President Donald Trump released a video highlighting his landmark accomplishments over the past six months — and the results speak for themselves. While the media fixates on negative polls and manufactured controversy, this period marks one of the most dramatic political turnarounds in recent memory. Now is the time to take stock of what conservatives have achieved — victories that once seemed unimaginable.
Nowhere has the shift been more profound than in the fight against gender ideology. Just five years ago, opposing male athletes in women’s sports brought swift condemnation from corporate boards, activist groups, and political elites. Today, the momentum has flipped.
This is no time to coast. The next phase demands aggressive follow-through. Now it’s about willpower and execution.
Americans no longer feel compelled to nod along as ideologues insist that men can become women — or vice versa. This change didn’t happen because it polls well. It happened because we reclaimed a basic principle: truth.
The same country that once put a Supreme Court justice on the bench who couldn’t define “woman” now has a federal government unafraid to say, “That’s a chick.”
That shift marks a massive cultural victory. A few years ago, it felt impossible. Now, it reflects a growing national trend — a long-overdue return to reality in public life.
Border enforcement has taken a decisive turn. For years, Americans watched as federal officials failed to act, leaving the southern border wide open and allowing criminal networks to thrive. That era has ended.
Under President Trump, the government began doing what it should have done all along. Targeted enforcement raids have sent a clear signal: Illegal immigration won’t be ignored, and those here unlawfully face consequences. Self-deportation has increased. Illegal crossings have declined.
The policy works — and the message is unmistakable.
This marks more than just a policy shift. It’s a cultural and political turning point. Americans now recognize that a secure border isn’t just possible — it’s essential. National sovereignty is back on the table.
Trump’s economic agenda has delivered real results. When he returned to office, the nation was still stuck in the inertia of the post-COVID economy and the slow-growth legacy of the Obama-Biden years. That changed quickly.
Trump’s signature 2017 tax cuts, now made permanent, have sparked renewed business investment, job creation, and wage growth. These are the largest tax cuts in U.S. history — and they’re doing what they were designed to do: make American companies more competitive and American families more prosperous.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has broken the regulatory chokehold that once blocked vital infrastructure and energy projects. Nuclear plants are coming back online. American energy is rising — without relying on foreign regimes.
This pro-growth agenda doesn’t just create jobs. It revitalizes the core of the American economy: workers, builders, producers, and risk-takers. By slashing taxes, limiting government overreach, and putting American interests first, the Trump administration has reignited prosperity — and buried the stagnation of the past.
Trump has reshaped American foreign policy with bold, decisive leadership. For decades, presidents vowed to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. None followed through. Trump did.
He launched targeted strikes, enforced crippling sanctions, and shattered the illusion that diplomacy alone would stop Iran’s ambitions. Critics warned of escalation. But Trump understood what past leaders refused to admit: Weakness invites aggression. Strength deters it.
His response proved the U.S. will defend its national interest — no matter the cost.
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Trump didn’t just contain Iran. He rewrote the rules of diplomacy in the Middle East. The Abraham Accords shattered decades of failed orthodoxy, establishing historic peace deals between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The foreign policy establishment said it couldn’t be done. Trump did it anyway.
He also forced NATO allies to pay their fair share — a long-overdue correction. For years, U.S. taxpayers carried the burden of Europe’s defense. Trump ended the freeloading and demanded real commitments.
Together, these achievements mark a dramatic departure from the weak, consensus-driven diplomacy of the Obama-Biden era. Trump hasn’t just restored credibility on the world stage. He’s proven that America leads best when it leads with resolve.
These past six months have delivered a series of political and cultural victories many thought out of reach. A year ago, they seemed impossible. Today, they’re reality.
But this is no time to coast.
The next phase demands aggressive follow-through — especially on immigration. Trump must solidify the gains made on border security and ensure illegal immigration remains in retreat. The infrastructure exists. Now, it’s about willpower and execution.
Foreign policy also demands continued focus. The world remains volatile, and America needs a president who won’t hesitate to defend U.S. interests. Trump has shown he can meet that challenge. He must keep doing so — with clarity, strength, and resolve.
And then there’s spending. The left hasn’t let up. Democrats want more programs, more debt, more control. Trump’s tax cuts delivered real growth, but long-term stability means confronting the bloated federal bureaucracy and forcing Congress to spend less — not more.
The first half of 2025 brought a revolutionary shift. We reversed trends that once looked permanent. We reclaimed cultural and political ground that had been written off.
