"The Past Is, and Always Has Been, Prologue..."
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
1817-1895
1817-1895
"Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find
out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out
the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon
them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words
or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance
of those whom they oppress.”
--Frederick Douglass, August 3, 1857
(1868-1963)
"Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States."
--"Address to the Country", August 19, 1906
‘Easily the Worst President in U.S. History’
Credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Listen · 15:46 minutes
by Thomas B. Edsall
April 21, 2026
New York Times
[Mr. Edsall contributes weekly essays from Washington on politics and demographics.]
Leer en español
The damage President Trump has inflicted on the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp.
It runs the gamut from public and private institutions to core democratic customs and traditions, from the legal system to universities, from innocent targets of fraud to those duped into believing vaccines do more harm than good.
One way to bring home the depth of Trump’s callousness is to look at a specific case. In May 2025, Anjee Davis, the chief executive of Fight Colorectal Cancer, a patient advocacy group, told CBS News:
We have a member who is being treated for Stage IV colorectal cancer. She had just qualified to enter a clinical trial that was going to be her last-chance effort to slow the spread of her cancer.
Her trial was about to start when N.I.H. funding was pulled overnight, and the trial was canceled.
Davis replied to my inquiry about the case by email. “This patient has since passed away without receiving the clinical trial she was counting on,” she wrote.
“What we will never know,” Davis added, “is whether that trial could have given her more time with her children.”
I have described in earlier columns bits and pieces of Trump’s destructiveness, but the list grows daily.
Projections suggest there will be millions of dead men, women and children as a result of his budget cuts, which were made without direct congressional approval. A study published in The Lancet, the London-based medical journal, found that Trump administration cuts in U.S.A.I.D. funding “would result in approximately 1,776,539 all-age deaths and 689,900 deaths in children younger than 5 years” in 2025 alone.
“Over the remainder of the period,” the study continues, “the complete defunding of U.S.A.I.D. would cause an estimated 2,450,000 all-age deaths annually, leading to a total of 14,051,750 excess all-age deaths and 4,537,157 excess under-5 deaths by 2030.”
There are the fraud victims who will never get court-ordered restitution because Trump pardoned the guilty. In a June 2025 report, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee found that “Trump’s pardons cheat victims out of an astounding $1.3 billion in restitution and fines, allowing fraudsters, tax evaders, drug traffickers to keep ill-gotten gains.”
It doesn’t stop there. America can thank the president for environmental deregulation that could sicken and kill people by the tens or even hundreds of thousands.
Everything happens in such a rapid and scattershot way with Trump that it is easy to forget what happened as recently as last year.
An Associated Press investigation published in 2025 found that Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency was seeking to eliminate or weaken “at least 30 major rules that seek to protect air and water and reduce emissions that cause climate change.”
If successful, the E.P.A. would gut pollution rules that were estimated, according to The Associated Press, to save “more than 30,000 lives annually.”
At the same time, the administration has been canceling funding for lifesaving scientific and medical research. In November, JAMA Internal Medicine published “Clinical Trials Affected by Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health.”
It said that “in the first half of 2025, the N.I.H. terminated grants supporting 383 unique clinical trials, affecting 74,311 individuals.”
In an accompanying commentary, two researchers, Dr. Teva D. Brender and Dr. Cary P. Gross, wrote about the JAMA study:
There is a more direct and sobering impact of premature and scientifically unjustifiable trial terminations: the violation of foundational ethical principles of human participant research.
First and foremost, it is betrayal of the fundamental principles of informed consent for research” and “participants who have been exposed to an intervention in the context of a trial may be harmed by its premature withdrawal or inadequate follow-up and monitoring for adverse effects.
In the October 2025 issue of Nature Medicine, Marianne Guenot reported that “at least 148 clinical trials have been impacted, with over 138,000 patients due to be enrolled or already enrolled,” as a result of cancellations. The word “impacted” falls far short of what’s needed to describe the plight of those 138,000 patients.
