Trump 2.0: How Europe must respond to the US Soft Power suicide
By Damien Helly and Celia Zayas
This article provides a summary of cS Brief #16 on Trump 2.0 and EU Soft Power.
Purges against US soft power
For decades, the United States combined military might with an extraordinary capacity to seduce: Hollywood, universities, independent media, development aid, and a tech industry that reshaped everyday life across the globe. That ecosystem of openness and aspiration was the backbone of American soft power – and the unspoken cultural foundation of the transatlantic relationship.
Trump 2.0 seems to be determined to blow it up from within. The new National Security Strategy sacralises a mythical “golden age” and recasts the US as a civilisation under siege. Diversity becomes then a threat, and no longer the element that allowed US society and economy’s constant reinvention and dynamism. The administration has launched an explicit offensive against “woke” universities, diversity policies and public arts funding, while praising itself for having “rooted out” DEI. Equality has been portrayed as an extremist doctrine, not a constitutional right. And the American “fight for Freedom” that once attracted hearts and minds across the world is replaced by empty narratives to sugarcoat illegal wars.
USAID has been gutted and re‑engineered into a transactional, ideologically-filtered instrument, purging thousands of liberal democratic professionals and hollowing out one of Washington’s most effective soft power tools. Voice of America and Radio Free Europe have been pushed to the brink, surviving thanks to courts and the Congress. Even the Kennedy Center has been turned into a personality‑cult stage, before being closed for “renovation” after a year of purges and protests.
On the global screens that once carried American pluralism and inventiveness, Trump’s Washington now attacks Hollywood as decadent and “anti‑American”, flirts with film tariffs and lionises aging loyalists while new investors – tech tycoons and Gulf funds – reshape the industry’s political centre of gravity. At the same time, MAGA politics rides on American platforms and generative AI that spread disinformation at scale and monetise outrage, turning the very tools of US tech soft power into amplifiers of authoritarian mimicry worldwide.
This is not just a US domestic drama. It is a deliberate soft power suicide with direct consequences for Europe.
Two Wests – and a culture war aimed at Europe
Trump’s culture war is not only waged against “coastal elites” but against the spirit that has shaped the European project. In the National Security Strategy, Europe is instructed to recover “civilisational self‑confidence” and “Western identity” – code for aligning with a white, Christian, anti‑pluralist project that collides with EU law and social realities.
The effect is a fractured West. On one side, a MAGA‑led America that treats liberal democracy and human rights as enemies, champions an open sphere‑of‑influence imperialism, and is willing to bomb first and consult Congress later. On the other, an EU that still claims to stand for multilateralism, international law, human rights and fact-based climate action.
MAGA is already a transatlantic movement. CPAC gatherings in Budapest and beyond, coordinated far‑right parties meeting in the European Parliament, and a constant flow of digital propaganda have turned US populism into a new soft power export industry. MAGA disinformation and culture‑war memes target European audiences as systematically as other authoritarian troll farms.
At the same time, Washington’s retreat from multilateral institutions — from UNRWA and WHO to UNESCO and other dozens of UN entities dealing with inequalities, discrimination and climate change — leaves a vacuum others will fill.
If Europeans still imagine that “the West” is a coherent values-based community led from Washington, they are deluding themselves. There are now two Wests, composed of fragmented and polarised societies.
Europe’s choice: imitate, accommodate – or lead
The EU and its Member States have recently toughened their posture towards the US on Ukraine, Greenland, trade tariffs and reinforced digital and AI regulation, but on the cultural and normative front vis‑à‑vis MAGA, hesitation prevails.
The risk is threefold. First, accommodation: treating MAGA as a temporary aberration to be waited out, while quietly adjusting language and priorities to avoid confrontation, which leads to complicity and accelerates the erosion of the very values the EU claims to embody. Second, imitation: allowing Europe’s own far right to “Europeanise” the MAGA playbook – defunding critical culture, dismantling diversity policies, rewriting history around frozen golden ages – while mainstream parties normalise this agenda in the name of “realism”. Third, irrelevance: underfunding culture and international cultural relations as “nice‑to‑have” extras in a time of permacrisis, leaving the field of imagination and narrative to authoritarians who know exactly what they want to destroy.
There is another option: Europe can decide that Trump’s soft power suicide is its moment to bridge its willingness for strategic autonomy with a genuine soft power – not as a pale copy of the American model, but one that is built on an optimistic, sensitive vision of the world shared by autonomous, decolonial, climate‑conscious democratic actors.
As the EU is looking to shape a new European Security Strategy, and as the Commission President calls for “power projection” and “more connections with reliable, trusted partners”, security priorities cannot ignore the need for trust-based cultural relations.
Five things the new EU cultural strategy must say
The EU is drafting its next international cultural relations strategy just as MAGA turns American soft power inside out. That text must stop being a polite technocratic exercise and become a political manifesto for Europe’s power of attraction in a hostile environment. The strategy’s preparation should include discussions with EU partners defending an international liberal and law-based order – the UK and Canada on the forefront.
- Name MAGA as a threat, not a partner: The EU should distinguish between federal policies under MAGA leadership and the plurality of American actors – cities, universities, independent media, civil society – that still share EU values. The strategy must say openly that culture war, disinformation and neo‑imperial foreign policy are incompatible with the EU’s commitments to human rights, cultural diversity and international law.
- Defend cultural diversity and artistic freedom at home as security policy: Trump’s purges show how quickly cultural diversity can be threatened, and how hard legal resistance becomes once illiberal forces capture institutions. The EU should declare zero tolerance for anti‑rights legislation in Member States, protect cultural workers and institutions with European‑level guarantees, and treat attacks on artistic freedom and academic independence as early‑warning signs of democratic backsliding.
- Invest in fair, decolonial cultural relations – not propaganda: If Europe wants credibility in the Global South, it must go beyond slogans and one‑off restitution ceremonies. Initiatives such as EUNIC’s “Fair Collaboration” or Africa‑Europe Partnerships for Culture show what a different practice looks like: co‑creation, shared governance, honest confrontation with colonial legacies. The EU must believe in its successes and embrace the space it created for its citizens to represent its voice and interact with the rest of the world.
- Make digital sovereignty a cultural priority: The clash over GDPR, the Digital Markets and Services Acts, the AI Act, the Media Freedom Act (to name but a few) and data sovereignty is not just a tech story; it is about who controls the infrastructure of imagination. The EU must match its regulatory muscle with investment in open, public, rights‑based digital ecosystems that embed plurality and diversity by design.
- Scale up transatlantic people‑to‑people alliances – bypassing MAGA: Instead of trying to charm a White House that sees Europe as a decadent rival, Brussels should dramatically expand direct ties with American artists, creatives, scientists, educators and tech workers. A re‑imagined “Transatlantic Rising Stars” programme, large‑scale residencies, joint creative tech labs and conflict‑related cultural projects could build a dense web of relationships that will outlive any single presidency.
From normative power Europe to enabling power
For years, the EU has been described as a “normative power”: a regulator exporting standards. In cultural and digital policies, that reputation is deserved – and it is precisely why MAGA now casts Europe as the enemy of “real freedom” in its propaganda.
The point, however, is not to abandon norms but to make them liveable. A credible EU cultural strategy should frame the EU as an enabling power: one that uses legal and financial tools to expand spaces where people can think, create and organise freely, across borders and differences. Trump 2.0 has made one thing brutally clear: soft power is not about being liked, it is about what survives when bombs fall and algorithms lie. If Europe wants to be trusted in that world, it must stop outsourcing imagination to others – including Washington – and dare to exercise its own.
The views expressed in this article are personal and are not the official position of culture Solutions as an organisation.