But none of it will last without vigilance. To secure lasting change, conservatives must stay engaged, focused, and relentless. The future won’t protect itself. We have to do it — now.
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Why does the story of Jeffrey Epstein matter so deeply to the American right? Why does it persist, years after his death, as a source of outrage, fascination, and dread? Why is the call to “move on” met with such visceral resistance?
The answer lies in what Epstein’s case reveals. It is not merely the record of one man’s depravity or even the scale of the crimes committed. It is a window into a concealed architecture of unaccountable power, intelligence protection, institutional rot, and elite impunity. For many on the right, it confirms long-standing fears about how power in the United States is really organized and who it is designed to serve.
These questions strike at the heart of an older conservative concern: Who governs? And who is permitted to ask?
These concerns are hardly new. They are the very ones that helped elect Donald Trump, and they have shaped conservative criticism of the American regime since the New Deal. The Epstein affair provides a rare glimpse into the soft underbelly of the administrative state. At some point, moral clarity demands that we stop parsing and start acting. This is a time to strike, to “fire for effect.”
From the expansion of the federal bureaucracy under Franklin D. Roosevelt to the postwar rise of the national security state, conservatives have warned about the merger of government power with private influence. The most dangerous feature of that merger is not the bureaucracy itself, but the consolidation of authority among entrenched intelligence services, elite financial networks, and foreign-aligned interests. These actors operate in close coordination, beyond democratic oversight, and with the consistent protection of institutional power.
Epstein is valuable because he exposes that structure in plain sight. He had no obvious source of legitimate wealth. His hedge fund, insofar as it existed, had only one known client. Yet, he moved in elite circles, befriended presidents and princes, and maintained access to corporate titans and scientific institutions.
Most disturbingly, Epstein appears to have operated a long-standing sexual blackmail network. The question is not merely how he got away with it, but who allowed him to do so.
The answers are deeply unsettling. The FBI curtailed its investigations. The CIA has remained silent. The media showed little interest and declined to pursue the story in any depth. Meanwhile, the possible involvement of foreign intelligence services (especially those operating through figures like Leslie Wexner) has been treated as politically untouchable. This refusal to investigate is not born of ignorance or oversight. It is protective behavior. It signals that the wrong people are implicated.
Even if one adopts the minimalist position, that Epstein was not a formal intelligence asset, the implications remain staggering. Why would a known predator be permitted to operate so openly, with so many connections to power? Is the American state unable or unwilling to act when the guilty hold the right kinds of passports or relationships? Have we reached a point where elite networks are simply beyond reach, shielded by layers of shared interest and mutual compromise?
These questions strike at the heart of an older conservative concern: Who governs? And who is permitted to ask?
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Epstein’s case offers a rare and ugly answer. What it uncovers is not a fever dream of conspiracy but an observable mode of governance that relies on secrecy, compromise, and shared immunity. It appears that intelligence actors have conducted operations not only abroad but also inside the United States, targeting the American elite itself. An immoral country condones sexual blackmail as a mechanism of influence and protection, integrated into a broader system of control ... ironically an indication of a country spinning out of control.
One can find instructive parallels in the operations of Israeli intelligence during the 1980s and 1990s. Under the direction of Mossad officials such as Efraim Halevy, Israel conducted systematic surveillance and developed personal leverage over Syrian elites. These methods included financial inducements, covert recordings, and exposure of private behavior. Such tactics are common in international espionage and are recognized tools of statecraft.
What makes Epstein so alarming is the apparent use of similar techniques within the United States, directed inward rather than outward. The uncomfortable possibility is that foreign intelligence services (including Israeli cutouts operating through figures like Wexner) were not merely bystanders, but active participants or beneficiaries of the Epstein operation. That possibility remains largely uninvestigated, not because it lacks merit, but because it threatens established political alignments.
Wexner’s history as a major donor to Republican candidates is one example of how these relationships complicate any honest inquiry. For a sitting senator or rising intelligence officer, confronting these questions comes at great cost.
This story is not important only because of the criminal sexual behavior it contains. That abuse, particularly of underage girls, is monstrous and demands full exposure and justice. But Epstein’s operation mattered at a higher level because those crimes were used to build networks of control. They were not incidental. They were instrumental. This is the cold logic of espionage deployed inside a supposedly self-governing republic.
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For the political right, Epstein represents a grim vindication. The warnings about politicized intelligence services, compromised elites, and foreign impunity were long dismissed as paranoia or fringe thinking. Yet, the details of this case suggest those warnings were not only plausible, but understated.
