The frantic pace of the Trump presidency makes days seem like weeks and weeks like months — if not years. Finding rhyme or reason amid President Trump’s erratic conduct is impossible. Even so, while 2026 has not brought calm, it has brought more clarity.
Twenty months into his second term, Mr. Trump has remade the presidency and changed what Americans will tolerate from their government and from one another. Yet that transformation, sweeping as it is, may prove less important than what Mr. Trump and his allies could not do. They failed at the most ambitious project that they brought to his second term: using the state to remake American society. 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.
When Mr. Trump took office for the second time, he arrived with several overlapping but distinct agendas. The one he cared most about would convert the executive branch to a form of government that scholars call patrimonialism, in which the state is run as the leader’s personal property and family concern. In a patrimonialist system, expert bureaucracies and neutral rules are replaced by — or subordinated to — the head of state’s will. Where they can, patrimonialists personalize and weaponize law enforcement, pardons, programs and grants, appointments, promotions and all the other aspects of state power.
Patrimonialism is manifest in Mr. Trump’s enrichment of himself and his family, reportedly by several billion dollars — and in his effort to extract almost $1.8 billion from taxpayers by means of a sham legal settlement. It is manifest, too, in his systematic repurposing of the executive branch to serve his personal and political interests.
He uses his Justice Department to wage personal vendettas and his pardons to indemnify his cronies. He has staffed the department’s senior ranks with his own criminal defense attorneys, and the F.B.I. with a fierce political loyalist whose chief qualification was a career spent attacking the investigators who had scrutinized Mr. Trump. And he has purged the government’s internal checks on corruption, including by firing inspectors general, career prosecutors and F.B.I. agents whose offense was to follow the rules.
Mr. Trump uses faits accomplis, such as the demolition of the United States Agency for International Development, to elbow aside Congress and impose his will without regard for constitutional boundaries. With some help from the Supreme Court, he has concentrated federal power in the office of the presidency; and with his patrimonialist agenda, he has remade that office to serve not the Constitution but himself and his desires.
The re-norming of political standards is another area in which Mr. Trump has made a lasting imprint. By “re-norming,” we mean the deliberate degradation of what is considered acceptable in American public life.
Examples are far too many to enumerate, but recall just a few: Mr. Trump described his political opponents as “vermin” and said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” When Robert Mueller died in March, Mr. Trump posted that he was “glad he’s dead.” When Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered in their home, he blamed the killings on Mr. Reiner’s criticism of him. He courted and excused political violence — winking at threats against officials who crossed him, joking about the near-fatal attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and praising and then pardoning Jan. 6 rioters. He revels in bullying, cruelty and hate as no president ever has. Beneath it all is the normalization of lying on an industrial scale: tens of thousands of documented false claims as president, including false accusations against Americans and false representations to courts.
Many Americans are sick of wading through the sludge and understandably want to look away. That is what Mr. Trump is counting on. He wins not by persuading us that the conduct is acceptable, but by wearing us out until we no longer object. Each violation makes the next easier; each unpunished transgression resets the baseline. What is being broken is not this standard or that one; it’s the idea that standards apply. Thanks largely to Mr. Trump and his allies, the country today accepts political speech and behavior that only a few years ago would have been disqualifying, if not unthinkable. It is no longer clear what a president could say — about a dead man, about a murdered family, about women he has abused, about incitements to violence — that would cost him anything.
So why, despite all that, does the second year of Mr. Trump’s second term seem less menacing than the first year? Because the patrimonialism and the re-norming, damaging as they are, were only part of what he and his followers set out to do. The largest of their ambitions was something else: the remaking of American society itself.
The Trump administration’s cultural reset was ambitious. While it had the president’s support, it was devised and pursued mostly by people around him. They included top officials such as Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and JD Vance on the inside of the administration, plus Elon Musk for the four months he worked in it; outside activists such as Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, and Steve Bannon of the “ War Room” podcast; intellectuals such as Patrick Deneen, Michael Anton and Charles Kesler; and institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, and the America First Policy Institute.
This group saw Mr. Trump’s second term as their best chance to block and reverse the left’s takeover and makeover of the country’s culture and institutions. By deploying government power against the commanding heights of the culture, they sought to supplant liberal hegemony not just in Washington but throughout society.
In his 2023 book “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future,” Dr. Deneen, a political scientist at Notre Dame, made clear that the regime that had to be changed included not just government offices, but elite positions throughout society. The goal was to achieve “the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class,” he wrote. “Where necessary, those who currently occupy positions of economic, cultural and political power must be constrained and disciplined by the assertion of popular power. However, merely limiting the power elite is insufficient. Instead, the creation of a new elite is essential.”
