Samuel Samson: The 27-year-old diplomat waging Trump’s cultural war with Europe
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.
As the meeting evolved into a general gripe session, the AfD politicians told Mr. Samson, then 26, and several other American diplomats that they feared the German government might ban their party, according to Mr. Paul and another person familiar with the conversation. The Americans railed against European regulation of social media, calling it a tool for stamping out conservative opinions. And the group discussed a bogus far-right conspiracy theory that mainstream European leaders were seeking to replace white populations with nonwhite immigrants.
“I got the impression — partly from the length of the conversation — that they were very interested in hearing from us,” Mr. Paul said in an interview. “They took a lot of notes.”
For much of the past year, Mr. Samson has been at the forefront of President Trump’s effort to reshape America’s relationship with Europe. Touring the continent, Mr. Samson has sought to cultivate Washington’s ties with far-right Europeans and bolster such figures at the expense of Europe’s centrist establishment.
He has shocked its mainstream leaders, many of them with decades of experience in diplomacy, by accusing them of stifling freedom and by frequently meeting with and promoting their hard-line challengers. He is just five years out of college, and he has repeatedly advocated an approach that overturns three generations of American diplomatic orthodoxy. [Continue reading…]