Consider the unequal application of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Consider the way domestic allies are hounded while foreign-aligned actors operate with impunity. Consider the cultural message that those with the right credentials and connections will never face consequences. Epstein’s story reveals the inner wiring of a regime that no longer pretends to serve the citizen, only itself.
Was Epstein a direct employee of a domestic or foreign intelligence apparatus? I highly doubt it. My best guess is he was a very well-connected money launderer with a psychopathic lack of empathy who was therefore the perfect tool for intelligence gathering and manipulation. He operated in the open, however, and was criminally harmful to some of the most vulnerable U.S. citizens. But we have seen how little citizenship means in the modern internationalist cosmopolitan soup.
Efforts to bury this story are morally callous and institutionally suicidal. Each attempt to suppress, ignore, or discredit the legitimate questions raised by the Epstein case erodes the remaining credibility of the agencies involved. The denial becomes confirmation. The silence becomes testimony. The cover-up increases the criminality, the offense to the American people.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower (R) warned in his farewell address of a rising military-industrial complex. But the deeper danger he identified was the fusion of state power, private capital, and unaccountable influence. Epstein should be understood as a grotesque product of that fusion. Refusing to confront it will not preserve institutional authority. It will ensure its collapse.
In the end, the Epstein story is not simply salacious. It is foundational. It forces a reckoning with how the American regime truly operates and what moral and political compromises have become routine. That is why so many are eager to see it buried.
And that is precisely why it must not be.
The American Enterprise Institute is an unlikely place to be reminded of why Donald Trump was necessary 10 years ago and is no less needed now. But a comment by Yuval Levin on a recent AEI panel succinctly brought out the difference Trump has made. Criticizing today’s populist, Trump-led Republican Party, Levin said, “The right has to ground its approach to the public in a more conservative message, in a sense that this country is awesome. It is not a festering, burning garbage pile — that is a strange way to talk to the next generation, and it’s not true, even a little bit.”
Trump has never used the words “festering, burning garbage pile,” but he’s used similarly strong language to describe America’s condition in this century under administrations other than his own. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” implies that America hasn’t been great lately, although he and his voters can change that. Whenever Trump alludes to what Levin calls “a festering, burning garbage pile,” he’s referring to the poor leadership our country has suffered from in the not-too-distant past and the results of its misgovernance.
Trump’s task is clear: Restore the people’s power over the elite. Only then will the elite feel compelled to reform.
But that’s not what Levin or other AEI types hear. To them, Trump’s criticisms of the ruling class sound like criticisms of the country.
It would be unfair to guess that Levin simply believes the nation’s elite and the institutions they run are what count as the country itself, but there are precedents for such a view. In traditional monarchies and aristocracies, the rulers are the embodiment of the realm. Our Declaration of Independence was quite radical in breaking away from that understanding, asserting that the people are the realm and that all its institutions are answerable to them, not the other way around.
Levin and other intelligent non-populist conservatives know this, and they’re well aware of the failings of the pre-Trump Republican Party and the country’s political establishment as a whole. But knowing and feeling are different things.
Much of what survives of the pre-Trump conservative movement even now feels that the virtues rather than the vices of the old elite (and the institutions with which they are almost synonymous) ought to be emphasized.
For reasons that are easy to understand, many temperamental conservatives have an abiding fear of demagogues and an irreverent public. However corrupt or incompetent Ivy League-educated leaders may be, they should not be criticized too harshly — likened to flaming rubbish, for example — lest Ivy League education itself be stripped of its mystique. That mystique is part of the decent drapery of republican life, instilling a proper attitude of deference among the public toward those who have the education and lifestyle preparation to lead them.
From the moment he came down the escalator a decade ago, Trump upended this system. He pays no heed to the norms that distinguish America’s leadership class from the rabble the way noble bloodlines distinguished leadership in traditional hierarchical societies.
Trump draws strength from the weakness of America’s elites and the widening public awareness of their vices. This is why, again and again, he has been rewarded for violating the very norms the elites consider sacrosanct, even to the point of winning the Republican nomination and then the White House last year despite a slew of criminal convictions and many more pending charges.
In three consecutive elections, Trump has not offered voters only a choice of leaders but a choice between systems of government. The capaciousness of our republican Constitution is such that within its framework, more than one kind of regime is possible. The “informal regime” can be considered the regime of society as well as government, or a regime that in operation reflects the real dispensation of authority within the country.
