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The New York Times thought it was writing a horror story. What it actually wrote was a gloriously nervous admission that Team Trump is done playing footsie with Europe’s stale, old, out-of-date, self-important establishment elites.
For eons now, the foreign policy game has been the same: flatter the old establishment, repeat pre-approved, canned slogans, and pretend the only legitimate voices in Europe were the same tired establishment creatures who opened the floodgates to migrants, censored free speech, and ran their countries straight into the ground. But thanks to Team Trump, things are changing. The younger people rising inside Trump’s circle aren’t the least bit interested in propping up the same failed old, dowdy Euro crowd. They’re interested in the future, which is why they’re talking to the new right, populists, nationalists, and the people the old order have spent years trying to crush into dust.
That’s why the New York Times is in panic mode. The freak-out is because Team Trump isn’t just changing policy, but it’s doing it with younger voices who aren’t at all impressed or intimidated by old political taboos, guilt rituals, or dusty diplomatic niceties. And that’s where Sarah Rogers comes in.
You might remember Sarah Rogers from her fight to help Douglass Mackey, who was convicted on election conspiracy charges for sharing an anti-Hillary meme. Always a champion of free speech and justice, Sarah stepped in to help Mr. Mackey when he needed it most.
So it is not surprising that the Times’ own reporting shows she became a key part of this larger shift from the old guard to the new. Sarah is the more senior, more polished figure helping carry that torch, and the New York Times is clearly not happy about it.
The piece kicks things off fretting that Trump’s people are no longer treating Europe’s hard-right parties like the plague.
New York Times:
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.
Ahh yes, the Times wants their readers to recoil in horror at the idea that Trump’s people are willing to break with the old postwar playbook, because the old establishment expects permanent loyalty, no matter what. Team Trump is making it clear those days are over.
The NYT dives into what Samson has actually been doing, and again, their panic is obvious. He’s coming to Europe to build ties with the people the establishment wants to shut out.
NYT:
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.
The Left cannot stand watching a younger generation inside Team Trump walk right past the old political fuddy-duddies and start building ties with a completely different part of Europe. That is what rattles them. Change rattles them. A new openness to the rising right rattles them.
They want the people who imposed mass migration, restricted free speech, and helped tear apart Europe’s traditions and cultural identity to remain protected, respectable, and above reproach no matter how badly they failed.
NYT:
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.
What’s really amusing is how the NYT presents this change like it’s some kind of massive political scandal. But to normal people, it sounds like Team Trump is finally telling the Euro establishment that flooding the continent with unsavory deadbeats and treating their own people like subjects, not citizens, won’t be getting any fake applause from the US anymore.
This is also where Sarah Rogers enters stage right. Once she came into the story, they knew this wasn’t just one young adviser having some freelance fun. The message became much more official and disciplined.
NYT:
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.
Honestly, Sarah’s presence made this whole political shift real, but Mr. Samson is doing his part, too. Sure, NYT might prefer the reckless-young-man angle, but in the end, they show that Sarah’s role sharpens and professionalizes everything.
The Trump State Department is reorienting the relationship with Europe around civilizational confidence, free speech, religious liberty, and national cohesion… the same thing they’re promoting at home as well.
NYT:
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 old European establishment is no longer being treated as the automatic moral center, thanks to younger figures inside Team Trump like Mr. Samson, with Sarah helping give that shift added weight and legitimacy.
This is why the NYT is so rattled and why they’re desperate to frame this as something bad. But it’s not. This is the first step to making Europe great again.
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