Politics
Global Right-Wing Leaders Revel in a Renewed Fight, Supercharged by Trump
To longstanding American allies in Europe, remarks by President Trump and Vice President JD Vance about Ukraine and Germany this month represented one of the gravest tests of the postwar order in decades.
But to a cohort of current and former world leaders who gathered this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, they represented something else: the dawning of a global right-wing resurgence that, thanks to Mr. Trump’s re-election, is on the cusp of irrevocably transforming that order.
“We missed the first American Revolution in 1776,” said Liz Truss, the Conservative member of Parliament who briefly served as Britain’s prime minister. “We want to be a part of the second American Revolution.”
Ms. Truss was one of more than half a dozen political figures from as many countries to make the pilgrimage to CPAC this week in Oxon Hill, Md., just outside Washington. A long-running gathering of American conservatives that helped foment right-wing insurgencies within the G.O.P. during the Tea Party and Trump eras, CPAC has in recent years taken these ambitions global. The conference now serves as a connector of right-wing political movements in the Americas, Europe and Asia that increasingly see themselves as allies in a linked struggle against the institutions and geopolitical norms that have dominated world affairs since World War II.
In the past two weeks, Mr. Trump and his top officials have questioned that order more directly and openly than any U.S. administration of the postwar period.
Marco Rubio, Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, met for more than four hours on Tuesday with Russian officials in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to reset the relationship between the two global powers and seek a path to end the war in Ukraine. At the same time, Mr. Trump called the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator” and blamed him for Russia’s 2022 invasion of his country.
And the Riyadh meeting came days after Mr. Vance, in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, likened the European Union’s policing of online speech to Soviet censorship. He also met with the leader of Germany’s right-wing Alternative for Germany party, which had long been marginalized for some members’ embrace of neo-Nazi slogans and for its links to a recent coup plot.
Mr. Vance defended his Munich speech at his own CPAC appearance on Thursday, as did a parade of international allies who took the stage after him.
The standard-bearers of right-wing political movements around the world — prime ministers from North Macedonia and Slovakia, opposition leaders from Poland and Spain — welcomed Mr. Trump as a transformational figure in a battle against liberalism that transcended nations and continents.
They cast their domestic enemies — judges, online speech constraints, civil society programs and mainstream news organizations — as part of an international project to suppress traditional values, religion and free markets, and hailed the new American president as an ally in turning the tide against them.
“He’s completely changing the international picture,” Balázs Orbán, the political director for the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, who is no relation, said in an interview at the conference.
In his speech on Thursday, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a Brazilian lawmaker and a son of the country’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was charged this week with attempting a coup to stay in power after losing the 2022 election, described his country as “a laboratory” that was “being used as a testing ground for the judicial weaponization against conservatives, libertarians and Christians — always under the pretense of protecting democracy.”
In particular, the foreign delegations at CPAC celebrated the effort being led by Elon Musk to eliminate the United States Agency for International Development and the civil society programs it funds around the world.
Such programs have enjoyed broad bipartisan backing for years in the United States, and similar support in the European Union, which has joined the United States in financing independent news media, rule-of-law programs and, more recently, efforts to curb online misinformation around the world. But these efforts have incensed the ascendant right-wing parties, which have often run afoul of them.
Mr. Bolsonaro, in his speech, accused U.S.A.I.D. of “channeling resources into censorship, judicial overreach and political persecution.”
Mr. Musk’s abrupt embrace of these grievances against the American development agency reflects the growing influence of the global right on the American right — a connection commemorated at CPAC when President Javier Milei of Argentina, who has become a celebrity on the American right, bounded onstage to present Mr. Musk with the chain saw he had wielded theatrically during his 2023 presidential campaign.
This year’s CPAC was perhaps the fullest fruition yet of the vision of right-wing solidarity that some in Mr. Trump’s political orbit, most notably his onetime White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon, tried to foment during the first Trump administration.
Mr. Bannon, who spoke at CPAC on Thursday, threatened to fracture the coalition, however, raising his hand briefly at the end of his speech in what appeared to many to be a reference to a Nazi salute — a gesture that recalled a similar salute by Mr. Musk at Mr. Trump’s inauguration rally last month.
Mr. Bannon’s gesture, which he denied was a Nazi reference, prompted Jordan Bardella, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, to cancel his planned CPAC speech on Friday. In a statement, he said he had made the decision “immediately” after seeing Mr. Bannon make a “gesture referring to Nazi ideology.”
But another international speaker on the Friday program, the Mexican actor and political activist Eduardo Verástegui, leaned into Mr. Bannon’s provocation, raising his arm in a similar salute at the conclusion of his own speech.
Speaking on Thursday, the British politician Nigel Farage, among the first from abroad to make connections with the right wing of the Republican Party in the Obama years, remarked on how far the right had come since.
“How amazing it is — 13 years ago, I was the only foreign speaker” at CPAC, said Mr. Farage, who was a key figure in the Brexit campaign of 2016, an early victory in the global right-wing resurgence.
Other speakers had followed Mr. Farage’s lead in crusading against the European Parliament and European Union bureaucracy, which they cast as part of the global network of institutions biased against their movement.
“My government was punished for standing up to Brussels,” said Mateusz Morawiecki, the prime minister of Poland from 2017 to 2023, when his right-wing Law and Justice Party was ousted from power by Civic Platform, a center-right party.
Mr. Orbán, the Hungarian official, whose government has been a model to many like-minded political activists in the global right, said right-wing political movements were less naturally predisposed to cooperate than liberal movements. But he argued that increasingly shared interests — blocking immigration, centering Christianity in public life and skepticism of the war in Ukraine — were drawing the disparate movements together.