In their steadfast disregard for scientific study, Trump and his appointees have purposely elevated unfounded fears of vaccines, effectively guaranteeing more childhood illness and infection epidemics.
In addition to policies inducing sickness and death, Trump has undermined America’s ability to compete with China on clean energy. In September, CarbonCredits.com, an energy news platform, published “The A.I. Energy War: How China’s Solar and Nuclear Outshine the U.S.,” summing up the problem nicely.
“China is on track for 1,400 GW, while the U.S. will reach only about 350 GW.”
“China plans to add 212 gigawatts of solar and 51 GW of wind, compared to less than 100 GW combined” in the United States.
“Offshore wind: China already has 42.7 gigawatts installed, compared with the U.S.’s Empire Wind project (816 megawatts in Phase 1, with a potential expansion to 2.1 gigawatts).”
Trump makes no secret of his disdain for renewable energy and the concept of climate change. In a speech in September to the U.N. General Assembly, the president said climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He added:
All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their country’s fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success.
Trump’s threats to pull out of NATO and his tariffs, not to mention his endless carping against and routine faulting of European leaders, have alienated allies who have stood with us for more than seven decades.
Over the Trump years, European views of America have nose-dived.
On April 8, Politico published the results of a survey under the headline “More Europeans See U.S. as Threat Than China.” The survey found:
Only 12 percent of those polled in March in Poland, Spain, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy saw America as a close ally while 36 percent saw it as a threat. By contrast, China was seen as a threat by 29 percent of those polled across the six countries.
Trump has assaulted the integrity of the presidency, turning the White House into a corrupt enterprise, pardoning donors as his family’s companies receive millions through cryptocurrency purchases from foreign companies and crypto operators subject to U.S. regulation.
Trump’s agenda reaches far into the private sector.
Trump and his regulatory appointees cleared the way for his conservative allies Larry Ellison and Ellison’s son, David, to acquire CBS, Paramount Pictures, MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, along with the streaming service Paramount+.
If, as expected, Trump regulators approve their acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, the Ellison media empire will grow further to include HBO Max, CNN and Warner Bros.
From the comments
2276
B
Brett
NC
The only possible silver lining in all this is that Trump is poking a sleeping bear. Hopefully that bear will wake up and enact sweeping, permanent change. We need another New Deal and we need another Great Society. Incrementalism is not going to cut it any more. The next wave of Democrats elected to office had better deliver on that or America really will be a failed nation.
Read 9 replies
I asked Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and the author of “The Right-Wing Idea Factory: From Traditionalism to Trumpism,” which will be published in May, to assess — without regard to merit — how consequential the Trump presidency will be.
On this measure he placed Trump in the Top 5 of American presidents, alongside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, noting, however, that “Trump’s consequences have been aggressive efforts to unravel the ideas of the other four presidents.”
Kettl listed some of the same permanent or semi-permanent Trump legacies that I already described, but he added a few:
He’s driven a deep divide into the country: between the states, between migrants and many others, between classes and between the intellectual elite and the rest of the country.
He’s slashed the size of the federal bureaucracy and made federal jobs much less attractive. It will be a very, very long time until college students will trust the federal government with their careers.
He’s fundamentally undermined the idea of an annual budget process and the concept of a balanced federal budget. These ideas were teetering before his presidency, but the Trump administration gave up on any pretense of seeking balance or an annual spending plan.
Michael Bailey, a political scientist at Georgetown, prefaced his assessment of Trump’s consequentiality by pointedly noting that he would rank Trump “as easily the worst president in U.S. history. The corruption and damage to long-term U.S. institutions and reputation are far beyond anything we’ve seen before,” including Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan and Rutherford Hayes.
As for being consequential, Bailey continued, Trump has been “highly consequential in an overwhelmingly negative way. He will leave a lasting negative legacy.”
Bailey listed three of these legacies: “The erosion of trust in the U.S. by European and Asian allies; the erosion of U.S. dominance of higher education; and huge budget deficits (not only due to Trump, but exacerbated by him).”
