The growing American interference in the EU is no coincidence. In April 2023, the Heritage Foundation published its Mandate for Leadership, a policy document of over 900 pages that formed the blueprint for Trump’s second term. It became known as Project 2025. More than a hundred ultra-conservative organisations contributed, from Alliance Defending Freedom to the American Principles Project. The document prescribes that all senior officials at the State Department must be replaced by ideologically vetted loyalists. It advocates dismantling foreign aid and ‘redefining’ alliances based on cultural and religious values. In practice, this means dismantling supranational organisations such as the UN, the WHO, and indeed… the EU. What happened next suggests it is being carried out, step by step, with Donald Trump as a pawn.
From words to policy
On 14 February 2025, Vice President JD Vance delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference. The audience expected remarks on Ukraine, but what followed instead was an attack on Europe itself. According to Vance, the greatest threats did not originate from Russia or China, but from within the EU: censorship, mass migration, a political elite silencing its citizens. He called European measures against disinformation ‘Soviet-like’.
Munich was no isolated incident. The following week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem spoke at CPAC in Washington. On 27 May CPAC Poland followed, where Noem accused ‘weak European leaders’ of ‘destroying their civilisations’ through migration. She urged Polish voters to elect the pro-Trump candidate Nawrocki. He won five days later.
In December 2025, the White House released its National Security Strategy. The document states that European countries risk losing their civilisation due to migration and calls the growing influence of ‘patriotic European parties’ a source of great optimism. MEP Brando Benifei called it ‘a frontal assault on the EU’.
In January 2026, the Heritage Foundation published ‘Saving America by Saving the Family’, a plan for the next 250 years. The report defines marriage exclusively as the union between one man and one woman. Every alternative family structure has, according to the authors, proven ‘on average inferior in all times and all places’. Feminism and the sexual revolution are identified as causes of the family crisis. All policy proposals, from marriage bonuses to home care credits, are exclusively available to married heterosexual households. The Heritage Foundation does not merely dictate what families should look like. It also provides the platform and network for a plan to dismantle the European Union from within.
Dismantling the EU from within: The Great Reset
While Washington supplied the rhetoric, the intellectual foundations had already been established in Europe.
The Polish ultra-conservative legal think tank Ordo Iuris and the Hungarian Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a state-funded educational institute transformed under Orbán into an ideological network, jointly published The Great Reset: Restoring Member State Sovereignty in the European Union. The report was presented on 11 March 2025 at the Heritage Foundation headquarters in Washington. Not as a guest lecture, but as a joint project. The Heritage Foundation had already signed a cooperation agreement in 2023 with the Hungarian Danube Institute. Four Heritage researchers work there annually as guest fellows in Budapest.
The substance of the report? Transform the European Commission into a technical secretariat without political power, dismantle the European Court of Justice, and rename the EU the ‘European Community of Nations’.
Since then, the report has been presented at conferences in Budapest, Warsaw, Madrid, Brussels and Paris. In the European Parliament, this was at the invitation of Patriots for Europe. In December 2025, MCC Brussels organised the conference Battle for the Soul of Europe. The same tactics were used everywhere: brand democratic oversight of disinformation as ‘censorship,’ so that legislation meant to regulate platforms becomes the problem.
The ‘project’ manager: diplomacy as a weapon
In October 2025, Sarah Rogers was sworn in as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. Her appointment fits the Project 2025 logic: ideologically vetted loyalists in key positions. On X, she called the Digital Services Act a ‘censorship tariff’ and Commissioner Breton the ‘mastermind’ behind European online regulation. Concerning migrants in Germany, she labelled them as ‘barbarian rapist hordes’.
Before her government role, Rogers worked at a New York law firm. She represented the National Rifle Association, assisted tobacco manufacturers and handled censorship cases on behalf of Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. On the Charlie Kirk Show she confirmed that her appointment was thanks to Kirk’s personal lobbying. Her mission: to export an ‘America First’ approach to diplomacy and dismantle the so-called ‘censorship regime’, including the European Digital Services Act, worldwide.
Since her appointment, Rogers has been systematically building contacts with the European radical right. In December 2025, she met in Washington with Markus Frohnmaier, the AfD’s foreign affairs spokesperson and part of a twenty-member party delegation. Frohnmaier was once described in leaked Kremlin documents as ‘a parliamentarian fully controlled by us’. He called the conversation with Rogers a confirmation that Washington is ‘looking for a strong German partner’. When a journalist on X pointed to those Russian connections, Rogers defended him publicly: ‘Unlike the Russian government, the AfD took an anti-censorship position during our meeting.’
That same month, Rogers travelled to Londen. She met key figures from Reform UK, the radical-right party of Nigel Farage that won five seats at once in the 2024 British elections and finished as the third party.
She discussed the creation of a fund for MAGA values. At the Prosperity Institute Rogers attacked the Online Safety Act, alongside Zia Yusuf of Reform UK and Toby Young of the Free Speech Union. In Italy, she met Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli. A prominent Reform UK member told the Financial Times that her trip was ‘a crusade to save Europe’.
The crusade
On 6 February 2026, the Financial Times reported that the State Department will fund MAGA-aligned think tanks in Europe. The programme, called America250, is tied to the celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence. The same Heritage Foundation that previously hosted the Ordo Iuris report on dismantling the EU has published its family policy plan under the same 250-year banner. The names may change, but the infrastructure remains the same.
From 5 to 15 February, Rogers has been travelling to Dublin, Budapest, Warsaw and Munich. In Paris, Ambassador Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, launched the America250 programme.