Most Americans have sadly little familiarity with even the letter of the written Constitution, and even most educated Americans have never entertained the thought of an informal regime. Much of the country’s elite (think about the typical writer for the Atlantic, for example) suffers paroxysms of panic over Trump’s words and actions because its members conceive of the informal regime under which they’ve lived their whole lives — and under which people like themselves flourish — as being the only natural outcome of the written Constitution.
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To violate the “norms” of this regime is to violate the Constitution itself, as far as their understanding can conceive.
It’s rare that voters get to make a choice not just between candidates but between regimes. The greater and lesser George Bush, the male and female Clinton, Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris all represented the same regime and norms. Trump differs from them all not only in policy but in the relationships he represents between the people, elected power, and institutional elites (both inside and outside government).
Trump at last gave the American people a choice of regimes, with one regime — represented by his enemies, not just in the general election but in the Republican Party, too — operating on aristocratic presumptions and the other being a reassertion of popular self-government, including its characteristic parrhesiaand even vulgarity.
Crude materialists who understand power only in terms of wealth struggle to interpret Trump, because he and many of his associates obviously belong to the same affluent class as his enemies. Yet just as Christ said the poor will always be with us, so too does every regime, formal or informal, have its rich men. The regime is not defined by the existence of a wealthy group; it’s rather about relationships and authority, and that is what Trump has changed.
This change was necessary because the old regime had already destroyed its own legitimacy. It performed poorly for millions of ordinary Americans, but beyond that, it had also grown arrogant. Its norms were not a limitation on its power or abuses but rather a gag stifling criticism from within or below.
The new regime that’s in the making will have its own defects and will need various corrections, but the test of a regime lies precisely in its ability to correct itself. The old elite had lost that ability and would hardly have had the will to exercise the capability even if it had still been there.
Trump is not a revolutionary who has overthrown a healthy order. Rather, he, like the American revolutionaries of 250 years ago, has given the people a chance to be healthy again by ridding themselves of a debilitating regime. Americans had been tricked into living under an aristocracy within the form of a democracy.
Thomas Jefferson hoped that voters would freely choose natural aristocrats — leaders of wisdom, virtue, and ability. But in recent decades, the country fell under the rule of an aristocracy against nature: a self-perpetuating elite that governed through institutions immune to the ballot box. Universities, nonprofits, media outlets, the permanent bureaucracy, judges, and political operatives in both parties — each aligned ideologically, broadly liberal — formed a web of power that shut down any real challenge.
Until Trump.
He offered the people a radical choice, and they took it. They rejected the aristocracy.
If America’s ruling class had actually resembled the natural aristocrats Jefferson envisioned, the people might not have turned to Trump. But the elite they faced was an aristocracy of privilege: smug mediocrities, not public-spirited heroes or genuine geniuses. Swapping one set of insiders for another would have changed nothing. Trump gave them a worthwhile alternative.
Even conservatives like Yuval Levin — who value the role of a well-formed elite in a healthy republic — should recognize this moment. America can only return to true aristocracy, the kind America’s founders hoped for, by becoming more democratic and more populist. The people must want an elite — and they will only want one that serves them faithfully, competently, and without arrogance.
Trump’s task is clear: Restore the people’s power over the elite. Only then will the elite feel compelled to reform.
That path won’t destroy American institutions. It will save them.
Editor’s note: A version of this article was published originally at the American Mind.
It shouldn’t have to be said, but here we are: No, it is not normal for federal employees — whether career staff, political appointees, or otherwise — to defy the direction of the president of the United States.
It doesn’t matter which party is in power. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with the president on a certain policy. Short of a murderous dictatorship or truly Constitution-threatening administration (and regardless of what they say on Bluesky, this isn’t that), the powers of the executive branch are vested in a president. All federal employees work for the president and have a duty to the American people to see their will enacted through each new administration.
Those who are fearful of losing their coveted and protected government jobs are gnashing their teeth at the sight of real accountability.
You wouldn’t know it, however, watching the second Trump administration.
Amid the streamlining of the federal government, many federal employees have taken aim at Trump’s policies mandated by the American people. Some may actually be motivated by their understanding of the Constitution or their love of country. But given the years of malfeasance in the Beltway, few deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Most are federal employees looking to save their comfortable jobs and pampered skin. These employees are so entrenched that they believe they are entitled to their jobs on the taxpayers’ dime — with one recently going as far as to claim that the Trump administration shows “disrespect” to federal employees.
Their resistance goes beyond Trump-era deregulation. Many of these same employees continue to complain about returning to the office after COVID-era stay-at-home orders — something the private sector largely resumed years ago. They claim that going back to their federal workplace is an “arbitrary punishment.”