Kate Shaw, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, cited “Trump’s violation of numerous statutes passed by Congress” to note:
It’s not that particular decisions to violate statutes can’t be undone or reversed; many, perhaps even most, can. But the combination of the president’s numerous and flagrant statutory violations and Congress’s failure to challenge those violations has created a permission structure for future presidents to disregard statutes any time they find those statutes inconvenient.
Gary Jacobson, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of California-San Diego, expanded the case against Trump:
He has done serious damage to many aspects of American government and politics that will be difficult and costly and, in some cases, impossible to undo.
The mass firing of dedicated and experienced civil servants has made government dumber and weaker and will make it harder to attract talented replacements even if the next administration wants to make it smarter and more effective.
The damage to scientific and medical research, the environment, relations with allies and trading partners, disaster preparedness, consumer safety, higher education, military leadership, civil rights, etc. will take years to repair even in cases where that is possible.
It is already clear, Jacobson continued, that “Trump is among the most consequential presidents in U.S. history, and not in a good way.”
In an email replying to my questions, Barbara Walter, a professor of international affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California-San Diego, wrote:
To flag one thing that belongs on your permanent list that likely won’t show up in the obvious places: norms.
American democracy remained strong for so long because both its political parties and its presidents respected a set of unwritten rules.
Adding that while formal checks “were essential, the oil that would grease the wheels of democracy would be norms,” Walter continued. Trump “has shown that you can violate them and survive politically. He’s torn down the invisible wall that kept the worst impulses of political life in check, and once that’s torn down, a new, ugly world emerges.”
Yphtach Lelkes, a professor at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, shares Walter’s concerns, writing by email:
I’m less confident about which specific policies or institutions belong on which list than I am about the broader effect on norms. My guess is that this is where Trump’s longest shadow will fall.
Norms take a long time to develop because they rest on habits of restraint and on the expectation that violations will be punished. But they can disappear quickly once it becomes clear that punishment is not coming.
As a result, Lelkes wrote, “Trump’s most consequential legacy may be less any single policy than the lesson he taught politicians: Norms can be broken, repeatedly and openly, without necessarily paying much of a price.”
While Trump’s norm violations amount to a major assault on American democracy, I am less convinced than Walter or Lelkes of the long-lasting damage.
In 2028, the Democratic presidential nominee and Democratic congressional candidates will all run on repudiating Trump, and even if a Democratic president is tempted to resort to arbitrary, Trump-like exercises of power, Democratic members of the House and Senate will be under strong pressure to put a halt to it.
From the comments
2276
C
Chester
New Orleans
All true but the most consequential impact has been the stunning acceptance by Congress of the actions by Trump making him the clear choice for worst president ever. I cannot overstate the historical judgement that will forever taint the current Congress. 100 years from now future generations will puzzle over the question: “Why, back in 2026, did Congress allow this?”
Read 8 replies
Even Republicans in Congress, who have been spineless under Trump, would rise in fury if a Democratic president followed Trump’s example.
That doesn’t, however, mean that all will be well. The problem created by norm violations is less that they will become permanently accepted and more that it will take time — years and years — to restore the trust in government that Trump squandered.
Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan‘s Ford School, addressed just this point in an email:
Trump might be an empowered executive, but the effect is to weaken American government in any situation where people are asked to place trust in the long-term credibility of U.S. government commitments. This applies to private businesses, government employees and international allies.
As Trump has created an environment where private businesses, universities or civil society can be threatened by the president, such organizations can assume that traditional norms of equal-handed application of the law, due process and fair treatment that they once took for granted no longer hold.
For example, if the president says “My executive order allows me to fire civil servants for whatever reason I please,” how much does it matter if another president reverses it, because in the long-run potential civil servants know they no longer have job stability?
The Supreme Court has been complicit in the undermining of trust, Moynihan argued:
By allowing Trump to claim these powers, the Supreme Court is weakening the ability of a future president or Congress to repair the damage he is doing today. If the court goes all in on unitary executive theory, it weakens the ability of Congress to bind the president from doing bad things.
By eroding America's government credibility and soft power, Moynihan concluded, “Trump can be both a hugely consequential president and a deeply damaging one.”
All of which points to one more indelible bequeathal: the stain on America left by the record.
Voters in this country twice elected a president with no ethics, no empathy and no end to his narcissism.
From the comments
2276
B
Brett
NC
The only possible silver lining in all this is that Trump is poking a sleeping bear. Hopefully that bear will wake up and enact sweeping, permanent change. We need another New Deal and we need another Great Society. Incrementalism is not going to cut it any more. The next wave of Democrats elected to office had better deliver on that or America really will be a failed nation.
Read 9 replies
More on Trump
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April 15, 2026
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The Trump Administration Is in a Psychotic State
April 10, 2026
Opinion | Michelle Goldberg
Trump Has No Idea How to Clean Up His Own Mess
April 2, 2026
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His essays on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appear every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/world/europe/trump-samson-europe.html
The 27-Year-Old Diplomat Waging Trump’s Cultural War With Europe
Five years out of college, Samuel Samson has driven the Trump administration’s push to upend America’s postwar relationship with Europe.
Listen · 15:23 minutes
Samuel Samson, left, at a meeting in December with a senior Hungarian official. Posted on Facebook by the U.S. Embassy in Hungary, the image illustrated Mr. Samson’s influence on American policy in Europe. Credit: U.S. Embassy Budapest
by Michael D. Shear Catherine Porter Jane Bradley and Christopher F. Schuetze
Reporting from London, Paris and Berlin, the journalists spoke to more than two dozen American and European diplomats, lawmakers and former officials to understand how President Trump’s views on Europe are turning into policy.
April 17, 2026
New York Times
Leer en español
When Samuel Samson, a senior adviser at the State Department, sat down privately with far-right German lawmakers in an office just steps from the White House, he was breaking with history.
For eight decades after World War II, America’s foreign policy establishment had usually steered clear of Germany’s hard-right parties, seeking to ensure that they never seized power again. That changed under President Trump, leading last September to Mr. Samson’s meeting with Beatrix von Storch and Joachim Paul of Alternative for Germany, or AfD — a party designated as a suspected extremist organization by German intelligence.
As the meeting evolved into a general gripe session, the AfD politicians told Mr. Samson, then 26, and several other American diplomats that they feared the German government might ban their party, according to Mr. Paul and another person familiar with the conversation. The Americans railed against European regulation of social media, calling it a tool for stamping out conservative opinions. And the group discussed a bogus far-right conspiracy theory that mainstream European leaders were seeking to replace white populations with nonwhite immigrants.
“I got the impression — partly from the length of the conversation — that they were very interested in hearing from us,” Mr. Paul said in an interview. “They took a lot of notes.”
For much of the past year, Mr. Samson has been at the forefront of President Trump’s effort to reshape America’s relationship with Europe. Touring the continent, Mr. Samson has sought to cultivate Washington’s ties with far-right Europeans and bolster such figures at the expense of Europe’s centrist establishment.
He has shocked its mainstream leaders, many of them with decades of experience in diplomacy, by accusing them of stifling freedom and by frequently meeting with and promoting their hard-line challengers. He is just five years out of college, and he has repeatedly advocated an approach that overturns three generations of American diplomatic orthodoxy.
Last March, Mr. Samson was in London for a secret breakfast meeting with Nigel Farage, Britain’s most prominent right-wing populist, to discuss abortion and censorship. In May, he was in Paris trying to convince a human rights commission that Marine Le Pen, a French far-right leader recently convicted of embezzlement, had been unjustly persecuted.
“They were looking for elements that could give credibility to this narrative,” recalled Magali Lafourcade, who leads the rights commission.
It is an approach that has yet to have lasting effects on the ground. Ms. Le Pen is so far still disqualified from running for president. Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, one of the far-right European leaders praised by Mr. Samson, lost power in a recent vote. And some far-right politicians in Europe have indicated that they now see association with Mr. Trump as a liability rather than an asset.
Yet this approach is core to the Trump administration’s agenda in Europe.
