Is Donald Trump winning the War on Woke? A preliminary audit
The story, thus far, is how weak, not how strong, the institutions captured by the left since the 1960s have proved to be. The US President is attempting to undo the progressive project single-handedly and in the face of scepticism, but not much effective opposition, from those whose hegemony is threatened.
Who is the war on woke on?
America has a long history of fighting wars against amorphous enemies. There have been wars on banks (1830s), trusts (1900s), poverty and crime (1960s), drugs (1980s), and terror (post-9/11). Trump has added “woke” to the list. This target is not self-defining.
To his opponents, a few million of whom indulged in “joyful”, risk-free protests in blue cities last weekend, Trump’s anti-woke agenda is a mixture of racism, sexism, transphobia and climate denial. This misunderstands his objective. Trump’s war is not on the victims of systemic oppression. Rather, he is assailing a managerial class that coddles historically marginalised people to maintain its own political and cultural hegemony.
This distinction is crucial. It explains why the universities have suffered some of the heaviest fire. It is not because they are full of the oppressed – black students, for example, make up about the same share of enrolments as they did in the late 1970s (about 10 per cent). It is because they are run by a progressive elite masquerading as their principled defenders.
As American sociologist Musa al-Gharbi observes, in his brilliant book We Have Never Been Woke (2024), the places where the woke “dominate also happen to be the most unequal places in the United States – with an ever-growing share of denizens classifying as either extremely well off or impoverished”.
The woke are bad for those they purport to represent. That is why Trump populism appealed to a record number of voters of colour last year. Trump’s war on woke aims to expand (not reduce) an emerging multiracial Republican movement.
Campus wars
Under Trump, the Department of Education has pushed vouchers and religious schooling, framing public schools as “woke monopolies”. He has set out to privatise as many as he can.
Professors remain a key focus. According to Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber, Trump has created “the greatest threat to universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s”.
There is some irony in this claim. If a McCarthyism obtains, it is of the left rather than the right. It is elite universities that have embedded racial segregation in their social justice strategies, that have been using race to engineer admissions, that have given 80 per cent of their students As while insisting there is no grade inflation.
It is elite universities that have systemically made it harder for poor, white boys to enter their hallowed halls. It is elite universities that insist on retention of their enormous endowments while demanding federal funding. It is elite universities that have postured on anti-racism while creating space for an ugly anti-Semitism. What is so pristine about this left-wing culture that Trump can’t try to engineer an alternative?
He wants merit to take precedence over identity. “You should be hired and promoted based on skill,” said Trump, “not race or gender.” Many universities have reinstated the Scholastic Aptitude Test as a requirement for admission. Diversity oaths are vanishing. Even progressives had begun to doubt their wisdom. Women are getting their college sports (and their prisons) back. None of this would have happened without Trump.
Bye-bye, DEI?
The President’s 2026 financial year budget slashed hundreds of millions in grants tied to racial equity, teacher training on anti-racism and housing programs aimed at marginalised communities. Big corporations such as Meta, McDonald’s and Salesforce have scaled back diversity targets and scrubbed diversity, equity and inclusion language from reports, signalling Trump’s pressure is working in some sectors.
At least 25 Republican-led states have introduced or passed anti-DEI laws, mirroring Trump’s agenda. Blue states are countering with pro-DEI bills, deepening the divide. The purging of a woke vocabulary from government departments is ongoing.
Even the US Army has been explicitly de-woked. In an unusual TED Talk to the military’s top brass last month, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth called time: “Foolish and reckless political leaders set the wrong compass heading and we lost our way. We became the woke department. But not any more … No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction or gender delusions. No more debris … we are done with that shit.”
As commander-in-chief, Kamala Harris would have been unlikely to have made the same pitch.
Peak trans?
Do you remember “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you”? That campaign ad may have won Trump crucial votes last year. It also may have been the moment the US reached peak trans.
The return of two sexes to American public life (announced in an executive order on his first day back in office) is the context in which a sharp reduction in the number of young Americans identifying as trans or queer has taken place.
In a survey this year, according to social scientist Eric Kaufmann, “just 3.6 per cent of respondents identified as a gender other than male or female. By comparison, the figure was 5.2 per cent in 2024 and 6.8 per cent in both 2022 and 2023. In other words, the share of trans-identified students has effectively halved in just two years.”
Correlation is not causation. The decline in trans identity may not be real and, if it is, has numerous causes. Trump has been blamed for a rise in transphobia, and therefore no wonder fewer Americans claim to be non-binary. But this won’t stop Trump claiming he won this battle in the war on woke, that his return to common sense on gender has shifted the wider culture.
Democrats in disarray
Trump remains blessed by poor opponents. For all their fire and fury about Trump 2.0, the left has proven incapable of organising an effective opposition to it. Progressive travails need their own separate audit. Let me highlight two key issues.
First, they are dominated by the elderly. Leading Democrats are turning congress into an old folks home. Independent senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders, who caucuses with the Democrats, is 84. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who turns 80 next July, intends to run for re-election for another six-year Senate term. These are not exceptions in Democrat ranks. There is a progressive old guard that lacks not only control of the departments of government – all three are currently in Republican hands – but has no plan for winning them back.
Second, and worse, their appeal to youth is falling flat. If congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known as AOC, and Zohran Mamdani (the socialist likely to be New York City’s next mayor) are the future of the Democratic Party, Trump’s advantage could prove much more durable. He won last year not by getting out American gammons – angry, old, white men – but by winning young men and people of colour (and both: he has doubled the share of African-American men voting GOP). Woke politics has alienated this electorally crucial demographic.
