The Scoop
A State Department delegation visited Paris and London in late May to press the Trump administration’s new priority of ending European restrictions on, particularly, right-wing speech.
The group’s leader was Samuel Samson, a young and intensely ideological senior adviser to State’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, who rattled Europeans last month with an essay on the State Department’s new Substack demanding they act as “civilizational allies.”
But Samson, a 2021 graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, met a chilly reception from Reporters Without Borders, a global group advocating for journalists and journalism, at the group’s Paris office on May 28, two people familiar with its substance said. Samson was accompanied by Christopher Anderson, the director of the office of European and Eurasian Affairs under the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, plus a representative of the US embassy in Paris. One of the participants said the Americans seemed particularly focused on the troubles of their ally Marine le Pen, who may be kept off the presidential ballot in 2027 over campaign finance violations.
“Everything was weird and troublesome about this visit by State Department officials — its purpose, the definition of freedom of expression that was the basis for this ‘investigation,’ and the strong bias of the questioning in favor of Europe’s far-right parties,” said Pierre Haski a leading French commentator and media entrepreneur who chairs Reporters Without Borders. Haski, who declined to discuss the meeting in detail, said he left feeling “as if liberal democracies in Western Europe were now to be treated at best as suspicious, if not outright adversaries.”
A senior State Department official in Washington declined to say who else the Americans met in France. The official said Samson and Anderson went to Paris to “address concerns regarding political censorship and lawfare in Europe. During their visit they reaffirmed the shared democratic values that underpin U.S.-France relations and met with French officials, political parties, and civil society to openly discuss these issues.”
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Samson’s European tour also included a visit to England, where American diplomats met anti-abortion protesters who had been arrested for violating the country’s law mandating buffer zones around abortion clinics, The Telegraph first reported.
They also sought to meet with representatives of the Free Speech Union, an anti-cancel culture group founded by the Tory peer Toby Young, who said the meeting never happened for scheduling reasons.
The delegation also met with the UK Foreign Office, where they criticized Britain’s Online Safety Act, according to the Telegraph.
Ben’s view
Samson’s visit to Europe mirrors decades of American diplomats visiting pro-democracy dissidents and civil society groups in China and Russia, and offers the same seal of American support and implied protection to religious and nationalist groups seen by much of the European establishment as a dangerous far-right fringe. Samson represents one strain of Trump’s coalition, a conservative Catholic who described himself as a “proud Thomist” in an online biography. He received a masters degree in government from Hillsdale College earlier this year, according to his LinkedIn biography.
Samson’s State Department Substack post attempted to explain the Trump administration’s rift with Europe in conciliatory terms, suggesting the White House is particularly hard on its Atlantic allies only because they have so much in common. But the piece’s language — in particular, its repeated description of a common “heritage” and notable omission of any reference to shared values — had the reverse effect, convincing the European establishment that they face implacable foes in Washington.
“It left me with a gloomy feeling about the future of the transatlantic relation,” said Haski.
That feeling is largely justified. Many senior Trump administration officials see European speech regulation — in particular, attempts to limit or punish speech on Elon Musk’s X — as one of the most pressing issues in international affairs, well ahead of more traditional concerns around trade or intellectual property. Vice President JD Vance shook European leaders when he hit some of these themes in a speech at the Munich Security Conference in February.
Samson is certainly at the vanguard of one of the various ideological projects in the Trump coalition, a rejection of liberalism and individualism that’s been associated with conservative Catholic thinkers. Four years before joining the State Department, he wrote about the project of “the infiltration of liberalism’s powerful institutions by right-wing post-liberal agents,” among whom he counts himself. (He also warned of “the temptations of liberalism — sirens singing alluring songs of pleasure, sexual license, material gain, power, prestige, and social inclusion.“)
But Trump has repeatedly shown that the well-developed ideologies of political appointees, and even of his vice president, bear almost no connection to his unilateral decisions. The first months of his tenure have been marked by massive reversals on economic and security policy, and, recently, back-to-back 180-degree turns on how migrant workers without criminal records — the vast majority of the unauthorized workforce — should be treated. The Defense Department recently purged leaders of one widely-discussed ideological movement, the anti-war “restrainers.” European speech regulations are a top target for figures from the Vice President to mid-level appointees like Samson, but that’s no guarantee that Trump — or Secretary of State Marco Rubio — won’t trade it for economic or security gains.
Room for Disagreement
Zach Beauchamp, writing in the progressive Vox, describes Samson’s role as part of a successful “entryist campaign targeting the bureaucracy.” The aim: “You get a few key people into positions of power, and then they quietly nudge the citizenry toward a place where they will accept some kind of ‘postliberal’ state.”
Notable
- Trumpism is “a vibe, not an ideology,” Scott Greer, a right-wing writer who was fired by the Daily Caller in 2017 for his ties to white nationalists, wrote in a Substack post circulated on the New Right circles. He took specific aim at Samson’s essay: “There have been numerous attempts to fashion a New Right in the wake of Trump. Some have turned to European thinkers–from Catholic reactionaries to Nietzsche–for inspiration. But most of these ideas are off-putting to Americans and bear little relation to our traditions and present situation. The idea of a Catholic integralist American Republic is about as realistic as Middle-Earth suddenly appearing in the midwest.”
- Samson’s post on the State Department’s Substack offers a pocket history of Europe that asserts its foundations are “natural law, virtue ethics, and national sovereignty.”