US President Donald Trump’s ‘war on woke’ escalates
Like a human wrecking ball, the US President has rolled out sweeping changes to tackle “wokeness” as part of a horrifying agenda.
Donald Trump’s war on woke is escalating.
Famous historical figures are falling by the wayside.
Pictures of the silver B-29 Superfortress bomber Enola Gay that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan in 1945 have been pulled from the walls of the Pentagon. It was named after the pilot’s mother.
Government websites are going dark.
Topics such as climate change, inclusivity and gender equality are no longer acceptable topics for federal agencies to address
And even once stoic institutions are bending the knee.
Universities, including Harvard, are reviewing curriculums for politically incorrect courses and imposing a hiring freeze ahead of anticipated strict new federal guidelines.
Donald Trump, the newly elected 47th President of the United States, insists that his country has turned a fork in the cultural road.
“We’ve ended the tyranny of so-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military. And our country will be woke no longer,” he told a joint sitting of US Congress.
Six weeks in, President Trump has done more than some presidents manage in a lifetime—securing the border, crushing wokeness, and putting America First.
— Kevin Roberts (@KevinRobertsTX) March 4, 2025
Tonight’s Joint Address is a reminder: the American Dream is alive. A new Golden Era is just beginning.
🚨New @Heritage ad: pic.twitter.com/oQKgiEsY5k
It’s not just about race. Gender is also at the heart of his MAGA Republican movement’s crusade.
And targeting the LGBTQ+ community is the spearhead of this campaign.
“I want Congress to pass a bill permanently banning and criminalising sex changes on children and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body. This is a big lie. And our message to every child in America is that you are perfect exactly the way God made you.”
It’s just one campaign promise President Trump was elected on.
It’s part of a sweeping agenda laid out by his principal policy source, The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
It’s now becoming policy, with federal departments – especially the Department of Education – being instructed to adopt a new political profile.
“The MAGA faithful believe that Trump is like a human ‘wrecking ball’, as evangelical leader Lance Wallnau said in 2015,” says Rutgers University anthropologist, Professor Alex Hinton.
“This metaphor speaks to how Trump supporters believe the president is tearing down an entrenched, corrupt system.”
The war on woke
The term “woke” originally arose among US black activists early last century to express growing awareness of institutionalised racism.
It briefly returned with the Black Lives Matter movement of 2014 after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
But it was quickly co-opted as a derogatory term by their opponents.
Now, its emotionally charged use is a symptom of the deep ideological divisions tearing the United States apart.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis defined it as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them”.
He then spurned the notion.
“We reject woke ideology. We will never ever surrender to the woke agenda. People have come here because of our policies.”
DeSantis’ Florida is an early battleground in the war against woke.
Race, gender, sexuality and human rights-related educational curricula, including high school African-American history classes, have been restricted through his Parental Rights in Education Law and “Stop WOKE” Act.
States nationwide soon followed, imposing similar spending bans on race, diversity and equity-related programs. Now it’s the turn of the White House.
“We believe that whether you are a doctor, an accountant, a lawyer or an air traffic controller, you should be hired and promoted based on skill and competence, not race or gender,” Mr Trump reiterated to Congress.
In his first 50 days as President, Mr Trump says he signed almost 100 executive orders and issued 400 executive actions “to restore common sense, safety, optimism and wealth all across our wonderful land”.
He’s now tasked the chiefs he has appointed to lead the Pentagon, education and law enforcement agencies to make it happen.
“The central message has routinely been that ‘big government’ has overstepped its bounds and trampled individual rights and that the architects of those reforms are not just misguided but treasonous,” says University of Iowa Professor of History Colin Gordon.
“In the wake of World War II, the charge was that feckless bureaucrats served Soviet masters. Today, Project 2025 aims to ‘bring the Administrative State to heel, and in the process defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America’.”
A battle for hearts and minds
“Trump and his supporters believe that liberals are ruining public education by instituting what they call a ‘radical woke agenda’ that they say prioritises identity politics and politically correct groupthink at the expense of the free speech of those, like many conservatives, who have different views,” writes Professor Hinton.
The threat of budget cuts and staff purges has already caused universities and colleges across the US to pre-emptively axe courses and impose hiring freezes.
This includes prominent institutional names such as Harvard University, the University of Washington, the University of Notre Dame, Stanford University and the Columbia University Medical School.
And self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has announced plans to slash half of the US Department of Education’s workforce.
Mr Trump says he wants to axe the whole thing.
It’s all part of a White House push to “end wokeness” in primary schools, high schools and universities.
President Trump has called education a “big con job”, filled with “radicals” seeking to impose “left-wing indoctrination”.
He insists he will cut funds to “any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on our children.”
The White House has launched an online service for students and parents to anonymously “dob-in” any “woke” or “divisive ideologies” among educational staff nationwide.
And its next moves appear to conform closely to the plan outlined by Project 2025.
In his executive order “Expanding Educational Freedom and Educational Opportunity for Families”, Mr Trump has proclaimed that he intends to shift education towards a voucher system.
This will “prioritise educational choice” by allowing parents to cash in their vouchers at religious schools or for homeschooling. The money will be diverted from public school programs.
“The MAGA faithful believe that Trump is restoring an era of American exceptionalism in which the US is an economic powerhouse, common sense is the rule, and traditional values centred on God, family and freedom are celebrated,” explains Professor Hinton.
Free speech. Banned words
On day one of his second term in office, President Trump signed an executive order titled Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.
“Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society,” he proclaimed.
“I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It’s back.”
Days later, the White House ordered the NASA space agency to remove all content “specifically targeting” women from its websites.
A memo was distributed among staff insisting terms such as “DEIA” (Diversity, Equality, Inclusivity, Accessibility), “indigenous”, “environmental justice” and “women-in-leadership” had to go.
“This is a ‘drop everything and reprioritise your day’ request,” the NASA directive read.
“These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination,” the agency’s new Trump-appointed acting administrator, Janet Petro, added.
Similar instructions have since been directed at the Department of Homeland Security.
The US Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency have new limits on what subjects they can address. The White House has instructed staff to “identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change”.
Any published content must be flagged and submitted for further inspection.
The same also applies to organic farming techniques.
Now, similar lists of banned words and phrases are being distributed to hundreds of federal government websites.
According to the New York Times, phrases like “all-inclusive”, “Native American, “at risk” and “sense of belonging” must be eliminated. Others, such as “historically”, “institutional”, “systemic” and “women” must be reviewed.
But Mr Trump will have to rely upon the Republican judges he appointed to the Supreme Court to see his slew of executive orders upheld. Abolishing a federal department legally requires the approval of US Congress and a minimum of 60 votes in the Senate. Republicans hold just 53.
“One of the most interesting points in the election was that a majority of the people who said democracy mattered to their vote voted for Trump,” says geopolitical risk analyst Ian Bremmer.
“And they did so because they believed that the United States was no longer really a democracy, due to the special-moneyed interests who captured the system to make it work for them without working for average Americans.”
Now, Mr Trump has established himself as the “great disrupter”.
He’s more than willing to “move fast and break things” in the process.
“He has identified the principal symptom and communicated some essential truths about how broken the American system has become,” adds Bremmer.
“And yet, the likelihood that he will fix it and make America once again a beacon of democracy, a beacon of human values, seems farcical.”
Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer | @jamieseidel.bsky.social
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