Trump’s Voice of America: The free-speech crusader pushing MAGA on Europe

U.S. diplomat Sarah Rogers is pledging $500 million to fight online “censorship” and ripping into European elites over mass migration. 

By TIM ROSS, NAHAL TOOSI and STEFANIE BOLZEN

^{Illustration by Robert Carter for POLITICO}

Depending on who you ask, she’s either just another MAGA troll meddling in European democracy, or the best hope of saving it. 

What Sarah Rogers, the U.S. undersecretary of State for public diplomacy, can never be accused of is speaking in diplomatic niceties.

With hundreds of millions of dollars at her disposal, she has positioned herself as the point person for U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign to save Europe from what the White House has called “civilizational erasure.”

For Rogers, that means backing MAGA-aligned movements against mass migration, attacking political elites across Europe and waging an unapologetic campaign against laws policing online speech — often in eye-wateringly direct terms.

“Germany infamously retains very few Jews, yet imported barbarian rapist hordes,” Rogers posted in January on her official X account. 

Rogers explained that her “rapist hordes” comment was deliberately provocative. Her intention was to expose how Germany’s curbs on free speech led far-right politicians to be investigated for posting in 2018 about “barbaric, gang-raping Muslim hordes” of immigrant men. The politicians were neither prosecuted nor convicted.

“As an American, I’m allowed to call them that,” Rogers added in her post on X.

But it was not an isolated outburst. 

The post captured both her deliberately inflammatory style and her readiness to challenge what she argues are overly restrictive European speech rules, which she says threaten American tech companies and the continent’s democratic traditions. 

Unlike many U.S. State Department roles, the undersecretary of State for public diplomacy’s job is not primarily to talk to ambassadors or officials, but to put the case directly to citizens in other countries. And since taking office in October, Rogers has brought her message directly to European audiences, through speaking appearances and on social media. 

Often, her interventions aggravate the scar lines that many Europeans think should distinguish free speech from racism, and science from conspiracy. 

“Examples of things that I have seen described as false are things like: ‘The grooming gangs in England are predominantly Pakistani.’ That is true,” Rogers told an audience at the Prosperity Institute, a London-based free-market, libertarian think tank, in December. “‘Covid vaccines don’t entirely prevent transmission.’ Guess what? That’s true. ‘Covid leaked from a lab.’ CIA says that’s true. ‘There are average differences in IQ between racial groups.’ A lot of scientists say that’s true.”

(A 2025 U.K. government-commissioned report said there was not enough data to provide a national picture of the ethnicity of members of grooming gangs, while noting some prominent cases where suspects were predominantly from Asian backgrounds. Studies suggest COVID vaccines reduce but don’t prevent transmission. Most scientists say that the environment is the main factor behind differences in IQ identified among ethnic groups, and the evidence for innate racial differences is hotly contested.)

Her approach has drawn sharp criticism from European officials who warn that her confrontational style risks alienating her country’s allies. It has also caused unease among U.S. officials and even some supporters, who are unsettled by her Europe-baiting.

Trump, however, seems to approve. He recently nominated her to lead the agency overseeing the government-funded international broadcaster Voice of America — a role she would carry out in parallel with her current post.

This isn’t just an ordinary promotion: There are few potentially more direct and powerful platforms for delivering a Trumpian media diet to European citizens. 

As allies and critics brace for what comes next, one thing is clear: Rogers is just getting started. 

Undiplomacy 

For a figure as polarizing as Rogers has become, she followed a conventional early path, studying at Ivy League universities (international relations at Dartmouth, then Columbia Law School) on her way to becoming a New York attorney. She then rose to partner at her firm, and won a high-profile free-speech case for the National Rifle Association of America, defending the advocacy group against an attempt by a New York regulator to coerce banks to cut ties with the pro-gun lobby. 

