Now, Dugin is trying to find common ground with supporters of President Trump. Over the past year, he has given interviews to pro-Trump media personalities such as Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. Appearing on their shows, he has attacked “wokeism,” transgender activists and George Soros, winning praise from his hosts.

Dugin’s outreach to MAGA comes at a turning point in U.S.-Russia ties. Trump is seeking to end the Russia-Ukraine war and rekindle relations with Putin, who became an international pariah after his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Trump’s efforts have unsettled European leaders and Democratic politicians, who regard Putin as a dictator with the blood of thousands of Ukrainians on his hands.

As Trump and Putin move their countries closer in the realm of geopolitics, Dugin is trying to do the same on a cultural level. But it remains to be seen whether he can succeed in bridging the gap between U.S. conservatives and Russians who back Putin’s war in Ukraine.

“I am interested in Trump and Trumpism,” Dugin told The Wall Street Journal in written remarks relayed through a spokeswoman. “And Trumpists themselves are probably interested, in turn, in my ideas, theories and philosophical-ideological explorations.”

Dugin’s critics—including Russian and Western liberals, and officials in Kyiv—say he helped incite a genocidal war in Ukraine. They decry U.S. media figures who have given him a platform to reach an American audience.

“He is just a Russian fascist,” said Andreas Umland, an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies. “He is really extreme, and I would say even toxic.”

In August 2022, Dugin’s daughter, Daria Dugina, was killed in a car bombing outside Moscow after attending a festival with her father. Russian investigators blamed Ukraine for the attack, which some media reports suggested was aimed at Dugin himself.

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Ukraine was behind the operation that killed Dugina, which was carried out without Washington’s knowledge and prompted a U.S. rebuke of Kyiv, the Journal has reported. Ukrainian officials have denied responsibility.

Dugina shared her father’s brand of hawkish politics and was a frequent guest on Russian state TV before her assassination. Since then, Dugin has made his slain daughter a martyr, appearing beside a large black-and-white photo of her in recent interviews.

The 63-year-old Dugin has long promoted Orthodox Christian traditionalism and the reunification of former Soviet republics with large ethnic-Russian populations. He sees Trump as helping Russia regain its sphere of influence by having the U.S. retreat from its role as a global superpower.

In a new book, “The Trump Revolution,” Dugin hails the president’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development as “a missile strike on the headquarters of globalism.” Released in February, the book is available in English through a small European publishing house that has long carried Dugin’s works.

Dugin started to reach a broader U.S. audience last year when he was interviewed by Carlson, the former Fox News host with millions of followers on YouTube and X. Their video encounter, recorded in Moscow, came out after Carlson’s controversial interview with Putin at the Kremlin.

Speaking in fluent but accented English, Dugin responded to Carlson’s opening question with a five-minute lecture that ranged from the Protestant Reformation to artificial intelligence to the LGBTQ movement. “Finally, family is destroyed in favor of individualism,” Dugin said.

“What you’re describing is clearly happening and it’s horrifying,” Carlson replied.

During the past two months, Dugin has sat for lengthy interviews with Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who hosts a show on Rumble, a video-streaming site popular with conservatives; podcaster Andrew Napolitano, a former Fox News legal analyst; and Mario Nawfal, host of a popular show on X.

Dugin’s father was a Soviet military-intelligence officer, but in his youth Dugin became involved with dissident circles and dabbled in underground rock music. After the collapse of the U.S.S.R., he became a fierce opponent of the pro-U.S. government of Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first post-Soviet president. Dugin published dozens of books and founded the Eurasia Party, a fringe group that advocates for the unification of former Soviet republics, as well as Serbia and Mongolia.

Although Dugin has called homosexuality a “perversion,” his first wife became one of Russia’s earliest LGBTQ activists and helped organize an unsanctioned Moscow gay-pride parade in 2006.

In 2014, after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and began to foment armed clashes in eastern Ukraine, Dugin demanded the annihilation of Kyiv’s pro-Western leaders and their supporters. “Kill, kill and kill. There should be no more discussions,” he said during a video interview with a Russian online news service. The remarks sparked a furor that resulted in Dugin’s removal from his post at Moscow State University.

Dugin is now promoting a softer version of such ideas in U.S. right-wing media. Appearing on Jones’s conspiracy website Infowars in February, he blamed “globalists” for driving a wedge between Russia and Ukraine.

“Ukrainians and us Russians, we are the same people. We are the same Russian world, and they have cut us [in] half,” he said.

Jones appeared receptive. “Napoleon and Hitler couldn’t defeat Russia, and the Huns couldn’t, and nobody else could…What a genius plan to have Russians kill Russians!” the Infowars host said.

“Exactly,” Dugin replied.

Write to Alexander Osipovich at alexo@wsj.com