“It’s complicated, because if you are a national conservative, it means that you want the best for your country, and your country’s national interests can be confrontational with other countries’ national interests,” he said. “But we still have to do it, try to identify the shared points — and now there are many, many points.”
Politics
Federal judge blocks Trump from cutting childcare funds to Democratic states over fraud concerns
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A federal judge Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from stopping subsidies on childcare programs in five states, including Minnesota, amid allegations of fraud.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian, a Biden appointee, didn’t rule on the legality of the funding freeze, but said the states had met the legal threshold to maintain the “status quo” on funding for at least two weeks while arguments continue.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said it would withhold funds for programs in five Democratic states over fraud concerns.
The programs include the Child Care and Development Fund, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, and the Social Services Block Grant, all of which help needy families.
USDA IMMEDIATELY SUSPENDS ALL FEDERAL FUNDING TO MINNESOTA AMID FRAUD INVESTIGATION
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it would withhold funds for programs in five Democratic states over fraud concerns. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
“Families who rely on childcare and family assistance programs deserve confidence that these resources are used lawfully and for their intended purpose,” HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill said in a statement on Tuesday.
The states, which include California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York, argued in court filings that the federal government didn’t have the legal right to end the funds and that the new policy is creating “operational chaos” in the states.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian at his nomination hearing in 2022. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
In total, the states said they receive more than $10 billion in federal funding for the programs.
HHS said it had “reason to believe” that the programs were offering funds to people in the country illegally.
‘TIP OF THE ICEBERG’: SENATE REPUBLICANS PRESS GOV WALZ OVER MINNESOTA FRAUD SCANDAL
The table above shows the five states and their social safety net funding for various programs which are being withheld by the Trump administration over allegations of fraud. (AP Digital Embed)
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.” (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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Fox News Digital has reached out to HHS for comment.
Politics
Washington National Opera is leaving the Kennedy Center in wake of Trump upset
In what might be the most decisive critique yet of President Trump’s remake of the Kennedy Center, the Washington National Opera’s board approved a resolution on Friday to leave the venue it has occupied since 1971.
“Today, the Washington National Opera announced its decision to seek an amicable early termination of its affiliation agreement with the Kennedy Center and resume operations as a fully independent nonprofit entity,” the company said in a statement to the Associated Press.
Roma Daravi, Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, described the relationship with Washington National Opera as “financially challenging.”
“After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with the WNO due to a financially challenging relationship,” Daravi said in a statement. “We believe this represents the best path forward for both organizations and enables us to make responsible choices that support the financial stability and long-term future of the Trump Kennedy Center.”
Kennedy Center President Ambassador Richard Grenell tweeted that the call was made by the Kennedy Center, writing that its leadership had “approached the Opera leadership last year with this idea and they began to be open to it.”
“Having an exclusive relationship has been extremely expensive and limiting in choice and variety,” Grenell wrote. “We have spent millions of dollars to support the Washington Opera’s exclusivity and yet they were still millions of dollars in the hole – and getting worse.”
WNO’s decision to vacate the Kennedy Center’s 2,364-seat Opera House comes amid a wave of artist cancellations that came after the venue’s board voted to rename the center the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. New signage featuring Trump’s name went up on the building’s exterior just days after the vote while debate raged over whether an official name change could be made without congressional approval.
That same day, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) — an ex officio member of the board — wrote on social media that the vote was not unanimous and that she and others who might have voiced their dissent were muted on the call.
Grenell countered that ex officio members don’t get a vote.
Cancellations soon began to mount — as did Kennedy Center‘s rebukes against the artists who chose not to appear. Jazz drummer Chuck Redd pulled out of his annual Christmas Eve concert; jazz supergroup the Cookers nixed New Year’s Eve shows; New York-based Doug Varone and Dancers dropped out of April performances; and Grammy Award-winning banjo player Béla Fleck wrote on social media that he would no longer play at the venue in February.
WNO’s departure, however, represents a new level of artist defection. The company’s name is synonymous with the Kennedy Center and it has served as an artistic center of gravity for the complex since the building first opened.
Politics
AOC accuses Vance of believing ‘American people should be assassinated in the street’
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Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leveling a stunning accusation at Vice President JD Vance amid the national furor over this week’s fatal shooting in Minnesota involving an ICE agent.
“I understand that Vice President Vance believes that shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not,” the four-term federal lawmaker from New York and progressive champion argued as she answered questions on Friday on Capitol Hill from Fox News and other news organizations.
Ocasio-Cortez spoke in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting death of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good after she confronted ICE agents from inside her car in Minneapolis.
RENEE NICOLE GOOD PART OF ‘ICE WATCH’ GROUP, DHS SOURCES SAY
Members of law enforcement work the scene following a suspected shooting by an ICE agent during federal operations on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Video of the incident instantly went viral, and while Democrats have heavily criticized the shooting, the Trump administration is vocally defending the actions of the ICE agent.
HEAD HERE FOR LIVE FOX NEWS UPDATES ON THE ICE SHOOTING IN MINNESOTA
Vance, at a White House briefing on Thursday, charged that “this was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order.”
“That woman was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation,” the vice president added. “The president stands with ICE, I stand with ICE, we stand with all of our law enforcement officers.”
And Vance claimed Good was “brainwashed” and suggested she was connected to a “broader, left-wing network.”
Federal sources told Fox News on Friday that Good, who was a mother of three, worked as a Minneapolis-based immigration activist serving as a member of “ICE Watch.”
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Ocasio-Cortez, in responding to Vance’s comments, said, “That is a fundamental difference between Vice President Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.”
But a spokesperson for the vice president, responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s accusation, told Fox News Digital, “On National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, AOC made it clear she thinks that radical leftists should be able to mow down ICE officials in broad daylight. She should be ashamed of herself. The Vice President stands with ICE and the brave men and women of law enforcement, and so do the American people.”
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