On 9 February, Rogers opened the Budapest Global Dialogue. She was joined on stage by Balázs Orbán, political director to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Paul Coleman, director of ADF International. Rogers criticized the Digital Services Act as ‘an opaque system’ that constrains democratic debate, while Orbán proclaimed that ‘the era of the neoliberal world order is over.’ The audience responded with applause.
ADF International, the organisation of which Coleman is director, has offices in Vienna, Brussels, London, Geneva, Strasbourg and Frankfurt. ADF lobbies the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the European Court of Human Rights. The organisation opposes abortion rights, LGBTIQ+ rights, and anti-discrimination laws, and is one of more than one hundred groups behind Project 2025. The same Coleman who sat beside Rogers in Budapest has spent years working within the very European institutions that Washington is now pressuring from the outside.
The Netherlands under fire too
The consequences are now also becoming visible in the Netherlands.
Turning Point USA, the ultra-conservative youth organisation founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk, opened a Dutch chapter in Autumn 2025. Kirk, who campaigned against LGBTIQ+ rights and abortion and maintained close ties with Trump, was shot dead on 10 September 2025 at a university in Utah. His organisation grew into one of the most powerful conservative movements in the US, with over 3,500 campuses and hundreds of millions of dollars in donations. In the Netherlands, board member Annelijn de Gier speaks of ‘progressive hegemony’ at universities and claims 700 participants. National Theologian Arnold Huijgen warned on NPO Radio 1 about the mix of Christian and conservative ideology ‘in a Trumpist sense’.
Radical-right influencer Eva Vlaardingerbroek spoke at CPAC Hungary in April 2024. Her speech was titled ‘The Great Replacement is no longer a theory, it’s reality‘. The Great Replacement theory posits that white Europeans are being deliberately replaced by non-Western migrants. The speech garnered 56 million views on X after YouTube removed the video for hate speech. At CPAC Hungary 2024, she met Prime Minister Orbán. On Instagram, she recently posted a video with the words: ‘We will Make Europe Great Again.‘
American conservative money has been flowing this way for years Research by Zembla and Justice for Prosperity shows that over seven years, €60 million was sent to Europe to fund anti-LGBTIQ+ and anti-women’s rights positions. Henk Jan van Schothorst, a former SGP staff member, holds a key position via Christian Council International as intermediary between American Christian-conservative money and European organisations. Van Schothorst attended Trump’s inauguration.
The most direct attack came on 3 February 2026. The House Judiciary Committee published a 160-page report titled The Foreign Censorship Threat, Part II. The Digital Services Act, the European law requiring platforms to protect users from hate speech, child abuse and disinformation, is consistently called a ‘censorship regime’ in the report. Investigative journalist Huib Modderkolk wrote in de Volkskrant that for the first time, Dutch organisations are being accused of attempting to ‘censor’ American companies. The Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM), the Dutch supervisor for the DSA, is named explicitly. Organisations that participated in an ACM roundtable with major tech platforms on user protection in the run-up to the Dutch parliamentary elections, including Justice for Prosperity and Bits of Freedom, are labelled as ‘censorious NGOs’ in the report.
Jelle Postma, director of Justice for Prosperity, told de Volkskrant the congressional report was ‘a deliberate attack on our democratic rule of law, on how we organise, how we make agreements and how we enforce those agreements.’ He added: ‘This is pure intimidation. We must be able to determine for ourselves how we organise our society. If we bow to Trump and his allies, citizens pay the price: less transparency, more political manipulation on platforms and less protection against doxxing and hate campaigns.’
Secretary Rubio imposed travel bans in December 2025 on five Europeans involved in DSA oversight and disinformation research, including former European Commissioner Thierry Breton. Rogers called Breton on X the ‘mastermind‘ behind the DSA. Breton responded: ‘Is McCarthy’s witch hunt back?’
The rhetoric of Project 2025 has now been translated into policy. Policy with budgets, travel bans and a diplomatic network stretching from Washington to Warsaw, from Budapest to The Hague. What this article reveals is a pattern: funding,
What can we do: five urgent measures
First: transparency on foreign funding. As long as the flow of money to European organisations remains invisible, the influence network stays intact. The US itself has had since 1938 the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). This law requires anyone who is politically active on behalf of foreign principals to register and disclose financial flows.
Second: integrity frameworks for think tanks and conferences. When a foreign power finances conferences, supplies speakers and co-produces policy reports, that is not a non-committal exchange.
Third: strengthening DSA enforcement. The fact that the law is now a target of diplomatic pressure shows that it is effective.
Fourth: protection of supervisory authorities and civil society organisations. Travel bans and congressional reports that single out organisations as ‘censorious NGOs’ constitute intimidation. European governments must explicitly stand behind their supervisors and civil society.
Fifth: public resilience. These tactics only work when they remain hidden. Media literacy and knowledge of influence techniques should be a structural part of education, journalism and government policy.
About Justice for Prosperity
The Justice for Prosperity Foundation is an independent research and detection platform based in Amsterdam that detects and counters societal manipulation, disinformation and organised polarisation, including the networks behind them and the business model that drives escalation and distrust. The team works from within civil society, in direct collaboration with citizens, governments, knowledge institutions, journalists and societal partners.
In practice, the team identifies and interprets who is undermining the foundations, which narratives are being used, who is amplifying them, how they spread and what purpose they serve. These insights are translated into education, threat profiles, training in (digital) safety and support for strategic and geopolitical processes.
That our foundation is being attacked in an American congressional report is something we consider a confirmation of the relevance of our work. Support us and donate if you care about democracy.
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