A former Reagan administration official and a conservative thinker argued that President Donald Trump has already lost his biggest second-term fight.
In a Saturday guest essay for The New York Times, former Reagan and Bush official Peter Wehner and Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued that Trump has already failed to remake America. The two conservatives even spotted the key moment when Trump’s power began to fall apart.
Wehner and Rauch called the promise to remake American society the most sweeping goal that Trump and his allies carried into the second Trump administration. The two conservatives wrote that Trump reshaped the presidency but failed at the larger goal he and his allies carried into a second term.
“They failed at the most ambitious project that they brought to his second term, using the state to remake American society,” Wehner and Rauch wrote. “That failure is a central fact of the past 20 months, and it is why the country is in a less dangerous place than it was a year ago.”
The authors describe an effort that moved against universities, law firms, newsrooms and cultural institutions, backed by shows of federal force in American cities. That project, they argue, ran aground in Minneapolis, where peaceful resistance to an immigration crackdown known as Operation Metro Surge pushed the administration to retreat.
From there, the setbacks compounded. Trump’s approval ratings sank to near-record lows, courts blocked one initiative after another, and the MAGA coalition began to splinter.
“The 80-year-old president is losing his grip on power and even his own base,” Wehner and Rauch wrote. “The MAGA movement is fracturing. And the president no longer inspires the fear he once did.”
The authors stop short of declaring the danger of the Trump administration over. They warn that Trump continues to menace universities and target free speech, and they caution against complacency. But their central claim is that American civil society proved “harder to intimidate and rewire than MAGA’s cultural revolutionaries hoped.”
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