Liz Truss, Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, began the first edition of her YouTube show with a vow to unmask “the evil-doers” attempting to bring down Britain, the US and Europe. She would, she explained, reveal how an “international network of leftists work to subvert democracy and the will of the people”.

Despite her bleak monologue, Truss pointed to hope from across the Atlantic. “We’re going to look at the Trump revolution and see how this can be achieved in Britain,” she said. “We’ll be talking to the leading lights of the Maga movement.”

Before the show’s launch, there was one particularly enthusiastic supporter. “This is the beginning of a kind of revolution,” said John Solomon, a controversial veteran US journalist. His conservative Just the News platform will host the former prime minister’s new podcasts.

British fellow travellers, including a pro-Reform adviser who has appeared on Maga media outlets, have also helped her set up the Liz Truss Show. Its staging is competent, if basic. Truss has amassed 10,000 subscribers in her first week and across the same period her debut had 67,000 views.

It is a modest start, but in making common cause with Solomon, Truss is being thrust into a well-developed conservative ecosystem producing and amplifying Maga talking points. Its obsessions include alleged censorship by the mainstream media and a desire to remove a conspiratorial “deep state” – which Truss blames for the swift end of her calamitous premiership.

“Just the News is not well-known beyond the Maga-verse, but it does have gravitas there, mostly due to Solomon, who gives commentary on Maga platforms like [Steve] Bannon’s War Room and has even interviewed Trump,” said Alex Hinton, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University who has closely studied the Maga movement.

Truss’s attempt to import Maga media to Britain has pushed her closer to controversial figures such as Solomon.

He set up Just the News following criticism after he was accused of pushing false stories about Joe Biden’s anticorruption effort in Ukraine, as well as controversial stories about the former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

His claims were amplified across the pro-Trump media, with Solomon appearing as a regular guest on Sean Hannity’s influential Fox News show. Trump himself boosted Solomon’s reporting.

Solomon made the Ukraine claims in a series of columns for the political newspaper the Hill, where he had already been re-labelled as a columnist after colleagues complained about his work. His claims were central in Trump’s demand for the Ukrainians to investigate the Bidens in 2019. Those demands led to impeachment charges against Trump. The Senate later acquitted the president.

Weeks after Solomon left the Hill in October 2019, the outlet announced it was carrying out a review of his work relating to Ukraine. It concluded Solomon had used unreliable sources and said he “failed to identify important details about key Ukrainian sources, including the fact that they had been indicted or were under investigation”.

Solomon did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment on the Hill’s findings or his support for Truss’s new show. However, he has previously said: “I stand by each and every one of the columns that I wrote.”

Solomon’s own media appearances are a sign of the conservative ecosystem Truss is entering. He discussed his support for Truss’s project on a show he co-hosts on Real America’s Voice, a rightwing cable channel that is home to the Maga influencer Steve Bannon and on which Tucker Carlson also appears. Truss has already interviewed Bannon on one of her first podcasts.

In linking up with Solomon and Just the News, Truss has become a minor player in a much wider network of conservative media outlets that often amplify each other’s content.

Solomon’s own podcast and Real America’s Voice show have repeatedly hosted figures such as Mike Benz, a rightwing influencer whose criticism of USAID was cited by Elon Musk as justification for shutting down the foreign aid agency.

Benz talks about conspiracies involving George Soros and USAID and states there is an “industrial censorship complex” opposing conservative voices. He popularised the false idea that Taylor Swift was a “psychological operation” asset for the Pentagon.

Earlier this year, Benz was given an exclusive interview with Marco Rubio, in which the secretary of state announced he was closing the Global Engagement Center, which focused on combating foreign disinformation. Benz had accused it of anti-conservative censorship. Benz did not respond to requests for comment.

While Truss’s stilted style and political travails have invited ridicule in Britain, some US observers do not dismiss her attempts to reinvent herself as a British branch of the Maga media.

“You have to take folks like that seriously, even if you may not want to take them literally,” said Rob Flaherty, a deputy campaign manager on Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign who served in the Biden White House.

“You saw how in 2024 President Trump leveraged that ecosystem to get his message out there. Certainly that ecosystem exports and influences conversation abroad. It seems relatively clear to me that the conditions in the UK are similar to what allowed this alternative media ecosystem to thrive here.”

Alan Finlayson, a professor of political and social theory at the University of East Anglia, said the online conservative ecosystem was already having an impact in Britain.

“Digital media knows no borders,” he said. “There’s a kind milieu within which stuff flows – sometimes taking an extreme form and sometimes less so – but which is connected.”

Hinton said the growth of the online right in the UK recently meant the “potential to have a growing impact is significant”.

“Both Truss and [the Reform UK leader, Nigel] Farage recently appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where I watched as they hit Maga talking points ahead of the king of Maga, Trump,” he said. “Maga, the professed anti-globalist movement, has become a global hegemon.”

Truss’s first show contained signs that she hopes to appeal to an American audience, too, with references unlikely to chime with a British viewer: “We’re now poorer than Mississippi,” she said at one point. “It’s like Huckleberry Finn without the steamboats.”

Solomon has been involved in attempts to build an alternative conservative media network for years. He was instrumental in the setting up of the Informing America Foundation (IAF), a little-known non-profit group that hands millions to conservative media across the US.

IAF has also funded Bentley Media Group, the parent company of Just the News, according to 2023 tax filings. It funds an array of local US conservative media, including in key swing states. IAF and Just the News did not respond to requests for comment on whether they financially supported Truss’s new show. A representative for Truss also did not respond to requests for comment.

Solomon said last year that the IAF now had “an ecosystem that [reaches] more than 120 million Americans a month”. He has said he has no formal role at the IAF, but that it shares office space with Just the News.

Hinton said Truss’s arrival was a “media marriage of convenience” for both parties. “It gives Just the News an international and UK foot in the door – and her British stature will bring the network a degree of cosmopolitan prestige,” he said. “Truss, meanwhile, gets the opportunity to refurbish her image.”

Advising Truss on the show is Joseph Robertson, a political strategist and Reform member who has spent time in the US. Appearing on a Real America’s Voice show last month, Robertson said Britain would effectively have “communist rule” should the government’s digital ID policy go ahead.

Like Truss, Robertson backs the downfall of the “administrative deep state”. He has also advocated for Britain to become “Dubai on Thames”, with deregulation and stricter law and order.

In setting up her show, Truss appears to be following Solomon’s advice on how to bring Maga media to the UK. He told her “one of the wisest things” done by major conservative funders such as the late Bernie Marcus, who co-founded Home Depot, and Richard Uihlein, a billionaire owner of an office supply company, was to develop an alternative “communication system” when Trump first came to office.

“We created a communications infrastructure that could get around the legacy media and get the word out,” he told her.

Some believe Truss’s bigger problem may be that she simply is not very good at the medium. “The people who are successful will have charisma and the ability to capture attention,” said Craig Oliver, David Cameron’s former communications chief. “I would say that’s a strike against her.”

“She has never been good at this,” said Finlayson. “When she tries to be dramatic and scary, it’s ludicrous.”

Flaherty, however, said critics should be wary of writing off Truss’s chances of finding validation in the Maga universe. “The alternative media ecosystem has no shortage of comeback stories,” he said. “It is always possible to rebrand yourself when you give in to a rabid political fanbase.”