For Mr. Samson and much of the administration, the Europe of 2026 has become a place where woke, gender-based politics is at its peak, the nanny state is empowered, and patriotism and national pride go to die. In this view, the European bureaucracy has sacrificed free speech by regulating American tech companies, an effort that includes trying to stamp out child sexual abuse imagery on social media outlets and limiting children’s access to them.
“Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance,” Mr. Samson wrote in an essay posted to the State Department’s official Substack account.
For most of 2025, Mr. Samson was the highest-profile diplomat wagging his finger at Europe’s leaders. The delegation began to evolve in November, after the Senate confirmed Sarah Rogers as the State Department’s head of public diplomacy, a much more senior government position.
She was soon in Europe, too, meeting with British diplomats in December, complaining to them about what she characterized as unchecked migration in Britain and demanding they produce statistics to prove the claim that migrants cause crime, according to four people familiar with the meeting. Her message was similar to Mr. Samson’s, but with a slightly more diplomatic tone, reflecting the department’s push to become more professional after the administration’s chaotic beginnings.
Private meetings and discussions held by Mr. Samson and Ms. Rogers were described for this article by more than two dozen people, many of whom were present during the meetings and others of whom were briefed about them later. Many requested anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal the contents of the discussions.
Mr. Samson and Ms. Rogers declined to be interviewed for this article. Tommy Pigott, the deputy spokesman for the State Department, said that “Under Secretary Rogers and Senior Adviser Samson have been having these hard conversations and raising these issues. Europe and America, our relationship, and our future, will all be stronger because of it.”
‘Building the Kingdom’
The son of a Filipino mother and an American father, Mr. Samson has been religious since he was young.
In 2013, as student president of his Catholic elementary school in Houston, he spoke about having “a personal and active faith in God, a deep respect for intellectual values, a social awareness which impels to action.”
In high school, he ran for student affairs council under the MAGA-inspired slogan “Make SAC Great Again,” and was known for being a “Savage Conservative,” according to the school newspaper. Later, he appeared to grow frustrated at the University of Texas in Austin. After working for a summer as a staffer for Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, Mr. Samson complained about racial slurs and threats he said he had received at the college because he was conservative.
“I can’t walk to class in a Reagan-Bush shirt without someone screaming f-bombs at me,” he told the school newspaper.
Heidi Altman, who got to know Mr. Samson when he volunteered at a Catholic school she runs near Austin, said he was “very committed to building the kingdom. He would talk about politics and would teach the young boys that it’s our job to lead in the world, in the values God has placed on us.”
Mr. Samson’s faith-based activism soon led him to Washington, D.C. — and to Vice President JD Vance’s orbit. Then a senator, Mr. Vance was an early supporter of American Moment, a nonprofit group that aims to create a career pipeline for young conservative leaders seeking jobs in government. Mr. Samson worked for almost three years at the group, mostly as its director of strategic partnerships.
“If you want to win this fight,” Mr. Vance told the group in a video on its website, “the country’s not going to be saved by people who are depressed and have given up. It’s going to be saved by people who believe in the future.”
Trump Administration: Live Updates
Updated
April 21, 2026
Senate Republicans released a measure that would fund ICE for three years.
The Pentagon will stop requiring members of the military to get flu vaccines.
The E.P.A. and Maryland filed separate lawsuits over a Potomac River sewage spill.
When Mr. Trump returned to the White House, Mr. Samson was appointed as a senior adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
The bureau was created by Congress in 1977 to advance freedoms around the world. It made deep connections to groups committed to women’s rights, gay rights, press freedoms, free elections and impartial courts.
Diplomats in the bureau looked Mr. Samson up on Google when he arrived, according to people working in the department in the time. Few had heard of him, but he told one official that he knew the vice president from his time with American Moment.
Armed with that reputation, Mr. Samson came in “guns blazing,” another official recalled. Mr. Samson told some of his colleagues, the official said, that the United States had “gone woke” and that he sought to give voice to Christians and conservatives.
