As President Donald Trump nears the end of the first year of his second term, the left is starting to realize he’s winning and they’re losing, particularly in the culture war. Exhibit A is this opinion piece in the New York Times, entitled "The Trump Revolution Is Going Much Further Than We Realize." It was written by Thomas B. Edsall, a Brown-educated snob who relied mostly on ivory-tower academics to inform the essay's perspective.
The roughly 3,000-word essay is four times the length of your typical newspaper opinion piece, which says something about the weight the Times is giving this issue. Obviously, there’s a good deal of concern and angst on the left that some of the things Trump is accomplishing may actually stick.
While the piece touches on a lot of things, the impetus seems to be that Trump has gutted certain non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) and “nongovernmental” influences like the news media, law firms, universities, corporations, and activist groups.
Matt Grossmann, an academic at Michigan State, seemed frustrated that while during Trump’s first term, the institutions he attacked resisted, while this time, they’re giving in: “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.”
Shari Berman, an academic a Barnard (pronounced Baanaad) said, “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.”
“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, an academic at George Washington University, added.
Dallek actually said that Trump’s use of the power of his office has enabled him “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.”
He says this like it’s a bad thing. But wait! There’s more!
Edsalll frets over how the left’s loss of 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.”
As Greta Thunberg would say, “How dare you?!”
Edsall added, “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!’”
Perhaps the best part of watching Trump troll the left is to watch the left’s reaction to being trolled. Savor this.
Kim Lane Scheppele, an academic from Princeton, bemoaned the Trump administration’s “evisceration of the nonprofit sector,” where “Some statistics indicate that fully one-third of NGOs incorporated in the U.S. lost funding in the first half of 2025…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.”
Scheppele used a lot of words to say the Trump administration appears to be over the target.
If you can imagine it, the essay gets even better with Edsall writing, “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.” On Nov. 17. Arabella Advisors announced its dissolution.
Edsall’s essay cried over the “decline of electric vehicle manufacturing” under Trump and the decline of private organizational influence over the federal government in the form of cutbacks to grants and government contracts.
Don Moynihan, an academic at the University of Michigan, attempted to get at why and how Trump’s been so effective. He speculated that, “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.”
Right, because Joe Biden and Barack Obama never used the Department of Justice in a political way to bring private institutions to heel.
Edsall wasn’t done. This hits just kept on coming when he wrote, “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,” noting that “Harvard, Princeton and a number of other institutions continue to challenge Trump in court and other venues.”
Shari Berman of Baanaad told Edsall 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.”
Let’s translate that. What she’s admitting is that colleges and universities have made a calculated move away from institutional neutrality and free speech. Let’s put an even finer point on that. What she’s saying is that the college campus in America is no longer a bastion of free speech and neutrality. If not, then what is it, Shari? Are you saying these campuses are nothing more than rather expensive indoctrination camps? Sounds like it to me.
Jack Goldstone, an academic from George Mason, had a more expansive take, but a sense of irony is not his strong suit. He pointed to the rise of MAGA’s populist base as a revolution, “in which longstanding government laws and institutions are being dismantled and replaced with a different form of government.”
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.
Wow. It’s breathtaking how one academic could so impressively describe the problem and so obviously miss the fundamental cause and who’s to blame. Hey, Jack! Do you realize this upheaval is in response to Democrat policies and Democrat elitists?
In his closing statement, Edsall seemed intent on his purposeful obtuseness, taking some of the heat off of Trump, but totally swerving around the Democrats’ role, saying, “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.”
Thomas, just what might that “something more foreboding” be? I’ll venture a guess. Decades of leftist policies, corruption, naked grabs for power, and the creation of a non-governmental, dark power network that makes Americans feel like they’ve lost their voice, their freedoms, and, to a good extent, their money, as they watch it given away to Democrat constituencies.
Trump's success is a backlash to the left for what it's been doing to the American public for far too long. One pro tip for Thomas Edsall and the rest of his fellow leftist elites. If you want to know the cause of the problems you are clearly aware of, look inward. That’s where you’ll see why and how the country is now in the state it's in. Trump is just trying to clean up the mess you made.
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