Apr. 19, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

President Donald Trump’s offensive behavior toward Christians and his unnecessary and unpopular war in Iran isn’t just splitting his political base at home — it’s also alienating his allies abroad. Right-wing nationalists in Europe are becoming more and more wary of association with Trump and growing inclined to keep him at a distance to protect their own political projects. The trend marks a blow to Trump’s aspirations of creating an international bloc of right-wing nationalist states that work in concert to quash the left.

This week, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni criticized Trump’s recent attacks on Pope Leo XIVas “unacceptable” and called it “right and normal for ​[the pope] to ‌call for peace and ​to ⁠condemn every form of war.” Trump lashed back at Meloni for defending the pope, marking his first criticism of her. He did so even though he has few allies left in Europe.

The Trump administration has also been criticized by right-wingers in Europe for its aggressive, but failed, attempt to bolster Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who lost in a landslide in last week’s election. The Trump administration’s efforts — which included Vice President JD Vance campaigning for Orbán in the final days of the race  — may have hurt Orbán more than it helped him.

Since then, multiple German lawmakers from the far-right Alternative for Germany party have openly criticized Trump as politically toxic for their movement. AfD parliament member Matthias Moosdorf said on X that the Trump administration’s close ties to Orbán “hung like millstones around [Orbán’s] neck” during his failed reelection attempt. Lawmaker Torben Braga said that in the context of elections, it’s “not a particularly promising approach” to keep close ties with Trump.

Diana Sosoaca, a far-right member of the European Parliament for Romania, said last week that it was “a big mistake” for Orbán to invite Vance to stump for him, particularly as Trump has become a source of great “disorder in this world” with his war on Iran.

In recent weeks, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has also criticized Trump’s disastrous war in Iran, calling his conduct “erratic” and his war “a mistake.”

Those bold criticisms speak to how incredibly damaging Trump’s war on Iran has been for his standing within his movement. The surge in global oil prices is politically radioactive; far-right leaders and parties in Europe affiliated with Trump risk becoming associated with the energy crisis unless they take steps to create distance from him.

While Trump’s criticism of the pope hasn’t been as salient or as materially significant as his hapless war, it, too, has global implications, with some 1.4 billion Catholics around the world who might take offense at Trump’s extraordinary broadsides against their spiritual leader. And then there are the hundreds of millions of people, Catholic or otherwise, who might be offended by Trump sharing on social media a blasphemous artificial intelligence-generated depiction of himself as Jesus Christ. One does not have to be Christian — or even religious at all — to recognize his behavior as repellent and megalomaniacal.

Trump’s lack of discipline is at the core of his own unraveling. Swept up in self-worship and a belief in his own infallibility, he’s now struggling to uphold his side of the deal with right-wing Christians and at least pretend he cares about their spirituality. And his desire to remold the world has alienated the isolationist part of his coalition that believed his promise that he wouldn’t start any wars.

Trump does not need European right-wingers, ultimately, in order to achieve his core political projects. But he has made alliances with right-wing nationalists in Europe a part of his foreign policy and described opposing European “civilizational erasure” in the face of immigration as a plank of his national security strategy. That those right-wingers see him as a political albatross shows that their collective assault on liberalism has major weaknesses. One hopes that these far-right movements in Europe aren’t able to shed their association with Trump only because that association is no longer  convenient. We should hope their political influence declines right along with his.

Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.

Apr. 19, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas gave a speech Thursday at the University of Texas at Austin attacking progressivism as the enemy of all that America stands for — or at least what he believes it ought to stand for. “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government,” he said, because “it holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God but from government.”

It’s not a new idea, especially in Republican circles. In 2012, for instance, vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan thunderedin response to Barack Obama’s supposedly tyrannical rule, that “even Presidents need reminding that our rights come from nature and God, and not from government!” But while Thomas may cast himself as the truest defender of the American system, what he actually revealed was his contempt for the foundations of our democracy — one that is all too common among conservatives today.

The idea that rights come from God, not government, couldn’t be more wrong. And as someone who routinely wields the power of government to deprive Americans of their rights, Thomas ought to know.

Thomas began his speech by citing Thomas Jefferson’s line in the Declaration of Independence asserting that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Deploying the essay-writing technique familiar to mediocre middle-school students everywhere, he added, “The American Heritage Dictionary of English Language defines self-evident as obviously true and requiring no proof, argument, or explanation.” (Fortunately, he declined to end his speech with “In conclusion, America is a land of contrasts.”)

As proof, Thomas offered his own history growing up in the Jim Crow South. “When you lived in a segregated world with palpable discrimination and the governments nearest to you enforced laws and customs that promoted unequal treatment,” he said, “it was obvious that your rights or your dignity did not come from those governments, but rather from God.”

So who was it who delivered the nation from the cruelty and injustice of Jim Crow? It was not a divine light of heaven sweeping across the land. It was government — or more specifically, democratic citizens who worked tirelessly to change the laws, and eventually forced those with power in the courts, legislatures and the executive branch to join their cause.

And it’s the laws passed and enforced by the government that guarantee those rights. To repeat, Thomas knows this perfectly well, since he and his conservative colleagues on the high court are in the process of destroying one of the key pillars of that effort, the Voting Rights Act.

Thomas never asks why, if God is so intent on providing all of us with these political rights, he took so long to offer them to almost anyone. Few citizens anywhere were guaranteed their supposedly God-given rights until a mere 250 years ago (and even then, it would be almost 200 years more before they were truly available to all Americans). God decided to allow thousands of generations of human beings to live from birth to death with no political rights, subject to the whims of kings, warlords and potentates — and yes, religious leaders, whose history of sins against fundamental rights is long and bloody.

Whatever support one might find in a selective reading of scripture for ideas such as universal equality (and one does have to cherry-pick rather aggressively), it wasn’t until the Framers created a government capable of guaranteeing those rights that they eventually became real. The people Thomas Jefferson enslaved may have taken inspiration from his words, but God did not deliver them the rights their master found so vital.

And critically, rights are more than vague notions about “equality” or “dignity.” Rights are specific and procedural, or else they are meaningless. God does not grant you the right to equal protection under law, or a fair trial if you are accused of a crime or the freedom of speech; it’s government that does that. Indeed, freedom of religion itself existed almost nowhere until the Constitution — a plan for government — created it. Even today, it is absent in many places, God’s supposed wishes notwithstanding.

Listening to Thomas’ speech, one can’t help but notice it comes at a moment when not only does his Republican Party hold a grip on national power, but the Trump administration he has done so much to support has brought to our government an aggressive and exclusionary Christian nationalism. The secretary of defense tells Americans to pray for the troops “in the name of Jesus Christ,” the secretary of agriculture sends an all-staff email on Easter saying “He is Risen indeed,” and the president posts an image to social media portraying himself as Jesus, while anyone not a conservative evangelical is left to wonder if this government represents them.

Americans know that when their rights are being trampled on, it is not God who will come to their rescue. Only government can do that — and it only does so when we as citizens demand it and have the power to ensure it.

Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture.