While the focus of attention since President Trump retook office has been on his deployment of military force in American cities, Iran and Venezuela; on his abuse of the pardon power; and on his family’s profiteering, his domineering tactics also extend deep into the private sector.
Trump and his allies are applying a financial and regulatory chokehold on an array of corporations, institutions and special interest groups that he is convinced are aligned with the Democratic Party and the left against him.
Trump’s efforts cut a wide swath, from electric cars and wind energy projects to service-providing nonprofits and television networks.
Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, described the administration’s agenda in an email replying to my inquiries:
Trump administration efforts to wage the culture war have been far more advanced the second time, with more preparation and empowered personnel using more available tools to incentivize and coerce cultural institutions across categories to change behavior.
We don’t know yet the extent to which these efforts will produce lasting change across sectors, but we do know that many institutions have changed their posture in response from resistance last time to accommodation this time.
Along similar lines, Shari Berman, a political scientist at Barnard, wrote by email:
Trump has been strikingly successful in weakening nongovernmental constraints on executive power. Media organizations, major corporations, law firms, universities and civil society groups have all come under sustained pressure.
Taken together, these developments represent a significant consolidation of executive authority beyond formal governmental boundaries.
Trump’s extensive intrusions into the private sector conflict with the traditional conservative belief that government should limit its interference with the free market as much as possible. For Trump, government regulation is not ideologically anathema; it is a tool to exercise power and control.
As the first year of Trump’s second term comes to a close, he can lay claim to some major culture war victories.
“Trump’s blunt-force approach has found more success in making culture more hospitable to the American right than at any time since the 1980s,” Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, wrote by email.
The president’s use of the government’s power to approve corporate mergers, the fear — and the actuality — of lost research funding and government contracts, Dallek continued,
have enabled Trump to shift the culture in his ideological direction. Social media companies have lifted bans on far-right hatemongers and made X and Facebook more hospitable to pro-MAGA content. Universities such as Columbia; law firms like Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom; and media institutions like ABC News have reached settlements with the Trump administration to stave off existential threats, including canceled licenses, loss of research funding and revoked security clearances.
CBS, once a key source of critical reporting on the Trump administration, has, for example, been taken over by Larry and David Ellison, Trump allies, who put Bari Weiss, the anti-woke publisher of The Free Press (and a former writer and editor for Times Opinion), in charge of the news division.
Perhaps most significant, key platforms and hubs in the social media complex — TikTok, Meta, X — have been taken over by Trump allies or have shifted right to accommodate Trump.
The administration has terminated, to use one of Trump’s favorite words, wind energy projects and ended tax and other incentives for electric-powered vehicles, two industries he believes are the creation of Democratic policies. In a Truth Social post on Christmas Day in 2023, Trump wished everyone a Merry Christmas, including “World Leaders, both good and bad, but none of which are as evil and ‘sick’ as the THUGS we have inside our Country who, with their Open Borders, INFLATION, Afghanistan Surrender, Green New Scam, High Taxes, No Energy Independence, Woke Military, Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Iran, All Electric Car Lunacy, and so much more, are looking to destroy our once great USA. MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS!”
In a detailed email, Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist at Princeton, described the administration’s evisceration of the nonprofit sector:
The entire nongovernment community (or — as we might say in tax parlance — the 501(c)(3) sector) has been threatened with a combination of loss of tax exemptions, cuts to federal funding and potential investigations.
Some statistics indicate that fully one-third of NGOS incorporated in the U.S. lost funding in the first half of 2025.
In this atmosphere, Scheppele continued,
NGOs are nervous — and some are pulling back from some of the causes that they know this administration does not support. Some NGOs have created sister organizations in other countries to shield resources from U.S. coercive measures (vindictive lawsuits, sudden tax-status changes) and provide an escape route if necessary.
Tracking the financial condition of nonprofit groups is difficult, at best. They are required only to disclose receipts and expenditures annually in 990 reports to the I.R.S. A tax-exempt group reporting receipts and expenditures for the 2025 calendar year does not have to file until this coming May 15. In addition, charitable organizations with 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) designations do not have to disclose donors.
In this murky world of political dark money, Trump and Republican allies appear to have inflicted damage on the most powerful collection of pro-Democratic nonprofits, an interlocking network operating under the umbrella of Arabella Advisors that for two decades has channeled billions of dollars to liberal advocacy and get-out-the-vote groups. (I say “appear” because no documentation of current fund-raising and spending is available.)
In 2024 alone, according to I.R.S. reports, four groups aligned with Arabella — the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Windward Fund, Hopewell Fund and New Venture Fund — raised a total of $1.46 billion and spent $1.48 billion, largely in grants to liberal and Democratic-leaning groups.
