Millions of US tax dollars sent to rightwing European thinktanks. Did any Trump supporters vote for that?

“THE CORRUPTION IS AT LEVELS RARELY SEEN BEFORE,” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social in February 2025. He was not referring to his own administration, but to the US Agency for International Development (USAID). “CLOSE IT DOWN!” the president added.

Just a few hours later USAID was in effect closed down, with most of the staff placed on indefinite administration leave. This was framed as part of Trump’s “America first” agenda. USAID, the Trump administration and his sycophants in the rightwing media had argued, was wasting taxpayers’ hard-earned money on ridiculous projects abroad instead of improving life at home. In the lead-up to the shuttering of USAID, for example, one of the most shameless lies about the agency, repeated without any evidence by the likes of Fox News, was that it was spending millions on condoms for Gaza.

Now that humanitarian aid has been slashed in the name of putting America first, is taxpayer money staying in the country? Not quite. A lot is still going abroad. But instead of being used to help the world’s most impoverished people, that money is going to thinktanks across Europe set up by multimillionaires who want to take Trumpism global.

Last month the Guardian reported that the US state department intends to grant $12m to conservative organisations in the UK; a move described by many critics as an attempt to influence foreign politics. Of that, $7m is going to a group called 878, co-founded by the former Conservative minister, now TV host Jacob Rees-Mogg (whose net worth is estimated at more than £100m) that appears to have been incorporated in the UK in March. The website describes it as a “leading British and American thinktank, dedicated to strengthening the civilisational partnership between the United Kingdom and the United States”. If millions in funding going to a new organisation with vague goals sounds a bit weird, it’s because it is. A former US official told the Guardian that normal funding processes are being subverted so that money can go to Trump-aligned causes.

Millions in grants are also being offered for proposals from groups in Europe to develop “civilizational self-confidence in Europe … [and] address national sovereignty, migration, censorship, and lawfare challenges in line with our shared political philosophy, law, and Western heritage”. If all this sounds vague, that’s by design. Zsuzsanna Végh, a researcher in liberal democracy, told the i Paper that “the advertising of the funding calls follows a long period of networking among Maga and like-minded European actors, which have already facilitated the identification of a pool of possible recipients”. In other words, it seems to be a bureaucratic form of meddling. Indeed, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, warned Trump’s administration against interfering in German elections following those grants. I imagine Trump has very much taken that to heart.

The US embassy in London is also offering grants of up to $500,000 for “public education” programmes that foster a “national conversation” about “shared civilizational values” between the UK and US. One recently departed US state department official told the Guardian that this seems to be an attempt to “create UK-originated narratives to support Maga propaganda”. Meanwhile Lisa Smart, a Liberal Democrat MP, accused Trump’s Maga money of “meddling in our democracy”.

What does the average Trump voter, who was promised an America-first agenda, think about all this money going to “public education” programmes in the UK instead of all the underfunded public schools at home? The short answer is: they’re not thinking about it at all. I am fairly certain there isn’t a single Fox News devotee who knows about the grants. They’re too busy getting worked up over Anthony Fauci and trans people in sports. There is a reason Trump has put so much energy into dismantling the free press: it’s a lot easier to lie to people and distract them from your broken promises when your billionaire buddies own the media.

Twelve million dollars of US taxpayer money going to projects in the UK may not seem like a lot in the grand scheme of things. It’s a few million less than Pete Hegseth spent on ribeye steak for the Pentagon last September. And it’s certainly chump change compared with the war on Iran, which has cost at least $37.5bn so far. But the money going to the UK and Europe represents a different kind of war effort. These are not isolated initiatives, but instead point to the growing transnationalisation of the hard right and a coordinated effort to make the Maga movement global under the guise of saving western civilisation.

The Trump administration has not been shy about its international intentions. Last December the new US national security strategy claimed Europe faced “civilizational erasure” and stated that US policies must include “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”. In other words: bolstering far-right parties and influencers. It is doing this financially, but also through direct endorsements. Trump’s buddy Elon Musk has amplified rightwing populist movements across Europe. And at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) conference in Warsaw last year, Kristi Noem, who was then homeland security secretary, broke established norms by calling for Karol Nawrocki, who ran under the Trumpy slogan “Poland first, Poles first”, to be president of Poland. (He narrowly won.)

The fact that Noem was even at a CPAC conference in Poland is also telling. CPAC, one of the most high-profile gatherings of conservatives on the US right, used to be a domestic affair, but has taken on an international focus in the past decade. Its first international conference was held in Tokyo in 2017, followed by conferences everywhere from Australia to Hungary. Last month also saw the inaugural British franchise of CPAC, called CPAC GB, spearheaded by the former Conservative prime minister Liz Truss, who ran the country for just 49 days. “We believe the fight for freedom and conservative values doesn’t stop at America’s borders,” CPAC’s chair, Matt Schlapp, told Axios last year.

All this brazen meddling in foreign affairs is alarming. However, the US hard right may have overreached by trying to take Maga global without actually addressing American problems first. The average person in the US cares less about this crusade to “save” western civilisation than about whether they can afford petrol and groceries. And trying to square America first promises and Trump’s pledge not to start any new wars with rising costs thanks to the Iran war is starting to get tricky. Last month a Politico poll found that just a third of Trump’s Maga base thought the war in Iran was worth the cost, down from half in May. Influential Trump supporters such as the podcaster Joe Rogan have also turned on the president because of Iran.

Trump, for his part, has brushed off cost-of-living concerns, declaring last year: “I don’t want to hear about the affordability.” But the president, who made an estimated $2.2bn last year, should start listening. The average Trump voter may not know anything about all the grants their taxpayer money is funding in Europe. But it’s becoming more obvious to even the most diehard Maga fan that they are being put last.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.