The Trump administration shut down USAID, the agency that feeds starving children and responds to humanitarian disasters, on the grounds that it was wasting American taxpayer money abroad. That money is now going abroad. To Jacob Rees-Mogg. Specifically, $7 million of it, to a thinktank Rees-Mogg co-founded in March that has been incorporated for roughly the same amount of time as a new gym membership.
The Greatest 'America First' Move: Funding British Aristocrats
Let's get the facts straight before we get to the screaming. The Guardian reports that the US State Department intends to grant $12 million to conservative organisations in the UK. Of that, $7 million is headed to an outfit called 878, co-founded by former Conservative minister and current television personality Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose personal net worth is estimated at over £100 million. The group was incorporated in the UK in March. Its website describes it as a "leading British and American thinktank, dedicated to strengthening the civilisational partnership between the United Kingdom and the United States."
A leading thinktank. Incorporated four months ago. Co-founded by a man who is most famous for being photographed looking like he wandered off a Victorian estate and directly into Parliament. This is where your tax dollars are going.
A former US official told the Guardian that normal funding processes are being actively subverted to route money toward Trump-aligned causes. So this isn't bureaucratic sloppiness. This is deliberate. Someone looked at the list of things American tax dollars could do and chose Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Remember When USAID Was the Problem?
In February 2025, Donald Trump posted in his signature all-caps fury that USAID was corrupt at "LEVELS RARELY SEEN BEFORE" and demanded it be closed. Hours later, most of the staff were placed on indefinite administrative leave. The MAGA media machine spent weeks explaining that USAID was squandering hard-earned American money on frivolous foreign projects. Fox News, in one of its more shameless moments, ran with the completely evidence-free claim that the agency had been buying condoms for Gaza.
USAID actually provided food, medicine, and disaster relief to some of the most desperate people on earth. But sure. Condoms. That was the problem.
Now that the humanitarian aid is gone, the money didn't come home. It just changed recipients. Instead of vaccines in sub-Saharan Africa or earthquake relief in Central America, it's "civilisational partnership" programming for a British organisation that is, again, four months old.
The Vague Language Is a Feature, Not a Bug
The UK grants aren't the whole picture. The Guardian also reports that millions more are being offered to groups across Europe to develop what the State Department calls "civilizational self-confidence" and to address "national sovereignty, migration, censorship, and lawfare challenges in line with our shared political philosophy, law, and Western heritage." If that sentence reads like someone tried to fit every MAGA talking point into a grant application, that's because it essentially is.
Researcher Zsuzsanna Vegh told the i Paper that the vague public advertising follows "a long period of networking among MAGA and like-minded European actors" who have already identified who's getting the money. In plain language: the fix is in. The application process is window dressing. The checks are already written in spirit.
The US embassy in London is separately offering grants of up to $500,000 for "public education" programmes meant to foster a "national conversation" about shared civilisational values between the US and UK. One recently departed State Department official told the Guardian this appears to be an effort to "create UK-originated narratives to support MAGA propaganda." Liberal Democrat MP Lisa Smart called it what it is: foreign meddling in British democracy.
This Is Bigger Than One Embarrassing Grant
Twelve million dollars is not, in the context of the US federal budget, a staggering sum. As the Guardian points out, it's a few million less than what Pete Hegseth reportedly spent on ribeye steak for the Pentagon. The war on Iran has cost at least $37.5 billion so far, per the Guardian's reporting. In that light, the UK money looks like a rounding error.
But the money isn't the point. The point is the strategy. Last December, the US national security strategy explicitly claimed Europe faced "civilizational erasure" and stated that American policy must include "cultivating resistance to Europe's current trajectory within European nations." That is the United States government officially declaring, in a policy document, its intention to meddle in European political movements. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned the Trump administration directly against interfering in German elections after those grants were announced.
Elon Musk has been doing the informal version of this for years, amplifying far-right populist movements across Europe on his own platform. Kristi Noem, while serving as Homeland Security Secretary, attended a CPAC conference in Warsaw and publicly endorsed Karol Nawrocki for the Polish presidency. He ran under the slogan "Poland first, Poles first" and, per the Guardian, narrowly won. CPAC itself, once a domestic American conservative gathering, has spent the past decade going international. The money flowing to European thinktanks is just the formal, taxpayer-funded version of something that has been happening informally for years.
The Fox News Viewer Has No Idea Any of This Is Happening
Here's the part that should make your head hurt. The average Trump voter who was promised an America First agenda, who cheered the destruction of USAID, who was told that foreign aid was a liberal scam robbing real Americans of their money: they have no idea this is happening. Zero. The machine that sold them on shutting down humanitarian aid is the same machine keeping this story away from them.
They're busy. There's always something to be outraged about on television. Anthony Fauci. Transgender athletes. Whatever the crisis of the week is. The rightwing media ecosystem is extraordinarily good at filling every available minute of attention with approved outrage, which is an extremely useful property if you are trying to funnel tax money to a British millionaire's new think tank without anyone noticing.
Trump has spent considerable energy dismantling independent journalism, and his billionaire allies now own substantial chunks of the media landscape. It is, as the Guardian's Arwa Mahdawi notes, considerably easier to lie to people when you control what they're watching.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that this is the America First administration. The one that stood up for the forgotten working class. The one that stopped sending money to corrupt foreign elites. That is the story. It is not the story.
What actually happened is this: the Trump administration killed the agency that fed poor people in desperate countries, called it corruption, took a victory lap, and then quietly redirected the money to rightwing thinktanks run by wealthy European conservatives who want to spread MAGA ideology across the continent. The populist revolution turned out to be a very expensive favour to a transnational network of rich people who want to move politics to the right everywhere simultaneously. That's not America First. That's a billionaire class playing geopolitical chess with public funds while the people who voted for this watch cable news and argue about sports.
The cruelty of USAID's closure was supposed to be the point. It was a signal to the base. It showed that Trump would torch something real, something that actually helped people, to prove his ideological commitment. But it was never about saving money or putting America first. The money was always going somewhere. It just stopped going to people who needed it and started going to people who wanted to win elections.
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