One person in the U.K. who knows Rogers, like others granted anonymity to speak freely, described her in the mold of classic hardball American lawyer: combative, fast-talking, funny — and, if you’re unlucky enough to find yourself on the other side in court, someone who will “litigate to kill you.” Although others in the Trump administration, like Vice President JD Vance, can be brash and confrontational, Rogers’ litigatory style is deliberate and distinctively her own. 

“I come from courtrooms where the way that you find a truth is that you make sure that every side or every bundle of interests in a controversy has a forceful advocate,” Rogers said in an interview with Semafor recently. “And I feel like I need to be the forceful advocate for that spirit of the internet that was — that a lot of us remember that made so many favorable contributions to our culture and our economy — the internet where you can go to be free.” 

Rogers agreed to be interviewed for this article, but after delaying the promised call, the State Department then canceled it and said she would only provide written responses to POLITICO’s questions. A few days later, the State Department canceled that offer too, without explanation. 

Instead, State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott emailed some remarks: “In months, Sarah Rogers has totally reinvented public diplomacy. Her fearless free speech strikes at the heart of the global censorship-industrial complex — countering our adversaries, challenging our allies when necessary, and ensuring that America’s voice is louder and clearer than ever.” 

In the months since she took office, Rogers has become one of the most divisive figures in transatlantic politics. Her connections to the MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk who was assassinated in 2025 (she worked on a freedom of expression case with him) helped her get the undersecretary job, according to a U.S. official, and she shows the same enthusiasm for the cause that he did.

Her supporters on the European right have welcomed her eagerness to intervene in the continent’s culture wars, where freedom of expression is one in a long line of complaints against the liberal establishment. 

Over the course of her recent travels in Europe, Rogers has appeared on a discussion panel with the political adviser of Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (before the recent election), met a senior member of Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party, and hosted a far-right Alternative for Germany politician in Washington. 

While visiting Ireland — where many American tech giants have their EU headquarters — Rogers announced $500 million in U.S. funding to “promote digital freedom through a series of upcoming international initiatives.” She has already held exploratory talks about handing out grants to pressure groups that share some priorities with the Trump administration. 

For those in Europe who fear that basic freedom of expression is being destroyed, she is already a hero. 

“I’m a huge fan of Sarah’s,” said Toby Young, a Conservative member of the House of Lords and free speech campaigner. “Fighting for free speech in Europe can often feel like a losing battle, so having such a senior political figure in the most powerful country in the world on your side is a huge morale booster.” 

Fred De Fossard, from the Prosperity Institute think tank, said his team is always eager to work with people “campaigning for the protection of freedom of expression.” He told POLITICO: “These are fundamental principles which underpin both the British and American constitutions.”

When it comes to freedom of speech, a U.S. official who knows Rogers described her as an absolutist. And her public comments show she’s no fan of the centrist European mainstream. She has slammed Spain for cracking down on “hate speech,” Germany for its law banning insults, and accused the U.K. of seeking to purge court records after the British government ordered the deletion of a legal data web portal over data protection concerns.

She has also slammed the administration of Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden for “trying to make the maps more gay” in central Europe — through a $72,000 government grant funding an LGBTQ+ research project mapping queer and trans experiences. “Czechia and Slovakia are great countries,” Rogers posted on X (both EU countries are led by MAGA sympathizers). “I’m sorry that my predecessors ‘queered’ your maps!” 

To Rogers’ critics, she embodies everything disruptive and dangerous about Trump’s hostility to the European establishment. In public appearances, on stage or in interviews, her rapid-fire delivery, strident and articulate, is as subtle as a car horn — and just as likely to provoke. 

“Everybody is allowed to say anything they like about any democracy in Europe,” Sweden’s center-right Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said in an interview. “But I think the tradition we normally have is a very good one: We cooperate with friends and neighbors, and we don’t interfere.” 

One EU diplomat described Rogers’ stream of social media attacks on European governments as “preposterous.” A second EU diplomat expressed frustration that more “MAGA crap” was being aimed at America’s supposed allies. 