Worse, the corporate left-wing media is attempting to spin the lack of resources at these bloated offices on the Trump administration, as if the previous president hadn’t allowed wanton remote work.
At the center of this bureaucratic backlash is President Trump’s push to reinstate Schedule F — a policy that would reclassify certain federal employees to make them more accountable to the executive by placing them more directly under the president’s purview.
Naturally, the federal employees ringing alarm bells about this policy are the same ones who want to retain the litany of job protections not afforded to people in the private sector. Redesignating certain staff as Schedule F employees ensures that those working in the government aren’t phoning it in and collecting a paycheck for decades on end.
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This isn’t a new problem. Both Trump administrations have faced internal resistance from the civil service. But so did the Biden administration. Though Joe Biden didn’t see nearly as much resistance as Trump, the scenarios were just as egregious.
Arguably the most high-profile issue that spurred federal workers to buck Biden was Israel’s war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas after the deadly anti-Semitic attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023. Some federal employees didn’t just protest the Biden administration’s stance on Israel’s war outside the White House; they staged a walkout in support of the war-fighting Islamic terrorists who hate America. A U.S. airman even immolated himself in protest.
These instances underscore a significant problem facing the federal government: federal employees who believe themselves both above the policies of the presidents they serve and more knowledgeable than the American people who decide our leadership.
It doesn’t matter which party or president is in power — those who are fearful of losing their coveted and protected government jobs are gnashing their teeth at the sight of real accountability.
When bureaucrats act like they’re above democratic accountability, they not only weaken presidential authority, but they also jeopardize the nation’s credibility on the world stage. In doing so, they erode the trust Americans place in their government.
While it’s imperative that federal workers speak out in the face of actual constitutional danger from any administration that seeks to upend our nation, the actions undertaken by federal employees in the current and previous administrations severely run the risk of the American people viewing all federal workers as boys and girls who cry wolf.
Perhaps some of these individual revolts are emotional reactions to perceived injustices or policy blunders. It’s tempting to see a pattern in their occurrences and the media lionization of the malcontents. But wisdom says never to attribute to malice what you can to incompetence.
When the system can’t make a sandwich, what else is it failing to do?
My wife had just come out of her 98th surgery. It was 10:30 p.m. She hadn’t eaten in nearly 24 hours — and all she wanted was a BLT.
Something simple. Familiar. A sandwich she’s ordered many times before from the patient menu when things ran on schedule.
But this time, the kitchen had closed.
She’d been NPO for nearly 24 hours. (That’s short for nil per os — Latin for “y’all don’t eat or drink nothin’.”)
No food. No coffee. No comfort. Just waiting around with dry lips and an empty stomach until anesthesia wears off and the all-clear is given.
So she turned to me and asked, “Can you go down to the grill and get me one?”
I went downstairs to the hospital’s after-hours grill — the one that stays open for staff and visitors — and asked the cook, “Hey, could I get a BLT?”
Fixing this begins by teaching people that they’re allowed to see the person in front of them.
Let me paint the picture for you.
There was a giant pan of cooked bacon right in front of me. Tomatoes. Lettuce. Bread. All present. All visible. All just sitting there.
But instead of a sandwich, I got a blank stare — followed by: “That’s not on our menu. We don’t have a way to charge for that.”
I even tried to explain: “I’ve got money. Please. Just make the sandwich and charge me whatever you want.”
Nothing. Just more blank stares and quiet helplessness — as if I had asked them to get Prince Harry back into the will.
That was the moment bureaucracy made me want to walk into the sea.
And I was in Colorado!
I wasn’t trying to be difficult. I wasn’t asking for seared ahi tuna with a drizzle of truffle oil. I was just trying to bring a woman — who had just survived her 98th surgery — the comfort of a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich at the end of a long, painful day.
They had the bacon.
They had the bread.
They had the hands.
But because there wasn’t a billing code for it, it could not be done.
I didn’t argue — much. I didn’t throw a fit. I just didn’t have it in me.
Sure, I could have ordered the bacon cheeseburger and said, “Hold the burger and cheese.”
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But I was tired — besmirched by 13 hours of hospital noise and fluorescent lights. I wasn’t thinking like a work-around guy. I was feeling like a husband who had just watched his wife survive another operation — and who just wanted to bring her comfort food before midnight.
The manager on duty saw me trying to explain — saw the look on my face, probably — and graciously had mercy on me.
No forms. No debate. Just a sandwich.
I left with a BLT, deep gratitude for that manager — and a sigh. One person made it right, but the system still made it harder than it should have been.
If we can’t make a sandwich for a post-op patient, what else aren’t we doing?
That moment wasn’t just about a sandwich. It was a snapshot of the country we’re living in — where solutions exist, but systems won’t allow them.
America was built by people who hated “we can’t” — and yet we now tolerate “that’s not how we do it.” And somehow, we’ve come to accept this as normal.
There’s something spiritually corrosive about a system that erases people to elevate process.
We see it everywhere — health care, government, schools, even churches.
But what if “good enough for government work” isn’t good enough any more?
Systems don’t change just because we complain. They change when people remember how to care.
The problem isn’t just that the forms are too long (which they usually are).
It’s that no one feels responsible.
Of course, deflection of responsibility goes all the way back to the garden — where Adam and Eve tried to pass the blame instead of owning their failure.
Fixing this doesn’t begin with a new workflow diagram or a subcommittee hearing.
It begins by teaching people that they’re allowed to see the person in front of them. See the need. See the moment. See the opportunity.
When Jesus saw people, He didn’t ask if they had a referral or a code. He didn’t ask what department handled the lepers.
He stopped. He touched. He healed. He saw the person, not the system.
If we want to model that — whether we’re surgeons, pastors, nurses, cashiers, representatives, senators, or grill cooks — we start by doing the simplest, most human thing: We see the person in front of us. And we make the sandwich.
Even if it’s not on the menu.
There’s a world before President Trump’s descent down the escalator, and there’s a world after it. The recent No Kings protests transmitted the idée fixe of the pre-2015 world. That idea was hostility to personal authority, or personal power — hostility to the notion of sovereignty, to the power once exercised by kings. Donald Trump, the figure who has dominated politics since 2015, is its most visible sign of contradiction. In that sense, the protesters weren’t entirely wrong. Trump’s success marks the passing of the world of the latter half of the 20th century, which was defined by hatred of personal authority.
Successive generations demolished the concept of sovereignty, casting suspicion on the notion that a leader’s decisions can legitimately reshape political or social life. This shift began in the United States when the intelligentsia promulgated the concept of “the authoritarian personality.” They found this personality in the working classes, their churches and associations, their families and fathers, and the politicians who represented them. Where there was the whiff of authoritarian character traits, fascism probably lurked.
All the elements of Trump’s personality that his opponents loathe have proved, for better or worse, to be demonstrations of strength rather than weakness.
The anti-authority impulse then extended to challenge the authority of elected bodies. Popular sovereignty became dangerous. In the late 1950s and '60s, on matters such as school prayer, unctuous judges and administrators tied the hands of potentially reactionary legislatures and frog-marched them toward secularism.
In the 1970s, the target was popular sovereignty as embodied in the office of the president. The American Constitution enabled an energetic executive or administrative presidency, traces of the monarchical form. But the president’s authority was decapitated in the great act of regicide — otherwise known as Watergate.
Sketching the gloomy landscape of the 1970s, the sociologist Robert Nisbet saw in the twilight of authority the rise of impersonal forces; administrators touting “best practices” stepped into the breach. Therapists, managers, and other experts became increasingly important. They coordinated with economic, social, and legal networks to constrain human agents who might otherwise upset progress.
That’s what globalization was all about. At the peak of the era of what Thomas Friedman called “the golden straitjacket,” sovereignty was outré. Successful politicians such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair dazzled their electorates with the bullion of cheap credit and narratives of an impending gilded age while tightening the bonds ever further. They weakened the power of their offices, distributing it to central banks and international agencies.
Their actions clarified the vocation of right-thinking people. Stigmatize the authoritarian personality. Banish any individual or group that displayed its signs from the helm of government and public life. Spin an ever-tighter web of legal, administrative, and economic networks that could remove the risks of exercising personal human control over government — the risks of an energetic executive — once and for all.
All that changed with Trump’s descent down the escalator. “The golden straitjacket” had numerous critics, but no major public figure exposed its hatred of political, personal power as aggressively and abruptly as Trump did. In 2015, he thrust personal authority back to the center of public life. It’s been there ever since, an example to imitate — in enthusiasm or envy.
As president, Trump has fought hard to restore the bloodied Article II of the Constitution. His executive and legal actions on behalf of presidential power even won over skeptics in the conservative legal world. Not only did he challenge the presuppositions of government via the administrative state, but he also exposed the overreaching deep state that is devouring the American Constitution.
Indeed, No Kings could very well function as a pro-Trump slogan. Prior to Trump, American presidents largely functioned as kings. Like the monarch in Great Britain, U.S. presidents had long held power in theory as the “dignified” branch, while other actors in the security state made the real decisions — the “efficient” branch. Trump has been his most republican when he has upset this double government.
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To be sure, anti-Trump No Kings protesters are more troubled by another phenomenon: Trump’s personal style of leadership. They’re not wrong to draw attention to it, but they’re wrong about its significance.
Authority depends on a person’s capacity to command in order to reshape politics. Trump mastered the new fragmented media environment, in which entertainment — rather than solemn statements — wins attention and deference. Trump made his personality an issue. His critics attacked him for it, claiming his persona was a manifestation of the dreaded authoritarian personality. But all the elements of Trump’s personality that his opponents loathe — rhetorical and physical aggression, incivility, scorn for discourse and discussion, brashness, maleness, unwillingness to apologize or express guilt, bluntly demarcating between American winners and losers, claiming the exceptional power to fix America’s problems — have proved, for better or worse, to be demonstrations of strength rather than weakness.
The importance of character traits such as “caring for people like me” or “experience,” which had mattered so much in late 20th-century mass democracy, faded away. Swaths of the electorate would of course still look for their “therapist in chief” or “expert in chief.” But more wanted a boss who asserted control and expected those under him to follow his lead.
The reassertion of personal authority, after decades of opposition to it, has been a messy affair. It’s risible to think that Trump ever intended to abolish elections, set up a dictatorship, or establish a hereditary monarchy. But his style did help accelerate the collapse of institutional authority, such as that once held by the media. Although many of his more dramatic promises have been unrealized (stymied by a variety of forces), the symbology of authority has remained key for gaining and wielding legitimacy.
A numinous connection has developed between an electorate that confers sovereignty upon its chosen figure and the figure who exercises it. The acoustic and visual symbols this connection generates are all the more potent because, at this point in the 21st century, as Mary Harrington has argued, a culture of mass literacy has vanished. This culture was essential to transmit the symbols associated with the print ideals of liberalism (for instance, the importance placed on the freedom of the press, or on discourse itself). As print culture goes, so go the symbols of liberalism. Other symbols step into their place.
Trump’s more subtle critics, who are troubled by the twilight of liberalism, noticed this transformation. They sense something has changed and single out Trump as the chief villain. But wielding the symbols of personal authority is one area in which Trump has long ceased to be exceptional. Even those who are very far from Trump ideologically and politically still inhabit his symbolic universe, in which personal authority, hierarchy, and one’s capacity to reshape political life are of critical importance.
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Emmanuel Macron’s predecessors, fearing being labeled authoritarians by the May ’68 generation, adopted a deliberately understated, egalitarian style. Macron shocked the French political system by embracing the persona of “Jupiter.” He seized the opportunity that Trump’s descent down the escalator made possible.
Pope Francis began his papacy in a conversational, freewheeling style, akin to a Clintonian or Blairite doing one’s best to manage the media narrative. But after the first few years, he also imitated Trump as his supporters embraced the theology of an imperial papacy.
Joe Biden likewise leaned into a “Dark Brandon” iconography of authority to create the impression that he was in charge, the simulacrum of a functioning presidency.
Politicians who can’t successfully embody the symbolism of authority, such as Biden, or those who shy away from it, such as Justin Trudeau, end up as failures. Trudeau launched his political career by an act of physical prowess, beating up a Conservative Party senator who was too lazy to train for a boxing match. It was a crude but effective way of legitimating Trudeau’s claim to lead the Liberal Party and Canada.
Even in an extremely progressive country, primal assertions of authority win admiration. But Trudeau forgot the underlying lesson. In office, he preferred the symbolism of colorful socks, and his unpopularity forced him to resign in ignominy. Meanwhile, Trudeau’s successor, who invokes the physical, masculine iconography of hockey fights to win votes, has returned to more visceral politics. The liberal norms of national civility go nowhere; it’s the brash Trumpian traits that are deployed to gain victory.
The resurgence of authority is why there’s no chance of reverting to globalized, impersonal power — at least how the pre-2015 world conceived it. As candidates compete for personal authority, those vying for power repudiate the notion that economic, social, and legal networks should constrain human agents. The capacity to take back control over these networks is what matters. This helps us understand the deeper unity behind Trump’s signature policies.
All the major themes that Trump hit on when he descended the escalator — an end to mass immigration, free trade, and regime-change missions abroad — were on one level anti-globalization topics: They slashed away at the golden straitjacket.