The first clear signal that the Trump efforts were having considerable effect was a Gates Foundation announcement in June that it was halting grants to the nonprofits administered by Arabella Advisors.
The internal memorandum described the action as “a business decision that reflects our regular strategic assessments of partnerships and operating models,” but in the nonprofit community at large, it was interpreted as a political response to pressure from the administration.
“Arabella’s association with progressive causes,” Stephanie Beasley, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Philanthropy, wrote,
has proved damaging at a time when left-leaning nonprofit groups have been losing federal grant funding and Congress is gearing up to investigate foundations and others in the sector.
In June, the Gates Foundation severed its 16-year relationship with the firm after having it administer $450 million in nonprofit funds from the foundation during that period.
At that point, some nonprofits that had worked with Arabella began to distance themselves from the firm to preserve their relationships with the Gates Foundation.
On Nov. 17, Arabella Advisors announced the dissolution of the firm and said its operations and many employees would be taken over by “Sunflower Services, a new public benefit corporation financed by lead investor New Venture Fund with financial support from the Windward and Hopewell Funds.”
While Trump and congressional Republicans appear to have wounded the Arabella network, the same cannot be said of their efforts to criminalize and discredit ActBlue, a crucial Democratic fund-raising vehicle that serves as a multimillion-dollar conduit for contributions to Democratic candidates.
On April 24, Trump signed a presidential memorandum specifically calling on the Justice Department “to investigate and take appropriate action concerning allegations regarding the use of online fund-raising platforms to make ‘straw’ or ‘dummy’ contributions and to make foreign contributions to U.S. political candidates and committees, all of which break the law.” An accompanying White House fact sheet claims that “ActBlue has become notorious for its lax standards that enable unverified and fraudulent donations.”
Trump’s action has not, however, slowed the flow of cash to ActBlue. In fact, just the opposite has happened: The amount of money continues to grow rapidly.
Take the data from Federal Election Commission reports of ActBlue fund-raising during the first six months of the nonpresidential election cycles in 2017-18, 2021-22 and 2025-26. In the first half of 2017, ActBlue raised $190.9 million. Four years later, in the first half of 2021, the group collected $373.9 million. In the first six months of 2025, ActBlue receipts rose to $520.0 million.
Perhaps ActBlue should thank Trump.
ActBlue, however, is the exception to Trump’s generally successful reign of regulatory and fiscal terror on the corporate, academic and institutional left.
Daniel Cornfield, a sociologist at Vanderbilt, pointed out in an email,
In my home state of Tennessee, I have observed the decline of electric vehicle manufacturing with the recent transition by Ford from electric to gas-powered vehicle manufacturing at its brand-new BlueOval plant in Stanton, Tenn., a small town in cotton-producing Haywood County.
The new plant has delayed production and recently announced that it will transition to making gas-powered vehicles and will begin production in 2029. The state government has poured $millions into the project and, despite the tremendous anxiety it has caused locally, Gov. Bill Lee remains a strong MAGA Trump ally.
Trump’s drive to change the culture has benefited from the growing interweaving of the public and private sectors, which enables him to threaten a wide range of targets.
Elizabeth Clemens, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, described this phenomenon in an email:
Although we tend to think of government as made up of public bureaucracies, much of American government works indirectly through private organizations, both for-profit and nonprofit. Over the past half-century, the size of the federal work force has not changed substantially. Instead, many policies are implemented through public funding tied to rules and regulatory oversight. And, as a consequence, a great many organizations that are formally “private” are profoundly dependent on government funding and often fully or partially oriented to politically defined projects.
As a result, Clemens argued:
The vulnerabilities are immediately evident when grants and contracts are canceled or cut back, but also when the funds allocated for individual services are restricted. Many universities, for example, include major hospital operations whose budgets assume certain payments from Medicare and Medicaid. Most of higher education budgets with assumptions concerning students’ ability to secure loans from (or guaranteed by) the government.
A crucial factor underpinning Trump’s success in winning concessions from private-sector companies and institutions is the climate of anxiety and trepidation he has created among his perceived adversaries.
Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, argued in an email that two factors played key roles:
First, underneath all of this is a climate of fear, a recognition that Trump will not hesitate to use public power to hurt anyone he deems to be an enemy.
Second, Trump’s politicization of public-sector institutions, like the Department of Justice, paves the way for credibly threatening the private sector. Every part of the federal government is aligned on the project of bringing private institutions to heel.
In contrast to the chaos of Trump’s first term, Moynihan wrote, the current administration has shown an exceptional ability to coordinate its drive to subordinate private-sector targets:
I cannot think of any prior presidential administration that has invested so much preparation and political capital on asserting control of institutions they perceive as hostile, often using extralegal means to do so.