Nick Solheim, the chief executive of American Moment, said that Mr. Samson’s government role was a “perfect fit” given his longtime focus on Christianity, free speech and Europe.
The second official, who has also since left government, recalled Mr. Samson instructing the staff to brainstorm how to punish the European Union for, as Mr. Samson saw it, restricting speech. Another former official said the office spent three months assessing if E.U. tech regulations had led to what Mr. Samson perceived as censorship.
Mr. Samson disliked that the bureau’s name included a reference to human rights. He wanted to change it to the Bureau of Natural Rights, according to three former State Department employees.
To Mr. Samson and other conservatives, the concept of human rights is often a radical expression of a human-made political ideology. By contrast, they say, “natural rights” indicates something god-given.
Mr. Samson gave his staff a document, seen by The New York Times, that was titled “Natural Rights Theory.” It asserted that his goal was to “prevent political ideology from distorting what is/is not a natural right.”
The bureau’s name was congressionally mandated, so Mr. Samson was stymied. Instead, he created the Office of Natural Rights, a unit within the bureau.
Europe Destabilized
For much of 2025, Mr. Samson traveled across Europe, putting his ideas into action.
One of the first people he tried to help was Ms. Le Pen, France’s veteran anti-immigrant leader, who hoped to become France’s first far-right president since World War II. She finished second to Emmanuel Macron in the country’s last two presidential elections.
In April 2025, a court convicted Ms. Le Pen of overseeing an embezzlement scheme and barred her from running for another public office for five years. Though she led many polls, another run for the presidency would now require a favorable verdict from an appeal hearing.
At a May meeting with an independent commission that advises the French government on human rights, Mr. Samson advocated for Ms. Le Pen. He asked if the commission had considered intervening on Ms. Le Pen’s behalf, according to Ms. Lafourcade, its director. Mr. Samson clearly viewed Ms. Le Pen as a victim, not a perpetrator, Ms. Lafourcade said.
Ms. Lafourcade described the hourlong conversation as “circular,” and said that it had so unsettled her that she refused to have a photo taken with Mr. Samson and his colleague. After escorting the diplomats to the lobby, she said, she reported them to the French government on the grounds of potential foreign interference.
“To me, it seemed more like a search for disinformation,” she said.
That same day, Mr. Samson and his colleague visited the office of Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom watchdog, according to Thibaut Bruttin, the group’s director. They expressed opposition to the Digital Services Act, the E.U.’s flagship tech regulation, Mr. Bruttin said.
To its European backers, the act is part of a broader attempt to protect users from abuse. It requires social media companies to police their platforms for illicit content, hate speech and misinformation — or risk hefty fines. Conservative U.S. administration officials like Mr. Samson say the act endangers free speech by preventing Europe’s right-wing voices from speaking freely online.
During the meeting, Mr. Samson “said France was gradually becoming North Korea,” Mr. Bruttin recalled.
By the final weeks of the year, Mr. Samson’s aggressive approach on matters like tech regulation had been echoed in official U.S. policy — first in the president’s national security strategy and then in the State Department’s internal strategic plan.
In a memo sent to embassies, the department said its aim for 2026 to 2030 was to “rebuild the civilizational alliance” with European states that had been “infected with the dogma of the post-Cold War neoliberal moment.”
The memo, seen by The Times, was a significant departure from previous internal directives. It instructed diplomats to “condemn anti-democratic actions which restrict free speech or the free exercise of religion” and to treat mass migration as “a threat to national cohesion, social stability, and civilizational values” across Europe.
The memo’s subtext appeared clear — and alarming — for mainstream leaders in Europe. In country after country, the United States was drastically shifting its approach. Groups fighting for gender equality, women’s rights, gay rights and electoral reform were out. Organizations dedicated to religious freedom, right-wing speech and fighting abortion rights were in.
The United States, under Mr. Trump, was preparing to loosen its support of the continent unless its politics shifted rightward.
Jaws Dropped
By the end of 2025, both Mr. Samson and Ms. Rogers were both fully engaged in pushing that message, spending the final weeks of the year separately crisscrossing the continent to implement Mr. Trump’s new European diplomacy.
