden Democrats recently lost ground. And Viktor Orbán, one of Trump’s closest European allies and a longstanding inspiration for the populist right, was defeated in April after 16 years of reshaping Hungary around what he called “illiberal democracy”.

These experiences raise an awkward question for MAGA: what happens when the nationalist movements it empowers become more interested in their own sovereignty than in American influence?

The Centre for American Progress (CAP) has argued that the Trump administration risks making precisely this mistake with Europe’s far right, confusing shared cultural grievances with shared strategic interests.

The AfD may oppose migration, climate policy, gender politics, Brussels and the European establishment. That doesn’t mean it necessarily shares America’s interests.

As CAP puts it, the Trump administration may have “mistaken cultural affinity for strategic alignment.”

And that could prove to be the fatal flaw in the MAGA strategy.

MAGA’s Europe problem

While MAGA is trying to export its political model into Europe, Britain is, thankfully, rediscovering the advantages of closer European cooperation. And across the continent, nationalist movements may find that welcoming American support does not mean surrendering their own nationalist ambitions.

MAGA wants a European version of itself. Europe though may have other ideas.

For a movement that insists Europe is committing “civilisational suicide,” the greatest threat to MAGA’s European project may not be Brussels, migration or “woke” politics.

It may be Europe deciding that it would rather be European than American.

And if Andy Burnham is serious about taking Britain all the way back towards Europe, MAGA may discover that the Europe it wants to reshape is already moving in the opposite direction.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch