For eons now, the foreign policy game has been the same: flatter the old establishment, repeat pre-approved, canned slogans, and pretend the only legitimate voices in Europe were the same tired establishment creatures who opened the floodgates to migrants, censored free speech, and ran their countries straight into the ground. But thanks to Team Trump, things are changing. The younger people rising inside Trump’s circle aren’t the least bit interested in propping up the same failed old, dowdy Euro crowd. They’re interested in the future, which is why they’re talking to the new right, populists, nationalists, and the people the old order have spent years trying to crush into dust.
That’s why the New York Times is in panic mode. The freak-out is because Team Trump isn’t just changing policy, but it’s doing it with younger voices who aren’t at all impressed or intimidated by old political taboos, guilt rituals, or dusty diplomatic niceties. And that’s where Sarah Rogers comes in.
You might remember Sarah Rogers from her fight to help Douglass Mackey, who was convicted on election conspiracy charges for sharing an anti-Hillary meme. Always a champion of free speech and justice, Sarah stepped in to help Mr. Mackey when he needed it most.
So it is not surprising that the Times’ own reporting shows she became a key part of this larger shift from the old guard to the new. Sarah is the more senior, more polished figure helping carry that torch, and the New York Times is clearly not happy about it.
The piece kicks things off fretting that Trump’s people are no longer treating Europe’s hard-right parties like the plague.
When Samuel Samson, a senior adviser at the State Department, sat down privately with far-right German lawmakers in an office just steps from the White House, he was breaking with history.
For eight decades after World War II, America’s foreign policy establishment had usually steered clear of Germany’s hard-right parties, seeking to ensure that they never seized power again. That changed under President Trump, leading last September to Mr. Samson’s meeting with Beatrix von Storch and Joachim Paul of Alternative for Germany, or AfD — a party designated as a suspected extremist organization by German intelligence.
Ahh yes, the Times wants their readers to recoil in horror at the idea that Trump’s people are willing to break with the old postwar playbook, because the old establishment expects permanent loyalty, no matter what. Team Trump is making it clear those days are over.