‘Scolding censors’

In December, the White House released the founding scripture of Trump-era foreign policy: a new National Security Strategy. Its short chapter on Europe focused on the need to shift the continent’s politics toward nationalism and save it from “civilizational erasure” as a result of mass immigration. 

The work of U.S. diplomats posted to Europe must be to support “patriotic” parties in the region, it said. Trump himself later told POLITICO in an interview for The Conversation with Dasha Burns that he would endorse individual candidates if they could steer their country in a direction to his liking. 

Rogers has clearly taken this mission to heart. Her newly announced $500 million funding pot will bankroll programs that share the U.S. government’s values, focused on privacy, age-verification tech and free expression. 

She often posts in support of the Free Speech Union, a U.K. membership organization and advocacy group founded by Young, which recently backed a man who faced prosecution for burning a Quran. 

Young is well known as a Conservative commentator and politician, but his organization has supported individuals from both the left and right. He told POLITICO he’d spoken to Rogers about the possibility of the State Department funding some of the FSU’s sibling organizations around the world, although not the British group he runs. 

“The State Department using overseas aid to fund organizations promoting the values the United States stands for, such as free speech, is completely legitimate and not something unique to this administration,” Young said. “In other words, if this happened — and it’s a big if — it wouldn’t be ‘political.’ Just business as usual for the State Department.”

Rogers made a similar argument. “The idea that we have some special slush fund for the far right is a lie,” she told POLITICO in February. “What is true, though, is that the State Department is continuing its longstanding practice of civil society, arts and cultural grantmaking in support of American priorities. It should come as no surprise that free expression is one of those priorities.”

What is new, however, is that the machinery of the State Department — and potentially Voice of America, too — is being reoriented from bolstering the conventional values the U.S. shared with European centrists toward a MAGA-aligned agenda. The Trump administration has sought to shut down Voice of America, but has been prevented from doing so by Congress and a ruling by a federal court. 

Rogers set out her philosophy in a memo to State Department staff, seen by POLITICO, when she took office last year. 

“Countries that purport to share Western values should act like it; when they instead arrest comedians for tweets, we should be prepared to respond,” she wrote, referring to the detention of an Irish comedian at Heathrow Airport for posting gender-critical comments. “Scolding censors isn’t sufficient, though — it’s also our job to advance an affirmative vision for free expression. I welcome all ideas in this vein.” 

Two pieces of law are particularly offensive to Rogers: The EU’s Digital Services Act and what she describes as the U.K.’s “tyrannical and absurd” Online Safety Act. 

Both of these, she believes, suppress freedom of expression and encourage creeping censorship inside the U.S. — because American tech firms like Meta, Google and X have to comply with U.K. and EU rules if they want to operate in European markets. 

In their fight against the European regulators, Rogers and her State Department colleagues even went as far as sanctioning the EU official they claim was a “mastermind” of the DSA law: France’s former European Commissioner Thierry Breton. They also sanctioned British citizen Imran Ahmed, a campaigner against online hate who previously worked for several leading center-left Labour politicians. Both men have described the sanctions as unjustified. 

“If you spend your career fomenting censorship of American speech, you’re unwelcome on American soil,” Rogers announced on tech billionaire Elon Musk’s X. 

What Europeans want

Rogers says she’s not just strengthening political alliances on the right, but meeting voters in Europe where she believes many truly are: fed up with being told what they can say and fearful that migration will change their societies beyond recognition. 

“The Trump administration is sometimes at odds with Brussels on those topics,” Rogers told an audience in Budapest in February. “But if you look at the polls in these European countries, we’re not at odds with the plurality or majority of Europeans. That’s why the people controlling the censorship levers are so scared of permitting dissent.” 

Indeed, there’s no denying the support for the policies Rogers is promoting among many voters in European countries — including those with centrist or left-leaning governments. 

In the U.K., Farage is pushing an anti-immigration, pro-free-speech agenda and consistently topping opinion polls. The same is often true of hard-right and far-right parties in France and Germany. 

In Italy, politicians once regarded as beyond acceptable on the far right of European politics — pushing traditional family values, right-wing cultural leadership, and targeting migration and LGBTQ+ rights — have been in power in a remarkably stable coalition for three-and-a-half years. 

On free speech, there is also significant support for some of the themes in Rogers’ campaign. 

In November, the European Parliament’s Eurobarometer report found that “threats to freedom of speech” was among the most pressing concerns for voters — with 67 percent saying they were “highly worried.” In the U.K., a government-commissioned survey last summer found 49 percent of the public leaned toward the view that people were too easily offended these days. Support rose to more than half among men, Christians and white people — the very groups Europe’s center-right politicians have often relied on for votes.

In carrying out her campaign, Rogers hasn’t shied away from taking on those in charge either. “The average Brit wants to be a free person,” said Rogers during her comments to the Prosperity Institute think tank in London.

Free speech, she said, is “America’s most famous freedom,” and “the one I’m most proud to carry forward and help you guys win back on your little island.” 

Blowback

Some of Rogers’ supporters worry her confrontational — and sometimes patronizing — approach could rebound. 

“Often, people don’t like being criticized from abroad,” said the person who knows Rogers cited above, who supports her aims. “I don’t like the discourse of Britain as a failed state. Britain has problems, but I think they’re solvable.”

While roughly two-thirds of EU voters are worried about threats to free speech, Eurobarometer found that almost exactly the same proportion — 68 percent — were highly worried about “hate speech online and offline.” (Similar numbers raised concerns about disinformation, deepfakes and the fact that social media platforms are controlled by “a few big companies.”) 

While Rogers has undeniably identified a fight that millions of people in Europe want to have with the politicians making their laws, voters on the continent also worry about an online free-for-all where nobody is protected — from lies, fake news, abuse and even violence. The Wild West of social media is not where many European parents say they want their children to be. 

Still, Rogers appears to retain the overall confidence of her superiors. While she is not personally close to either the president or her nominal boss, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, there is no sign they don’t like her, said a second U.S. official familiar with her activities. Her nomination to serve as CEO of the agency overseeing Voice of America further underscores that support. If she’s confirmed, she would wield a mighty bullhorn to harness her cause, broadcasting content she approves of directly to European audiences. 

At the same time, officials inside the Trump administration acknowledge the potential risks of her approach. Rogers’ constant baiting of Europe, especially on free speech, has frustrated some, including in the White House, who worry she’s going too far. “The president would rather focus on trade and security issues that actually impact Americans,” the same U.S. official said.

There are indications in Europe too that resistance to Trumpian coercion is stirring, as the economic fallout from the Iran war begins to bite. 

Many of America’s traditional allies have declined the president’s request for help in the U.S.-Israel military operation in the Persian Gulf. And even some of Trump’s natural sympathizers, such as Germany’s anti-migration AfD party, have criticized the Iran war. AfD party leader Alice Weidel has even ordered that trips to the U.S. by her members of parliament should be significantly limited in the future, or ended altogether. 

Both Trump and Vance endorsed their staunch ally Orbán, but the Hungarian leader still lost this month’s election by a wide margin. Increasingly, European politicians of all stripes worry that the economic damage from the new Middle East conflict will be vast and long-lasting — and a problem for their voters too. 

In the end, Rogers’ challenge could be that she’s an emissary for a president who is increasingly unpopular abroad. Trump’s attempts to coerce European allies over annexing Greenland and joining the war against Iran have dismayed voters and political leaders alike. 

The Trump administration’s threats against its critics in the media and crackdowns on campus protests have also sparked concern across the Atlantic. The first EU diplomat cited earlier said the U.S. should get its own house in order when it comes to freedom of expression before lecturing Europeans. 

“We have plenty of fringe people espousing these exact thoughts in Europe — many of them in our parliaments,” the diplomat said. “Feels like we’re fine on free speech actually.” 

Stefanie Bolzen is a reporter for WELT, which — like POLITICO — is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network.