Australia has a crisis of young men. Forty-three per cent fewer of them finish high school than do young women. Our universities, especially the humanities, are increasingly female dominated. The ratio of undergraduates is approaching 80:20 female-male. Has Trump’s war on woke plotted a way back to social balance that we could adapt for Australian consumption? Young men in the US are no longer the preserve of the left. There are lessons here for the Liberals that require, at minimum, a scepticism about any Labor-lite strategy.
Organisers of Trump’s youth vote, such as Charlie Kirk, did not appease the left’s cultural hegemony. They took it on. Kirk paid with his life. The war on woke has its first martyr.
Border war won
It is hard to not chalk up the border war as a significant victory in Trump’s wider campaign. Democrats made the faulty assumption that a pregnable border would give them an impregnable electoral advantage – that immigration, legal and illegal, would deliver them more voters than it would their opponents.
Hispanic voters did not agree. This socially conservative and economically rising demographic walked away from the chaos of the Biden-Harris border and into the Trump camp.
In 2020, Trump lost the Latino male vote 59 to 36. In 2024, he won it 54 to 44. The first woman of colour to win her party’s nomination for president, and certainly the most woke Democrat on any presidential ticket, proved a disaster for her cause.
In Europe, Trump has made debate about illegal immigration politically viable, if not vital. Even Britain’s Keir Starmer, an open-borders socialist in his organic core, has sounded Trumpian. “We risk becoming an island of strangers,” he warned.
Anthony Alabanese has watched all this. He has held in check the refugee multiculturalism of some in his party. That realism, too, has a Trump genesis.
War on woke abroad
We should add climate realism to this list. I’ve listened to just about every significant speech made by a US president for 30 years. I can recall none as bracing as Trump’s to the UN last month. For states to prosper, he said, they need access to cheap energy. Renewables are not that.
An article of faith for the transnational woke was undone, not just rhetorically by the US President. The whole architecture of the climate change movement was compromised by his refusal to accept the national penury it would entail.
Israel: Any audit of Trump’s peacemaking must applaud the hostage return. But it also would have to be cautious that MAGA offers a template for a permanent Israel-Palestine peace.
A domestic movement that disdains foreign entanglement is not well placed to do nation building – especially when no Palestinian nation exists.
As part of the war on woke, however, Trump’s deal has been a success. It has exposed the moral bankruptcy of Palestinianism.
This bizarre hybrid of Israelophobia and identity politics has been central to progressive posturing for two years. It delivered nothing for the oppressed and certainly freed not a single hostage. “Queers for Palestine” may have been peak woke: social justice activists demanding victory for Hamas terrorists who would throw them from buildings. Has the poverty of the woke world view ever been clearer?
Are you as sceptical as me that president Harris would have achieved the breakthrough Trump did this month? In any review of Trump’s anti-woke crusade, the inadequacy of the alternative is glaring and should be factored in.
Clouds and headwinds
If you are a Trump supporter, are you sick of winning yet? There may be some medicine on its way.
The blitzkrieg quality of this war – consisting of more than 200 executive orders but little institutional transformation – will inevitably face more organised resistance. Trump will be 80 in June – the oldest man to take the oath of office. When/if he leaves office in 2029, he will be the oldest president in American history.
He may not slow down; he seems to defy most gravities. But possibly his cultural revolution is at its most intense now because it is later than anyone thinks. If Trump can escape the centrifugal politics of most second terms, he will have cemented his place in history. But precedent is not his friend.
Lyndon Johnson won in a landslide in 1964. His policy innovation – the Great Society – came thick and fast. But he turned down the nomination in 1968. His Democrats fractured over Vietnam. Richard Nixon was elected. As for his second term …
Ronald Reagan fought a war against communism. But his second term was mired in the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton waged a war on welfare (not unsuccessfully). He was still impeached by the House of Representatives for a sex scandal in his second term. George W. Bush declared a war on terror. But his most enduring legacy was the Great Recession of his second term. Barack Obama’s second term sowed the seeds for the rise of his nemesis, Trump.
Trump’s use of the National Guard to quiet (to de-woke) Democrat cities invites civil conflict. Can we imagine if the shoe were on the other foot? That Illinois guards marching into Dallas, Texas would not be met with violence? Construing every issue as an emergency invites adoption of this tactic by his opponents.
Past performance is no guarantee of future success. Of course. But Trump’s war on woke is so multi-sided, embracing politics, economics, culture and diplomacy, it is hard to imagine it will not encounter resistance and/or overreach itself. The Deep State is, after all, so named for a reason. Does the war on woke go deep enough?
Trump is knocking down. Is he putting up? Is he reforming or merely punishing institutions such as universities? Can they not just wait him out? Executive orders are easily undone. The reform of entitlement spending is crucial to US prospects. Trump elides it. Victories in the war on woke may all prove pyrrhic.
Trump has warned that “The woke agenda is practically gone. But it’s like a weed – you think you’ve killed it, then it starts growing again.” Quite so.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
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When Donald Trump was campaigning this time last year, he pledged to “end the woke takeover of America … Wokeness is destroying our country. We will fight it everywhere – schools, corporations and government.” Twelve months later he has opened several fronts in this war on woke. He is winning on nearly all of them. For now. I’ll get to the clouds later.