In early December, face to face with British diplomats in London, Ms. Rogers did not hold much back. In the meeting, previously unreported, Ms. Rogers railed against migration levels in Britain, accusing migrants of stoking a crime wave. (Crime against individuals and households has generally fallen in Britain over the past 10 years, according to official figures.) She criticized British police for arresting a comedy writer critical of advocacy for transgender rights. She insisted that the diplomats knew something was wrong with the British system, according to four people familiar with the conversation.
The British officials were left stunned.
“Jaws dropped,” one person said.
Ms. Rogers, a former First Amendment lawyer whose clients included the National Rifle Association and Charlie Kirk, the slain MAGA activist, has not always matched Mr. Samson’s most bombastic rhetoric and rarely echoes his concerns about natural rights.
Though Ms. Rogers, who outranks Mr. Samson, has sometimes taken an approach that is less confrontational, her focus in the first three months of 2026 remained largely the same one that the young diplomat developed through the previous year.
In his last big trip through Europe in December, Mr. Samson toured Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. It was in Hungary that Mr. Samson made his boldest public broadside against the old European order.
He gave a speech at the Hungarian Institute for International Affairs, a think tank founded by the Hungarian government.
“Clearly, this is not a Europe of free speech and self-governance,” Mr. Samson said.
His new Office of Natural Rights, he said, would take “targeted action to resist traditional authoritarians and modern ideologues alike who seek to undermine these core societal goods.”
Four months later, that message may not look as effective as the Trump officials had hoped.
Days before the general election in Hungary, Mr. Vance traveled to Budapest, hoping to boost Mr. Orban’s re-election chances. The vice president called the Hungarian a “statesman” and one of the few leaders in Europe to “stand up for the values of Western civilization.”
When Hungarian voters went to the polls last Sunday, Mr. Orban lost heavily after 16 consecutive years in power.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Michael D. Shear is the chief U.K. correspondent for The New York Times, covering British politics and culture and diplomacy around the world.
Catherine Porter is an international reporter for The Times, covering France. She is based in Paris.
Jane Bradley is an investigative reporter on the International desk. She is based in London, where she focuses on abuses of power, national security and crime, and social injustices.
Christopher F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics, society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
A version of this article appears in print on April 18, 2026, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Envoy, Five Years Out of College, Leading Cultural War in Europe. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-administration-is-using-christianity-to-justify-murder-and-empire/
Op-Ed
Politics & Elections
Trump Administration Is Using Christianity to Justify Murder and Empire
There is no love of the stranger in Trump, Vance, and Hegseth’s embrace of imperial Christianity.
by George Yancy
April 21, 2026
Truthout
There is no love of the stranger in Trump, Vance, and Hegseth’s embrace of imperial Christianity.
by George Yancy
April 21, 2026
Truthout
PHOTO: President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth bow their heads during the invocation the amphitheatre at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, on Memorial Day, May 26, 2025. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images
The Latest on the Trump Administration:
- Trump’s Pick to Lead Fed: Kevin Warsh has enough support to become the next chair of the Federal Reserve, but a criminal investigation into the central bank stands in his way.
- F.B.I. Director Sues The Atlantic: Kash Patel has sued the publication, accusing it of defamation over an article that claimed his excessive drinking and unexplained absences were putting his job in jeopardy. Patel and the White House have denied those claims.
- Demand for Ballot Info: The Department of Justice is seeking ballots and other materials from the 2024 election in Michigan. The state’s officials call it election interference.
- Boat Strike in Caribbean: The U.S. military attacked another boat, killing three people, as the death toll rose to at least 180 in the country’s campaign against people it accused of smuggling drugs at sea.
- Closing the Skies Over El Paso: In the first major airspace shutdown since Sept. 11, 2001, a high-energy laser weapon and a power struggle between federal agencies brought a night of hassles to El Paso.
- White House Correspondent’s Dinner: President Trump will break his boycott of the event as questions arise over what he will say at a dinner that celebrates the news media.
