The question asked by many is how do we get here? It is a question asked in our daily news of a Donald Trump presidency operating like an autocratic regime. Intentionally, we are bombarded with an ongoing news cycle dropping the latest executive order, political insult, international folly or money scheme. In turn, it presents itself as chess pieces haphazardly thrown on the geopolitical board. Yet, it is very intentional and carries an agenda. Regardless, the ploy creates unfettered chaos under an administration run by incompetent and unqualified cabinet members.
What has become a slogan and ideologue—Make America Great Again (MAGA)—is a contemporary white supremacy movement masquerading in the form of a reemerging far-right populist movement. Hijacking the Republican party, under the stewardship of Donald Trump, this campaign places blame on issues like immigration and class warfare. Its thrust is to attribute fault on other ethnic and racial groups for white suffering. American populist movement has then become a converges of two subsects of principles that view society as two dissimilar entities: “pure people” representing fatherhood and those exogenous to the relationship of homogeneity. In other words, to maintain “racial purity,” and specifically, whiteness, there must be an exclusion of those who fall outside of the white category.
At its core, MAGA ideologies are structured around a conceptual framework that “real Americans” who were historically marginalized by elites. The elites, primed as a nefarious subset of the state, conspires to appropriate the country’s resources from authentic countrymen: white Americans. To remedy the problem, populist leaders established regimes, also called kleptocracies, to maintain the distribution of resources in their favor. The also disabled federal government with the rapid closure and massive layoffs at agencies.
To dissolve state institutions, Trump endorsed a series of policies dismantling federal bureaucracies in response to ongoing shifts in the country’s political posture. In 2025, the Administration, under the auspices of the Department of Government & Efficiency (DOGE) has recommended the “reduction in force” (RIF) for several critical bureaus.
- The U.S Department of Education,
- Health & Human Service (HHS)
- Food Drug Administration (FDA)
- National Institute of Health (NIH)
- Department of State, U.S veterans Department (VA)
- Forest Services
- Minority Business Development Association (MBA)
- Environment Protection Agency (EPA)
- The shuttering of U.S. Agency for Global Media (which oversees Voice of America),
- The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
- The Institute of Museum and Library Services
- The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness
- The Community Development Financial Institutions Fund
- The Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA)
- The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service
Using tactics such as fiscal conservatism as a linchpin to revamp bureaucratic structures, has been a façade to consolidate power across various political institutions and apparatuses. This form of governance has become synonymous with the Trump administration.
Dismantling the “deep state”
One of the main contentions of members within the MAGA movement is structured around the belief that the current U.S government is controlled by a “deep state,” or a group of elitists. This clandestine assemblage represents an intense consolidation of money, power, and wealth. To maintain this positioning, they are submerged within state institutions operating as a catalyst within state apparatuses, and ultimately prohibiting the socio-political economic development of MAGA forces. Thus, MAGA’s remedy is to tear down the ugly parts.
For years, members of the MAGA movement engrossed themselves into destroying the current socio-political economic institutions, along with social forces within the institutions. Then, replace governing leaders with MAGA loyalists dedicated to maintaining a far-right homogeneous agenda. The failure of American institutional controls to prevent the destruction of democratic norms has seen an insurgency of far-right Christian white nationalist religious groups from dominating the political sphere of American politics.
Ideological principles of American democracy have emerged from a series of institutional frameworks influenced by Madison, De Tocqueville, Aristotle, and Jefferson, designed to maintain democracy within the state. Madisonian democracy is frequently composed of clashing, antagonistic principles. Madisonian theory of democracy is the effort of a comprise between the power of majorities and the power of minorities, between the political equality of all the adult citizens on one side, and the desire to limit their sovereignty on the other is now replaced with ideological principles of MAGA political ideological sphere constructed around Christian nationalism.
For MAGA, Christian nationalism, and more specifically, the idea that the U.S. started with a conservative, white Christian identity that must be sustained to achieve their utopian worldview of society. This paradigm sees the U.S. as a sort of fatherland that eliminates the participation and voices of women, and other minority groups to maintain far-right religious politics in the United States.
To implement such a plan MAGA has begun the dismantling of institutional norms, ideals, and the sustainability of American democracy similar to Trojan malicious virus eradicating democratic norms from within liberal institutions.
Consequently, the goal for MAGA is to swap out democratic liberal ideologies with a Christian nationalism that centers the actions of preventing, both legislatively and socially, nonwhite groups from being part of the great American experience. Hence why we see the total obliteration of federal agencies providing certain services and oversight, to the removal or forced resignation of nonwhites in key roles.
The objective of American populism can be differentiated into two ideological perspectives, structured as opposites: to elitism and pluralism. Populists are anti-pluralist and often proclaim themselves the only socio-political-economic forces capable of representing marginalized groups against the elites. To further the point, populist ideological postures have changed the political landscape of electoral politics by implementing frameworks designed to marginalize social forces by bifurcating them within states. These ideological principles underpin populist leaders’ platforms, which aim to unify their base against the rest of society, which is demonstrated by the actions in Trump Administration.
The rise of far-right, populist groups
Populism in the United States is not a new phenomenon and has metamorphosed from historical malignant forces lying dormant in American civil society and political systems. In the U.S., American populism is a transcending movement, with its historical remnants originating from the compromise of 1877 between Republicans and Democrats and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan.
