An investigation by Corriere della Sera’s Dataroom unit, together with recent court cases and media reporting across Europe, suggests that political forces close to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are working – separately but in parallel – to weaken the European Union as a political project.
In a recent non-paper titled “Il contrasto alla guerra ibrida: una strategia attiva”, Italy’s defence minister Guido Crosetto warned that “authoritarian states” are covertly encouraging the delegitimisation of domestic democratic processes and “supranational alliances such as the EU”. He named Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. The Dataroom investigation argues that there is also a “silent guest”: Trump’s America, acting through a network of ultra-conservative foundations, above all the Heritage Foundation.
Heritage, described in Italy as the world’s largest ultra-conservative think-tank, is the main architect of “Project 2025”, the domestic blueprint adopted by Trump to strengthen presidential control over the US administration. According to Gabanelli and Gatti, the dismantling of the EU has been one of Heritage’s strategic objectives for roughly two decades. They trace a line from Lee Casey’s 2005 paper welcoming the failure of the EU constitutional treaty and urging US politicians to “question” the European project, through a 2006 report by John Blundell asking why Washington should not play a role in the EU’s “disappearance”, to a 2006 analysis by Nile Gardiner describing political centralisation in Europe as a “fundamental threat” to US interests.
In parallel, the Kremlin has long used energy dependence to influence key member states. After the annexation of Crimea, Moscow exploited Germany’s heavy reliance on Russian gas – around half of its consumption until 2022 – to resist tougher sanctions sought by eastern neighbours. Today, the same logic is applied through oil to Hungary, whose prime minister Viktor Orbán has repeatedly slowed or diluted EU-wide responses on Russia and Ukraine.
The financial link is now clearer. In 2020 Orbán transferred a 10 per cent stake in Hungarian oil company MOL to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a government-aligned think-tank with an explicitly eurosceptic profile. Dividends from MOL – largely generated by sales of Russian crude – provide MCC with an annual income stream; German broadcaster ZDF calculates that in 2023 alone, MCC received €50 million in dividends. MCC has since emerged as a key European partner for Heritage.
On the political side, both Moscow and Trump publicly backed Brexit. Nigel Farage, the leading pro-Leave campaigner, is explicitly cited by Heritage’s current president Kevin Roberts as a model national-conservative leader, alongside Santiago Abascal of Spain’s Vox. In November 2025, a British court sentenced Farage ally Nathan Gill, a former MEP and ex-leader of Reform UK in Wales, to ten and a half years in prison for taking bribes to make pro-Russian statements in the European Parliament and media.
The Italian investigation argues that Heritage’s anti-EU activity has intensified since 2022. In November 2022, Roberts told a Budapest audience that nation states face two enemies: “supranational organisations from above” and “woke propagandists from below”, singling out Brussels as the most dangerous “globalist clique”. In September 2024, Heritage co-organised a conference in Warsaw with Polish think-tank Ordo Iuris to oppose what it called the “dangerous project” of EU consolidation. Ordo Iuris, like MCC, is described as eurosceptic and maintains links to Moscow via the World Congress of Families, financed by Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev and associated with ideologue Aleksandr Dugin.
On 11 March 2025 Heritage hosted a closed-door workshop in Washington to debate a joint MCC–Ordo Iuris report titled “The Great Reset: Restoring Member State Sovereignty in the 21st Century”. The document calls explicitly for “dissolving the EU in its current form”, downgrading it to a loose confederation or replacing it entirely with a “European Community of Nations”. Academic analysis has since described The Great Reset as a far-right manifesto aimed at rolling back post-Lisbon integration and the EU’s rights framework.
Trump’s own statements reinforce this agenda. In February 2025 he repeated his claim that the EU “was created to cheat the United States” and is “in many ways worse than China”. In April 2025 Nile Gardiner praised Trump as the only US president to have “actively opposed the European project”. A month later, Trump received Polish presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki in the Oval Office and publicly endorsed his eurosceptic platform. Shortly afterwards, US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem urged Polish voters to back Nawrocki at a CPAC event in Poland, an unusual intervention in an allied country’s election.
In the same period, Reuters reported that a US State Department delegation led by Samuel Samson met senior figures from Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in Paris, offering political backing after Le Pen was barred from the 2027 presidential race. Samson, a senior adviser in the Department’s democracy and human rights bureau, has argued on an official Substack that Europe’s “democratic backsliding” threatens US security, the American economy and US citizens’ free-speech rights, while criticising EU digital regulation.
Financially, the Italian inquiry draws on work by RAI’s Report programme. Journalist Giorgio Mottola, using US tax filings and European Parliament records, calculates that 12 major US conservative foundations have invested $109.8 million in Europe over the past five years, with flows rising sharply from 2022. Many beneficiaries are described as national-conservative or sovereigntist organisations linked to the networks around MCC, Ordo Iuris and Heritage.
Raphaël Kergueno of Transparency International notes that most of these bodies are not registered in the EU’s lobbying transparency register, meaning their activities and objectives are opaque; the only visible indicator is a marked increase in meetings with MEPs since Trump’s return to office. For both Moscow and the “MAGA” milieu, he argues, a unified, liberal-democratic Europe is a structural rival: for Washington because it would be a full competitor in trade, regulation and security; for Moscow because it limits bilateral leverage over individual member states and constrains influence in the post-Soviet space.
The Italian material does not demonstrate a single command structure linking Trump’s circle and the Kremlin. It does, however, document a growing overlap of partners, narratives and funding streams that point to a de facto convergence of interests in weakening the EU’s cohesion and institutions.
