Donald Trump hoards attention like a preening gorilla at Washington’s National Zoo, obscuring what his administration is actually doing. When asked in Scotland whether he would force Israel to give food to starving Gazans, for instance, he whined about not getting thank you cards for American aid and then offered up a Trumpian non-sequitur about how the stock market was booming.
Such showboating is partly responsible for the growing view that Trump’s style masks his real substance: that beneath the bombast lies a traditional Republican. Several of his predecessors, including Ronald Reagan, also wanted to expand executive power, abolish the Department of Education and rein in the administrative state. Trump’s military build-up and raid on Iran have recast him as the heir to the Republican tradition of waging war abroad and cutting taxes and regulations at home.
There is some truth to this. But away from the spectacle, Trump’s Maga acolytes are undertaking a revolutionary redrafting of the purpose of the American government unlike what has come before.
In Room 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building on 23 July, across the road from the Capitol, his congressional loyalists were prosecuting their case to remake the state. Eric Schmitt, chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, opened a hearing on ending diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) with a tirade against the civil rights infrastructure established in the Sixties. He said the Civil Rights Act had led to “a new racial caste system sanctioned and enforced by the administrative state”. Nevermind that an actual racial caste system existed before the Civil Rights Act.
The Ur-text for Trump’s most revolutionary followers is Christopher Caldwell’s 2020 The Age of Entitlement. In it, Caldwell argues that the civil rights reforms formed “a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible”. This regime, Caldwell thinks, elevated a new social contract centred around anti-racism. “I take the Caldwellian view,” the chief Maga influencer Charlie Kirk told the New York Times earlier this year, “that we went through a new founding in the Sixties and that the Civil Rights Act has actually superseded the US Constitution.”
Trump’s disciples, in other words, are pursuing something more radical than Reagan or the Bushes ever conceived: the overthrow of the civil rights settlement that was erected in 1964. In his first week Trump overturned affirmative action and then went on to root out DEI programmes across the government and, by proxy, in those companies the state works with. (Reagan’s team once drafted an executive order to overturn affirmative action but he never signed it.) The assault has also been fought by Trump’s appointed judges: by overturning Roe vs Wade in 2022 and then affirmative action the following year.
A month after the election Caldwell wrote in these pages that Trump’s victory, like those of 1992 and 2008, was as much a social revolution as a political one. Put simply, Caldwell thought the age of woke was coming to an end.
The irony, however, is that according to critics like Caldwell, some of Trump’s most extreme supporters are no longer interested in scrapping the civil rights reforms they loathe – and are instead using them to pursue their own ends. In simpler terms, as Caldwell and others would see it, parts of the right have gone woke. Trump’s assault on universities uses accusations of anti-Semitism, for instance, as a bludgeon with which to bully progressive institutions into submission. The administration’s campaign has led Columbia University to adopt a much more expansive definition of anti-Semitism in order to curry favour with the administration. Caldwell thinks this is a mirror image of progressive attempts to compel conservatives into obedience under Democratic administrations.
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gives tremendous power to the executive branch to both override congressional and local democratic legislation and really bring pressure to bear, including financial pressure, on all sorts of institutions, not just government institutions, but also private universities,” Caldwell told me. Caldwell thinks Trump is not interested in scrapping “this incredibly powerful tool” but wants to “use it for himself and from what we know about Trump, it shouldn’t surprise us. He has a tremendous instinct for power.”
This power grab is happening as a new, overtly white identitarian politics is asserting itself in Washington. Jeremy Carl, who was a senior official in Trump’s first term and has been nominated for a State Department role this time, wrote in his 2024 book The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart that white people needed to start seeing themselves as white in order to fight apparent discrimination against them, which he and others argue began in the Sixties.
Carl’s book is not a plea for America to return to the ideals of a “colour-blind” or classically liberal society, but a manual for one in which racial groups compete for power. He wants to co-opt the language of woke. He writes that “‘No justice, no peace’ applies to white people as well”.
Those on the right who dislike positive discrimination because it treats people differently based on their skin colour are now being outflanked by parts of the movement that want to vivify the concept of whiteness. Tribal white politics has once again found a place at the heart of American power. Away from Trump’s pyrotechnic gaggles with reporters, he sits astride forces far outside of his control.
[See also: Donald Trump, the king of Scotland]
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This article appears in the 30 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer of Discontent