Anti-globalization themes are now so mainstream that even Keir Starmer imitates Trump’s symbology by talking tough on border control. On one level, it’s a policy victory. But the success is more profound than that. To effect that agenda demands the reassertion of the personal, political will to effect social and political change. Faced with the diminishing returns of the old regime, that’s what more and more people are looking for.
In our new world, leaders rise and fall by how well they can speak the language of authority. Whatever the full implications of this paradigm shift may be, the longing for sovereigns shows no signs of letting up.
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally as “A New Birth of Authority” at the American Mind.
The media’s narrative has done its job. Many Americans now see Donald J. Trump not as a reformer but as a symbol of corruption. That perception is both dishonest and deeply misleading.
The reality? The first 100 days of Trump’s second term leave no doubt about his goal: to reform and remake the federal government.
Reform should mean growing the economy, not growing the bureaucracy.
It’s about time. Too many unelected bureaucrats accountable to no one infest the federal government like roaches, wielding unchecked power over our lives, liberty, and happiness. They treat the mandate for reform as a nuisance. Their mission: obstruct Trump’s appointees and protect the status quo.
Organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Voice of America have deservedly drawn the president’s attention. But many others deserve the same scrutiny. One that stands out is the Securities and Exchange Commission, which repeatedly overstepped its authority during the Biden years, using vague regulatory powers to impose sweeping social mandates under the guise of financial oversight.
Trump tapped former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins to fix it. As chairman, Atkins can be counted on to take a best-practices approach to administrative responsibilities and to ensure that the SEC conducts its mission as described by the law: “facilitate capital formation; maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets; and protect investors.”
That’s a welcome clarification of responsibility. Gary Gensler, who ran the SEC for Joe Biden, was often accused of having a reach that exceeded legitimate bounds, as when, for example, he tried to regulate the market for precious metals.
Gold and silver are not securities. Neither are individual retirement accounts. Yet the Gensler-era SEC attempted to assert authority over companies offering precious-metals IRAs to individuals and families who wish to own gold and silver.
As the Heritage Foundation’s David Burton told the House Financial Services Committee in March 2024, “The commission is statutorily required to promote efficiency, competition, and capital formation by responsible participants in the capital markets.” Still, under the Biden administration, “it increasingly does the opposite.”
John Gulliver of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation told the same committee that Gensler’s SEC had “an unprecedented rulemaking agenda that will radically redesign the regulation of our securities markets and will have a major impact on the cost of being a public company and investing in our markets.”
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Atkins can and must guide the SEC away from such nonsense. As CEO of Patomak Global Partners, Atkins oversaw the development of best practices for managing digital assets. Congress should follow his lead wherever it may go, solidifying his reforms into law and preventing the agency from trying to regulate financial instruments that are not securities.
The overreach matters. The United States is in a race with China for cryptocurrency dominance. The winner gets to establish the terms under which everyone else must live. It’s no surprise that the SEC’s failure to establish what Burton called “basic rules for responsible actors to follow” undermines America’s ability to take the lead.
“I am not entirely sure whether this irresponsible failure to provide basic rules is a function of the limited understanding of those charged with regulating in this area or their desire to simply have no rules so that the commission can engage in regulation by enforcement,” Burton told the committee.
Regulation by enforcement doesn’t just stifle innovation — it cripples the economy. It may also violate new limits the U.S. Supreme Court just imposed on federal agencies in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which ended the Chevron deference doctrine.
But Atkins can’t fix the SEC alone. Congress must step in and rewrite the law to bar the commission from using backdoor tactics to seize authority over emerging markets and financial technologies.
If lawmakers fail, they’ll guarantee a future where financial technology innovation gets strangled in red tape while real fraudsters skate by untouched. That’s bad news not just for entrepreneurs, but for America’s investors — roughly half the population — who rely on strong markets to secure their retirements.
Reform should mean growing the economy, not growing the bureaucracy. With Atkins at the helm, the SEC finally has a chance to get back to doing what it was meant to do.
Left-wing bureaucracies are quietly undercutting the will of Republican voters in so-called “red states” across the country, according to a new report. Published this week by the State Leadership Initiative (SLI), the group’s “Shadow Government” analysis reveals how “Republican voters elect Republican governors and legislatures — only to find their states governed by the same […]
The real goal of DOGE is the return the government to the limited, constitutional order envisioned by the founders.
Trump should immediately issue an executive order dismantling Biden's National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.
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