In keeping with their revolutionary ambitions, Mr. Trump’s cultural warriors spoke in revolutionary terms. Mr. Bannon, in 2017, announced the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Mr. Vought, an architect of Project 2025, said the goal was for career civil servants to be viewed as “villains.” Mr. Rufo, widely credited with designing the administration’s campaign against universities, described the MAGA movement as a “revolution against revolution” that “has to use what many see as radical techniques” to put universities “in an existential terror” and “set them back a generation or two.”
Their project, in other words, was to use government power and the unmatched influence of the presidency to dominate and rewire civil society. They sought to strike at “wokeness” wherever they saw it, an all-of-society project. The campaign proceeded domain by domain.
Universities: Mr. Vance, in 2021, endorsed President Richard Nixon’s claim that “professors are the enemy,” and Mr. Trump, in 2023, promised to “choke off the money to schools that aid the Marxist assault on our American heritage.” True to their word, they froze billions in federal research funds at Harvard, Columbia, Penn and others as leverage over admissions, hiring, and governance — brazenly violating the universities’ due-process rights in order to exert unprecedented sway over core academic matters. Had courts not intervened, Mr. Trump might have effectively commandeered America’s private universities.
Law firms: Mr. Trump signed executive orders aimed at punishing or crippling major law firms by stripping their security clearances and federal access. That was partly because some firms had challenged Mr. Trump or represented his adversaries. But more broadly, the administration sought to intimidate the legal profession and drive it away from liberal causes and clients. (Several of the firms settled on the Trump administration’s terms; those that fought the orders in court won.)
Media: Among the president’s early second-term actions was an attempt to force The Associated Press and other news organizations to rename the Gulf of Mexico. While bizarre, that effort heralded persistent efforts to bully and reshape the media. The president sought to marginalize legacy news outlets by displacing them from the White House and Pentagon. His personal lawsuits against ABC, CBS and other news organizations extracted multimillion-dollar settlements, while his Federal Communications Commission chairman publicly threatened broadcasters’ licenses — pressure under which Jimmy Kimmel was pulled off the air (temporarily, it turned out).
Culture: Also among his first actions, Mr. Trump installed himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center — the country’s congressionally chartered cultural showcase — and renamed it to include himself. He defunded public broadcasting, canceled funding for humanities councils in 56 states and jurisdictions, and effectively shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He ordered a review of Smithsonian exhibits and programming for ideological content. He pressured national parks to remove references to slavery. He and his defense secretary remade the military as a culture-war showcase — restyling the Defense Department as the “Department of War,” restoring Confederate base names, scrubbing web pages honoring the Tuskegee Airmen and Navajo Code Talkers (later restored), and pulling nearly 400 books from the Naval Academy library.
Sports: Executive orders created White House task forces for the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, with Mr. Trump installing himself as chairman of both. He demanded that Washington’s N.F.L. team, the Commanders, and baseball’s Cleveland Guardians revert to their former names. He attacked athletes with the goal of intensifying cultural divisions. He personally called the international soccer federation’s president and got an American striker’s red-card suspension lifted in the middle of the World Cup. He spent $60 million or more to stage a U.F.C. cage match on the White House lawn for his 80th birthday.
The Streets: Probably most important, the administration used displays of force in an attempt to teach Americans docility. It deployed National Guard troops in the nation’s capital and in other cities, ostensibly to reduce crime but actually to own the streets. It deployed masked, unidentified, paramilitary-style agents against American cities and instructed them to use ostentatiously forceful tactics. In “Operation Metro Surge,” thousands of agents poured into Minneapolis–St. Paul, with parallel deployments and shows of force in Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and beyond. Journalists were arrested covering the operations.
Those operations were not law enforcement as it is ordinarily understood; they were the state’s effort to instill fear in its citizens. In the CECOT affair, hundreds of migrants were flown to El Salvador’s mega-prison without hearings — and the secretary of homeland security made a well-publicized visit there to gloat about their harsh treatment. As federal agencies posted triumphant videos of raids and arrests, and Mr. Trump suggested that American citizens should be next, the message was: Be afraid.
Every administration tries to shape the culture. What sets this one apart is not the ambition, but the means and the scale — not persuasion but coercion, and not on one front but everywhere all at once, in ways that were unprecedented and found by courts to be unlawful. Mr. Trump and his administration sought to bully and commandeer private institutions, to redirect the culture, and to remake society from above by force and fear.
