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Elon Musk and MAGA are already disrupting the status quo, and Europe seems ill-prepared.
Jan. 13, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
For the last decade or more, Europe’s governments have been trying to resist covert influence operations from adversaries like Russia and China.
Now they have a very different challenge: Fending off overt efforts by Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement to seize territory, oust elected leaders and empower far-right causes and parties.
Even before he retakes office, Mr. Trump is making threats — perhaps serious, perhaps not — to acquire the territory of NATO allies like Canada and Denmark. And Mr. Musk, the president-elect’s biggest financial supporter, is using his social media platform X to bring the far-right Alternative for Germany party into the mainstream and smear the leaders of Britain’s center-left Labour Party.
It is not clear if Europe’s political immune system has the antibodies to defend against these new incursions.
This is not the first time a Trump ally has attempted to build a bridge with the European far right. In 2018 and 2019, the Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon held meetings with far-right politicians across Europe. But the political landscape now is very different. The governments of Germany and France have collapsed; far-right parties are on the rise in those countries, and are already in power in several others across the continent.
A senior official from the first Trump administration, who is in line for an even more senior role in the second, was blunt in his assessment: Europe, he said, has no idea what is coming its way.