If you look at the assault on higher education, for example, it involves coordinated action by the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, the Department of State (which oversees visas for foreign students), the National Science Foundation and the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Science Foundation (which houses the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Aging), the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture and the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency. They had to work together to ensure a consistent response. Such coordinated efforts across agencies are normally difficult to organize; it reflects shared ideological goals, and a White House prioritization of those goals. Seemingly every part of the government was on board. That is deeply unusual.
In its concerted efforts to place ideological restraints on higher education, the Trump administration has adopted a carrot-and-stick strategy, and so far, the sticks have proved more effective than the carrots.
Trump’s threats to cut off federal grants forced substantial concessions from such prestigious universities as Brown, Penn, Columbia, Northwestern and the University of Virginia, although Harvard, Princeton and a number of other institutions continue to challenge Trump in court and other venues.
The administration’s more recent carrot — the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education — has met with far less success.
The compact offered colleges and universities favored treatment in applications for federal funds and less restriction on federal government coverage of overhead costs and would serve as assurance that schools were complying with civil rights laws.
In return, the schools had to agree, among other things, to a five-year freeze on tuition, a cap on the number of international students and acceptance of a strict definition of gender. In addition, schools had to specifically prohibit any activity or speech that would “punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
On Oct. 1, 2025, the compact was offered to nine schools: the University of Arizona, Brown, Dartmouth, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia.
Since then, seven of the nine have publicly rejected the compact: Arizona, Brown, Dartmouth, M.I.T., Penn, U.S.C. and Virginia.
Their defiance suggests that higher education officials may have strengthened their backbones in their dealings with the administration.
In an Oct. 20 letter to the Department of Education, for example, Suresh Garimella, the president of the University of Arizona, wrote:
University policies recognize that academic freedom is not absolute, and the university will ensure policies are in place that prohibit discriminatory, threatening, harassing or other behaviors that infringe on the rights of members of the university community and visitors to the campus.
A federal research funding system based on anything other than merit would weaken the world’s pre-eminent engine for innovation, advancement of technology, and solutions to many of our nation’s most profound challenges.
Garimella later said, “We seek no special treatment and believe in our ability to compete for federally funded research strictly on merit.”
Berman, of Barnard College, pointed out that “universities’ earlier retreat from institutional neutrality and free speech has left them more vulnerable to political attack and less well positioned to mobilize broad public support.”
Trump’s ideological pressure campaign on the private sector poses another danger: the weakening of democratic rule and of the free market.
Justin Gest, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, wrote by email that “the image of the government as unbiased, dispassionate and neutral is central to governing.”
In its campaign against businesses and nonprofit institutions, Gest continued,
the Trump administration has communicated that special treatment will be afforded to entities that curry the president’s favor. Or that organizations can avoid scrutiny and enforcement if they acquiesce to this administration’s demands.
The Trump administration wants all organizations to know that their relations with the government are now subject to arbitrary discretion. Contracts, tax status, regulatory compliance — nothing appears to be off limits.
“The long-term risk of this creep to authoritarian capitalism,” Gest concluded, “is not just the distortion of how businesses and nonprofits run their organizations; it’s the loss of rule of law itself.”
Many scholars have described the emergence of Trump as part and parcel of a larger democratic backsliding phenomenon evident in such other countries as Hungary, Turkey and Russia.
Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason, differed with them and had an even more pessimistic take, writing by email:
In those countries, there was no democratic tradition or established rule of law; rather a brief period that looked promising for democratic transition failed, leading to backsliding to their previous, autocratic style of government.
But the U.S. has been the richest, most powerful democracy in the world for over three-quarters of a century and has been a country of strong democratic and constitutional government for almost 250 years.
So what is happening here is not backsliding; I see it more as a revolution, in which longstanding government laws and institutions are being dismantled and replaced with a different form of government.
Instead of comparing what is happening under Trump with the situations in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, Goldstone argued that conditions in the United States are,
ironically, more like what happened in Venezuela, where after a century of reasonably prosperous democratic government, decades of elite self-serving neglect of popular welfare led to the election of Hugo Chávez with a mandate to get rid of the old elites and create a populist dictatorship.
I find that decades-long trends in the U.S. — stagnating wages for non-college-educated males, sharply declining social mobility, fierce political polarization among the elites and a government sinking deeper and deeper into debt — are earmarks of countries heading into revolutionary upheaval.
Just as the French monarchy, despite being the richest and archetypal monarchy, collapsed in the late 18th century because of popular immiseration, elite conflicts and state debts, so the U.S. today, despite being the richest and archetypal democratic republic, is seeing its institutions come under attack today for a similar set of conditions.
In other words, Trumpism is less the cause and more a symptom of something far more foreboding than one bad president: the fraying of a once-proud nation torn apart by structural conflicts inimical to democracy.
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