In a few ways, the Trumpian social revolution succeeded: by slowing, and even reversing, the momentum of so-called D.E.I. (diversity, equity and inclusion) in elite institutions and of what conservatives called “gender ideology” — though both of those changes were already underway before Mr. Trump took office. On the whole, though, the administration’s effort to remake the culture in its image has failed.
History may one day judge that the tide turned in Minneapolis. In January of this year, Operation Metro Surge made mass arrests, invaded homes, fired pepper balls and shot dead two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, without plausible cause — and then, after their deaths, defamed them.
The architect of the operation, Stephen Miller, one of the most powerful presidential aides in modern history, was explicit about the method. He ran Operation Metro Surge through daily calls with the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security, wielding the authority of the president — reportedly directing agents to “force confrontations” with protesters to win the “P.R. battle” and saying that if Minnesotans came to believe “their protesting is successful,” the administration’s interior operations would fail nationwide. Protesters, he reportedly said, “need to be vanquished by any force necessary.”
The people of Minneapolis answered with disciplined, peaceful resistance: tens of thousands marching in Arctic cold, luminaria spelling “ICE Out 4 Good,” a statewide “economic blackout,” a state lawsuit in federal court, citizen networks that tracked ICE and documented its activities, and a population that refused every provocation.
The administration backed down; within days, its border czar announced a “drawdown plan.” Key figures in the effort to break the city’s will were subsequently removed: Greg Bovino, the operation’s enforcement commander, was pulled out of the city and sent back to California. Kristi Noem was fired. Noticeably less was heard from Mr. Miller.
By demonstrating that they could face the spectacle of force and win, Minnesotans shook off their despair and found that they were not powerless. The moment became a catalyst far beyond the Twin Cities. The mass public saw what was being done in their name and many were repulsed by it. What they glimpsed was that a country can, in fact, be lost, and that theirs had come nearer the edge than they had believed.
The president and his forces lost other key cultural battles, too. From outside his home country, but speaking pointedly to it, the first American pope not only defied Mr. Trump but transcended him, demonstrating a moral authority against which the president had no power. Within the United States, No Kings marches staged some of the largest single-day protests in American history, deploying anger and humor without fear. Lawsuits on behalf of Harvard, U.C.L.A. and law firms fought and won key rulings. Federal judges, including some of Mr. Trump’s appointees, blocked action after action. Mr. Musk’s demolition crew disbanded in failure and disrepute.
At the same time, and equally important, the president’s approval rating collapsed. Voters wanted an orderly border and criminal immigrants removed, not a culture war waged brutally in the streets. Mr. Trump’s unpopularity — abetted by his twin fresh failures on Iran and high prices — reached near-record lows for a second-term president.
Had Mr. Trump’s ratings been in the 50s instead of the 30s, he might well have had the confidence to foment a true constitutional crisis by defying the Supreme Court or invoking the Insurrection Act — and he probably would have gotten away with it. Instead, when the Supreme Court invalidated his signature tariffs in February, he felt compelled to comply. (He rebuilt some of them under a different statute.) His efforts to bully the culture have not stopped; he is still menacing universities and attacking free speech. No one should be relaxed about that. But his preoccupations have shifted away from intimidating and dominating civil society and toward building monuments to himself.
Revolutions can fail but still scar the landscape. And Mr. Trump, with just under two-and-a-half years left in his second term, might emotionally and psychologically blow apart. But things are different than they were. The 80-year-old president is losing his grip on power and even his own base. The MAGA movement is fracturing. And the president no longer inspires the fear he once did. We know something today that wasn’t altogether clear a year ago: America’s civil society is harder to intimidate and rewire than MAGA’s cultural revolutionaries hoped.
Conservatives have every right to influence and change the culture, as progressives assuredly have done. But they should do it Ronald Reagan’s way: by moral inspiration and persuasion, not force majeure. Progressives have something to learn, too. Mr. Trump and his culture warriors lost by moving too far out of the moral mainstream; Democrats should claim and occupy that mainstream, not lurch well out to the left, as they seem tempted to do.
Those who played a role in Mr. Trump’s rise to power have acted not just unwisely, but culpably. Even so, it is now apparent that many Americans — probably enough Americans — are determined to live within the truth rather than the lie, to fight for their civic and political self-respect, to return a sense of humanity to a nation that has grown too cold, too callous and too cruel.
Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served in Ronald Reagan’s, George H.W. Bush’s and George W. Bush’s administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”
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