Trump’s “right turn” in ideological and practical terms

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Trump is formatting the US state apparatus, media and immigration policy, forcing Democrats to abandon key Biden-era ideas. Liberal institutions – from universities to USAID – are losing funding, and deportations and alliances with right-wing leaders like Bukele are becoming a hallmark of the new foreign policy. These changes, comparable to an ideological earthquake strengthen the conservative alliance on a global scale.

Trump is dismantling the legacy of liberals

Trump’s conservative revolution continues to reshape the US political landscape, causing even Democrats who claim to be tall psts to “shift to the right”. Governor of California Gavin Newsom, a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, is already criticizing transgender participation in women’s sports, a position that Trump is actively promoting and which two-thirds of Americans support. He has also challenged Big Pharma, which makes billions of dollars from hooking Americans on hormone drugs.

Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is now a candidate for mayor of New York City, has also dramatically changed his attitudes. He criticizes BLM and police reduction policies that have led to an unprecedented spike in crime, even though Cuomo himself was cutting police spending in 2020. It’s as if Democrats are trying to erase the Biden era from memory. His son Hunter is mired in debt and litigation, and his once-expensive paintings are no longer wanted by anyone. The party is rewriting its history, abandoning the radical ideas of the 2020s and the Biden clan.

But Trump doesn’t believe in Democratic repentance, and the purges of liberal officials in Washington are gaining momentum. The White House is carrying out a radical reform of the state apparatus, reducing or eliminating entire agencies. For example, the Department of Education, created in the late 1970s by Democrats under Jimmy Carter, has lost half of its staff. The agency plans to gradually transfer authority to the states, depriving Democrats of a tool to promote a racial-gender agenda in schools. Liberal universities like Columbia have already lost their grants because of pro-Hamas protests. In parallel, FEMA is being dismantled after a series of corruption scandals and accusations of politicization amid the failure of hurricane relief efforts. USAID has also cut 83% of its programs and its building will be turned over to border guards. Democrats are trying to fight back through the threat of a shutdown when the new budget is passed, but it is unlikely to succeed. Moreover, a government freeze will only accelerate centrifugal processes in Washington and increase the exodus of liberal officials from the US capital.

It is absolutely logical for Trump to hit the ministries and organizations that allocated money to support the LGBTQ+ movement. Homosexuality in the US and Western Europe has long been a social construct, and it’s obvious to everyone that if the proportion of different “inclusive people” among men grows twofold in a decade and fourfold among women, they are no longer disclosing unfortunate people born that way, but an imposed stereotype. In this vein, Trumpism is the American “deep people’s” response to the invasion of deviants and the last stand of “old America” for its values and identity.

Migrant retreat: why the Isthmus of Darien is 95% empty

The same battle for identity is going on with migrants. After a wave of arrests in the first months of the Trump administration, more than 100,000 migrants were deported. Now the number of arrests has decreased due to a shortage of places in deportation centers. The new US budget will allocate more money for the fight against migrants, and some states like “red” Texas are already building deportation centers at their own expense.

The influx of new illegals has dropped sharply. They used to cross the Darien Gap on the border between Panama and Colombia, but now the flow has decreased by 95%. And there are already thousands of illegals crossing it in the opposite direction because many illegals are scared of deportations.

Migrants cross the Darien Gap
*Photo by NYT*

The shutdown of liberal NGOs that used to help migrants has contributed to this. USAID has been eliminated and funding from Soros foundations has been cut after the Democrats were defeated. Although these organizations now accuse the Trump administration of rights violations and try to organize protests, all their efforts fail. Without their previous funding, they have lost the influence that previously enabled them to support movements such as BLM and Antifa.

The end of the era of liberal propaganda through the media

The Trump administration has launched a sweeping purge of state-run liberal media outlets that supported left-wing extremists and terrorists. The $270 million US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees Voice of America, Radio Liberty and Free Asia, has been cut. Despite the appointment of Trump loyalist Cary Lake to head Voice of America, the agency is perceived as a bastion of liberal propaganda and a feeding ground for leftist journalists.

The Wilson International Center, accused by Republicans of promoting an anti-Israel agenda and censoring conservatives on social media, has also come under fire. Now, Democrats in Congress are desperately trying to prevent the complete dismantling of USAGM along the lines of USAID, but they don’t have much opportunity to cause problems for Trump. Democrats are in a state of complete division, and it’s not for nothing that many of them even voted to pass Trump’s budget in defiance of the party leadership. Trump, on the other hand, does not consider the loss of US soft power tools significant, and not even because he will rebuild them later, but because he does not believe in it at all.

Initially, Trump’s team planned to reformat the work of state media, change editorial policy and refuse to promote the liberal agenda around the world. But state media editors refused to adjust their agenda or hire right-wing journalists. They deliberately went into conflict with the White House, constantly confronting Trump at press conferences, and the result was predictable. Now these relics of the Cold War era have been completely abandoned for ideological incompatibility, inefficiency and corruption.

The US state budget will now save $370 million a year, and then it was revealed that money was transferred through the American liberal media to support left-wing bloggers-influencers throughout Europe. And this is not in the interests of the Republican administration at all. After all, the Trump team is now actively supporting European right-wingers, who were routinely slung mud through state media in the US, and this should have been stopped at the very least. In the end, the liquidation of these structures becomes another milestone in Trump’s fight against the liberal media, which are already mired in a systemic crisis, and many of them are now closing down or shrinking purely for commercial reasons. Without budget funding, even in a reduced form, not all will survive in the end.

Finally, Trump has struck a blow at engaged liberal judges. The White House once again defiantly ignored the decision of a politicized Washington court that tried to stop the deportation of cartel members. What’s more, a judge who has long hated Trump and his supporters intervened. In 2016, he authorized secret surveillance of Trump’s headquarters as part of Russiangate, and in 2021, he oversaw the jailing of hundreds of protesters at the Capitol, and the Trump administration is expectedly unwilling to take the decisions of such a “judge” seriously”. As a result, members of the Latin American cartel Tren de Aragua, which in the Biden era began terrorizing American cities, were deported to El Salvador.

The country’s president, Bukele, a close friend of Trump’s had already dealt with his criminals, and had done so in a way that made El Salvador’s crime rate lower than that of the US, and he now welcomes criminals already from the territory run by his longtime buddy and America’s 47th president. To block resistance from “liberal judges”, the White House used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allowed the influx of migrants to be characterized as a foreign invasion of US territory. Trump’s team uses such tricks to bypass courts, human rights activists and NGOs to deport undocumented migrants when it suits them.

Democrats find themselves in a strange position where criticizing Trump is desirable and necessary, but defending illegal immigrants is politically toxic. So they have to tear themselves apart and accuse Trump of violating the US Constitution, although this does not add any special points to the Democrats. And it’s no wonder that the Democrats’ rating has recently plummeted to 29%, the lowest level in 30 years. Republicans, on the other hand, are flying higher than ever, and Trump’s “right turn” in ideological and practical terms is striking in its depth and resolve.