American populism first emerged during the Compromise of 1877, a movement designed to recapture the South and return white supremacy to the helm of Southern institutions. It eliminated the political, economic, and social progress made by newly emancipated Blacks through the implementation of policies designed to marginalize them and restore a whites-only track to prosperity and dominance.
The Great Compromise of 1877 between Republicans and Democrats in the United States led to the withdrawal of northern Federal troops under the auspices of the Republican administration. It brought an end to American Reconstruction, a time after the Civil War where federal authority allotted resources and military protections to Blacks who had just entered society as free persons and American citizens. As well, this period marked massive rebuilding in the south, which was heavily damaged during the war.
The insurgency of the Ku Klux Klan—a white, domestic terrorists group targeting Black communities—ended protectionist measures for freed slaves. Subsequently, the dismantling of the Reconstruction Era served as the fulcrum for perpetual lynching of African Americans, mostly, but not exclusively, in southern states.
Global MAGA cultural hegemony and how it works
European populist movements emerged from nationalistic principles fermenting from nativist ideals constructed in the notion of the fatherland.
On the other hand, American populism, unlike its European counterparts, has more destructive malignant forces. than other populist forces and a compilation of various ideals with its genesis moored within the principles of fatherland, ethnicity, racial formation, Christian nationalism, and class warfare. It is within this paradigm that the ideological divergence between European and American populist forces emerges, leading to the rise of Make America Great Again (MAGA).
To maintain the allure of white supremacy, the Trump administration has used mass media and social networks to persuade social forces that democratic institutions are the cause of “white suffering.” Much of this is seen in actions driven by gerrymandering and campaign finance changes, has fueled ongoing zero-sum conflict between MAGA Republicans and democratic forces over institutional control, similar to disruptions in major European cities like Türkiye, Spain, France, Great Britain, and Hungary. These European states have seen the insurgency of populist leaders such as Tayyip Erdoğan (Türkiye), Georgia Meloni (Italy), Maria Le Pen (France), Victor Orbán (Hungary).
These states have provided Trump the model on how to depoly this argument to rally support and undermine democratic opposition, enabling far-right domination of institutions in the U.S. Specifically, the MAGA approach promotes a male-centered identity politics to divide U.S. social forces by fostering an ‘us versus them’ mentality, targeting marginalized groups and heightening tensions within established institutions seen as the deep state. These ideological divisions make it challenging for innovative democratic policies to emerge within U.S. institutions.
At the same time, Trump’s foreign policy agenda is reshaping geopolitical relationships among regional powers, beginning with the U.S withdrawal from security institutions such as NATO, and has forced other European states to rearm, leading to a potential arms race in Europe. The Trump administrations embrace of proxy forces in the middle east regardless of their criminality, violations of rules of arm conflicts and the Israeli weaponization of foreign aid to create food insecurity. Using starvation as a weapon against the Palestinians during the Palestinian-Israeli conflicts have seen a rise in protest across U.S college campuses was curtailed by the implementation of various institutional restrictions limiting the freedom of opposition social forces of its foreign policy agenda in the middle east.
The actions of the Trump administration have also resulted in protests on university campuses, with the government undermining the sovereignty of educational institutions by withholding government aid to universities, arresting student supporters, and imposing travel bans on foreign students attending universities. These challenges are affecting the viability of democratic institutions, forcing the posturing for regime change, and have created insurmountable democratic challenges to the rise of American populism.
MAGA Against everybody
Trump’s policies have eroded American institutions into what 19th century philosopher, Alexis De Tocqueville called the “absolute sovereignty” of the majority. Under Trump’s reign, there is such political divide that it has ended pluralism, the majority principal threading society. In exchange, a dissent within political institutions has caused grave political polarization.
This new form of political polity has emerged along party lines as unitarian governance, adopting a zero-sum policy that eliminates heterogeneity within American society. This construct places American society in a marginal, bifurcated subsector composed of two groups in a contentious, zero-sum ideological relationship. This zero-sum game has weaponized sub-sects of societies supportive of a right-wing political agenda to dismantle frameworks constructed by democratic institutions, thus crippling benefactors considered the sole recipients of socio-economic welfare programs designed to serve the marginalized.
Part of the zero sum political calculation of MAGA political reign is constructed on crippling or shuttering federal agencies, and terminating thousands of federal workers with expediency, the Trump Administration of American populism is now taken advantage of the erosion of political pluralism. In just a year, he has consolidated power along loyalty lines that have resulted in an expansion of presidential powers that overrides the legislative branch. In short, and brutally, the regime launched a bureaucratic coup against federal agencies to eradicate any resistance against the populist agenda.
What this has caused is a serious political divide in the country led by a “us against them, or MAGA against the others considered the deep state.” Most troubling is that the placeholder for the agencies dismantled is the onset of Project 2025, an agenda that is said to strip federal power and return it to the state. What it has done is incite a scenario similar to the movie franchise, The Hunger Games.
The erosion of institutional constraints has created social dependency and political maldevelopment among state social forces. The dismantling of liberal institutions and the lack of social welfare programs have also placed tremendous strain on municipalities, leading to contention over access to resources. The insurgency of populism has reshaped the functioning of democratic institutions into hybrid institutions found in pseudo-democracies and authoritarian regimes. As the restructuring of American democracy takes shape, institutions have become instruments of populist frameworks designed to consolidate power in the hands of a strongman populist leader, leading to the rise of populism and the erosion of American democracy.
