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Over the last year, the second Trump administration has launched a broad and sustained assault on the institutional structures of America’s liberal democracy, markedly more aggressive than anything in President Trump’s first term. One key feature has been an unprecedented series of attacks on free speech and the free press. Another is political support for these policies from the world’s most powerful technology corporations – including Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, X, and Google.
At first, the ferocity of the attacks knocked many American liberals off balance. In recent months, growing numbers have taken their protests to the courts, the halls of Congress, and the streets. But even among the most aggressive fighters, a critical blind spot persists. Most American liberals have paid little attention to the international dimension [ [link removed] ] of Trump’s war on democracy, especially the administration’s attacks on European efforts to protect free speech and the free press by imposing stronger regulations on the tech corporations that control online communications and commerce.
The problem is not merely traditional American parochial failure to stand up for others. It also demonstrates an inability to understand how to protect our own democracy. Over the last decade, Americans have benefited enormously from dozens of new laws [ [link removed] ] and regulatory actions in Europe, Australia, Brazil and elsewhere – as well as home-grown legislation and lawsuits in individual U.S. states. In tandem with actions by Biden-era regulators, this world-wide net of interlinking regulatory actions both slowed the growth of dominant tech corporations and mapped new ways to rein in their power. These foreign laws and actions, in short, helped make Americans both safer and freer.
Democrats have finally awakened to the fact that the Trump White House has all but destroyed federal antitrust enforcement – transforming agencies from defenders of rule of law to instruments of rule by one man. And many Democrats and Republicans have assailed recent Trump efforts to block individual U.S. states from even attempting to regulate AI.
But when it comes to cooperating with defenders of liberal democracy around the world, most Democrats have allowed Trump to divide us from our closest allies in ways that make it easier to conquer us all. And as the muted Democratic response to the brazen abduction of a foreign head of state this weekend demonstrates, Democrats are not yet ready to ready to join—let alone lead—a global fight for the future of democracy.
The path back from the brink starts with reforging our oldest and strongest alliances with the democracies of Europe. The release of the administration’s National Security Strategy in December provides Democrats with a new opportunity to learn and act. The document [ [link removed] ] clearly states that the ultimate objective of the Trump White House is to replace liberal democracy in the U.S. and around the world with a form of Christian-infused authoritarianism. Or as the NSS put it, “We want Europe to remain European [and] to regain its civilizational self-confidence,” which in turn requires Europeans to “abandon [their] failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”
To achieve this, the NSS says, the administration will actively “cultivat[e] resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
Democracy has always been a cross-border project. In the 18th century European soldiers like Lafayette and Kościuszko joined America’s revolutionaries in founding a government to serve as a beacon of freedom for the world. In the 20th century, the American people fought to destroy fascism, then invested immense effort in rebuilding Europe’s democratic institutions and industries after the war. The reasoning was simple; we are all safer when we stand and fight as one.
If Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, or Kennedy were to behold the silence of today’s liberals in the face of Trump’s war against European democracy, it’s hard to imagine the shame they would feel.
From the start, it was clear the second Trump Administration’s approach to Europe would differ radically from his first term. It was also clear that – despite its claim to be countering “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition” by European governments – the exact opposite was true. The administration’s practical goal was to exploit the power of the U.S. state, often in direct alliance with dominant communications platforms like Facebook and X, to interfere in free political debate in these democracies.
Vice President J.D. Vance signaled this new posture at the 2025 Munich Security Conference in February, suggesting a new approach to alliances based on economic quid pro quo rather than shared democratic values. “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor,” Vance said. “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”
At the Paris AI Summit that same month, Vance emphasized the administration’s commitment to secure the dominance of America’s technology corporations through aggressive deregulation at home and by imposing high tariffs on any nation that dared to regulate U.S. corporations, no matter how blatantly those corporations violated that nation’s law.
“The Trump Administration is troubled by reports that some foreign governments are considering tightening the screws on U.S. tech companies with international footprints,” Vance said. “America cannot and will not accept that,”
Those threats became reality with the announcement of the “Independence Day Tariffs” in April. The administration explicitly tied the tariffs to one of Europe’s landmark tech laws, the Digital Services Act (DSA), which aims to increase platform accountability for illegal and harmful content.
The effort was soon taken up across the executive branch. Secretary of State Marco Rubio worked to reframe Europe’s tech regulations as a direct assault on American free speech, and in May announced [ [link removed] ] visa restrictions on foreign officials he accused of “censoring” Americans.
That same month, the hard right ideological underpinnings of this policy shift were made explicit in a State Department memo [ [link removed] ] outlining its intention to redefine the transatlantic alliance as a “bond forged in common culture, faith, familial ties, mutual assistance in times of strife, and above all, a shared Western civilizational heritage.”
The administration’s congressional allies meanwhile worked hard to enforce these threats. House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan in late summer led a congressional delegation to Brussels and London and held hearings to portray the DSA as a “foreign censorship” regime. In announcing an August hearing on the topic, Jordan warned that the DSA “compels Big Tech to censor user content” and that “this foreign censorship threat... risks chilling the speech of Americans online.”
As if to eliminate any lingering doubt, Trump himself wrote in late August of his intent to retaliate against any efforts to “attack our incredible American Tech Companies.” This included any law, regulation, or tax that he felt was “designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology.
Finally, last month the State Department blocked [ [link removed] ] former European commissioner Thierry Breton and four academics from traveling to the United States. The charge? Serving as “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex.”
The outlines of this attack on European democracy and regulatory sovereignty were first sketched out during Trump’s first administration. They are largely the result of an effort by Hungary’s autocratic prime minister Viktor Orban to curry friendships with key Trump allies, especially Steve Bannon, and to enlist their support for his own efforts to swing European politics from the liberalism of the last 80 years towards tribalism and authoritarianism.
During those years, Trump’s misleading antimonopoly messaging in the U.S. helped to obscure the increasingly anti-democratic nature of his policies in Europe. During the 2016 campaign, for instance, Trump repeatedly attacked Amazon and other large corporations for predatory behavior in the U.S. Once in power, his law enforcers helped to bring groundbreaking lawsuits against Google and Facebook.
All the while, however, Orban was perfecting his playbook for subverting liberal democracy. As detailed in Anne Applebaum’s book Twilight of Democracy, this centered on eroding judicial independence, helping friendly oligarchs to purchase independent news outlets, cracking down on civil society and academia, and rewriting the constitution to entrench his party’s rule.
Internationally, Orban positioned himself as the intellectual leader of a global movement, hosting conferences and building networks to export his brand of illiberalism. In a now-famous 2018 speech, he declared his goal was to replace “the shipwrecked liberal democracy” with “a 21st-century Christian democracy.” To this end, Orbán and his allies also invested in key regional news outlets like Euronews and established a powerful think tank named MCC Brussels.
But it was Steve Bannon who, beginning in 2017, worked hardest to connect Orbanism with Trumpism. Bannon’s goal was to forge an international network of hard-right nationalist parties that could work together to undermine and ultimately destroy the European Union from within. Or as Politico [ [link removed] ] put it in a March 2017 feature, Bannon’s goal was to “unmake the West.”
Bannon did so by helping to anoint far-right parties in other European nations, in ways that transformed Orban from a somewhat powerless outsider within the European Union to a leader of a broad movement. This included early contacts with the Alternative for Germany party (AfD) and Nigel Farage, then head of the UK Independence Party (UKIP).
The ideological project was supported by influential conservative organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which have helped export American-style culture wars and legal strategies to attack LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive freedom, and secularism. A multi-year investigation by the nonprofit openDemocracy found that the ADF had spent over $20 million in Europe. The project has also been supported by leading right-wing Catholic writers such as Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher.
The result is a network that today provides the connective tissue for a global movement that shares tactics, funding, and personnel. Or as the journalist and researcher Martin Gak put it [ [link removed] ] in 2021, Bannon has “crafted one of the most successful recipe books for the construction of völkisch conservatism in the past 70 years.”
The political economic policies that serve as a foundation for European democracy and political union date to the end of the Second World War. Largely modeled on antimonopoly thinking and laws first developed in the U.S., they aim at the careful distribution and neutralization of power, in ways designed to promote human liberty and to protect democratic institutions and balances of economic power.
In the case of Germany, the Post-War antimonopoly laws and industrial structures were directly imposed by U.S. military governors during the Occupation, based on the belief that German monopolists had helped to make and sustain the Nazi government. In the case of the European Union, Americans worked closely with French leaders to internationalize control over industries vital to arms production, such as steel and coal, and to use American-style antitrust rules to prevent dangerous concentrations of power and control.
That’s why in the initial months of the Trump administration’s assault on Europe’s regulatory regime, many Europeans appeared caught off guard by the administration’s demands, which they viewed not merely as unprecedented but Orwellian in nature.
Fortunately, European leaders mostly responded with a unified and measured defense of their policies, careful not to further provoke an already hostile administration but unafraid of guarding their sovereignty. In February, while Vance was previewing the administration’s aggression, French Digital Minister Jean-Noël Barrot pushed back against American pressure, stating in his own remarks in Munich that “freedom of speech is guaranteed in Europe,” and that “no one is required to adopt our model, but no one can impose theirs on us.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has also repeatedly affirmed the EU’s commitment to democratic rules for the digital space, framing it as a model for the world. She has also rejected attempts to trade deregulation of the tech monopolies for the relaxation of tariffs. “These are not in the packages of negotiation,” she told the [ [link removed] ]Financial Times [ [link removed] ] in April [ [link removed] ], “because these are our sovereign decisions.”
New champions like Alexandra Geese, a German Green Member of the European Parliament, have also stood to protect Europe’s regulatory regime from “autocrats and tech billionaires [who] use narratives about protecting freedom of speech to entrench their illiberal policies through misinformation, lies, and hate.”
Encouragingly, the EU’s powerful antimonopoly enforcement agency, DG Competition, has also continued its work despite U.S. pressure. This includes a major decision targeting Google’s anti-competitive adtech practices that mirrored the recent US court finding that that the corporation has illegally maintained a monopoly over this crucial piece of digital infrastructure.
Then in December, the Commission fined social media platform X $140 million due to lack of transparency in advertising. This followed Commission decisions to open broad investigations into Big Tech’s dominance of cloud [ [link removed] ] computing services in Europe, and of Meta’s efforts to restrict how other AI providers access WhatsApp [ [link removed] ].
Europe also opened a second front in the fight against U.S. tech giants, promoting the building of European-owned and controlled digital infrastructure. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz put it [ [link removed] ] in a recent summit in Berlin, Europe’s dependency on U.S. and Chinese suppliers is being exploited for “power politics.” As a result, Europeans must “work together toward one goal: that is European digital sovereignty.”
And French President Macron, at that same summit, presented a newly concise and practical defense [ [link removed] ] of Europe’s approach to protecting free speech from the power of the dominant tech platforms.
Despite such resolve, Europe remains highly vulnerable to attacks by the Trump Administration and the dominant tech corporations. Macron’s government is the weakest French administration in decades, and the hold of Merz’s Christian Democratic party in Germany is not much stronger. With far-right populist parties continuing to rise across the continent there is ample reason to fear that without strong displays of solidarity from American allies, European leaders will feel forced to retreat, including in ways that will also make Americans less safe and free.
Nowhere has the insularity of American liberals been more obvious than on the subject of tariffs. Since the White House imposed massive “Liberation Day” levies even on close allies, Democrats have responded mainly by condemning the tariffs as a tax on consumers, hence another threat to the “affordability” of basic goods. A smaller group has narrowly – and in some cases correctly – embraced some of the tariffs as a way to protect key industries and shift factories and jobs from locations abroad back to U.S. communities.
But neither group has addressed the administration’s ultimate political goal – which is to force European governments and other democracies to abandon their efforts to protect the basic liberties of their citizens, including freedom of speech, the press, and debate. Worse, some Democrats have actually aided [ [link removed] ] Trump’s attacks against Europe’s public interest regulations, as a way to protect the dominance of American tech corporations.
Luckily, as we recently wrote [ [link removed] ] in Liberty + Power, Trump’s war on free speech in America seems to have finally started to open liberal eyes. The temporary cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show, for instance, appears to have been an inflection point in understanding the threat posed by Trump’s authoritarian actions and the closely related threat posed by concentrated corporate control over speech and communications.
But liberals must move faster to view these threats in a global context. If we are to actually counter the threat posed by Trump and the oligarchs, one foundation must be a renewed commitment to solidarity with democratic allies around the world.
Champions on our side of the Atlantic are beginning to emerge. Congressman Jamie Raskin argued in a recent address in London that the world is witnessing the rise of an “authoritarian axis” that requires a unified response. “We need a new and robust global alliance of democracies,” Raskin said, “founded on democratic solidarity and a passionate commitment to human rights and the rule of law.”
And at Open Market’s own two-day conference [ [link removed] ] in Brussels in October, Raskin and Senator Cory Booker (NJ) joined key European leaders like former EU Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager in calling to renew the transatlantic liberal democratic alliance. Vestager emphasized the need for a rejuvenation of competition policy to prevent “concentrated powers” from seizing control of western democracies. “And of course we need to do that with American friends,” she said. “We need to work together.”
Booker echoed those remarks. “The fate of liberty, the ideal of freedom in America, is inseparably bound to the fate of those same ideals around the world,” he proclaimed. “We must ensure that AI and emerging technologies serve humanity and not dominate it… That our technologies remain instruments of liberty, not control.”
The time has come for every other leader who believes in liberal democracy to recognize that the Trump administration’s campaign against European tech regulation is not a sideshow about trade policy, nor simply a smart opportunity to win points on affordability, but a central front in an international war to protect democracy and human liberty. A war we have no choice but to win.
This edition of Liberty & Power was written and edited by: Barry Lynn, Austin Ahlman, Max von Thun, Ben Winsor, and Anita Jain.

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