The fortunes of Mexico and Donald J. Trump are inextricably linked.

When I visited Mexico City in the summer of 2017, locals seemed to have warmed to that reality. Several told a yarn about investing in 11-foot ladders to scale Trump’s 10-foot wall, a joke that always landed if told with levity and confidence. Driving along the Paseo de la Reforma in the capital’s elegant heart, my host and I noticed a large rainbow flag commanding the entrance to the American embassy, affirming Washington’s cultural imperialism. (READ MORE: Five Quick Things: Who Lies About Working at McDonald’s?)

“Trump can’t control his own government!” my friend gleefully chided. The egg was decidedly on this Trump-voting gringo’s face.

It was something of a personal introduction to the administrative state, apparently impervious to electoral democracy. Since that time, a handful of excesses have bubbled to the surface of American public consciousness and highlighted a foreign policy that Rod Dreher has summarized as “queer the Donbass.” 

‘Queer the Donbass’

In February of 2023, Karen Decker, Chargé d’Affaires of the U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, tweeted, “Are Afghans familiar with #BlackGirlMagic and the movement it inspired? Do Afghan girls need a similar movement? What about Afghan Women? Teach me, ready to learn.”

Later that year, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby asserted, “LGBTQ+ rights are…a core part of our foreign policy.” So much so, in fact, that the United States Embassy in the Vatican has sported a giant rainbow flag under the current State Department regime. (READ MORE: Robin DiAngelo’s Plagiarism Exposes the Fraud Behind ‘Anti-Racism’)

In the Central and Eastern Europe region, to which I devote my attention and research, I see the abuses that don’t make headlines across the Atlantic. In Hungary, Ambassador David Pressman (from the Clooney wing of the party) has been a reliable cheerleader for identity politics and regime change. In Poland, Mark Brzezinski (son of Zbigniew and brother of Mika) waves the cultural-imperial flag and brazenly backs the newish liberal government. In Bulgaria, locals refer to “the embassy,” the only one that sports such a moniker; they marvel at how American prestige could collapse so thoroughly in just a decade. In all these countries and countless others, U.S. government money flows into the coffers of left-wing political movements. 

Recent USAID (the government’s foreign-aid arm) grant priorities have included abortion, gender equity, and mobilization of “climate activists.” One information request last year uncovered U.S.-funded projects to promote DEI in Ethiopia. The agency’s Central Europe program, announced in 2022, purports to “[support] new locally-driven initiatives in Central Europe with the goal of strengthening democratic institutions, civil society, and independent media, which are all pillars of resilient democratic societies.” One can easily read the political ramifications between the lines.

A Trump Administration Is Beholden to the Whims of the Bureaucracy

How American foreign policy reached this point is not mysterious. Consider the 2020 election cycle, in which a staggering 93 percent of political contributions from State Department employees and 96 percent of those from USAID employees went to Democrats and associated PACs; financial contributions from employees of these institutions totaled $2.9 million for Democrats and just $200,000 for Republicans. Never mind the interests of American power and prosperity. The foreign-policy apparatus promotes the priorities of the establishment wing of one political party. (READ MORE: Gamers Don’t Want to Deal With DEI)

If President Trump wins this year, the likes of Pressman and Brzezinski will ship out for the Washington cocktail-party circuit, and Republican dignitaries will secure some plum ambassadorships. Yet, we’ve seen this film before — most of the iceberg remains untouched. The U.S. Foreign Service includes some 15,000 Americans at 271 embassies and consulates. For some context, the embassy in tiny Luxembourg employs 32 American direct-hire employees; the embassy in Iceland employs 12. The path of least resistance leaves most of the diplomatic corps intact. Most of these personnel will remain employed and unaccountable — and so the cultural-imperial flag flies in Mexico City. 

Now extrapolate this conundrum across the entire federal government. Education watchers will relate similar anecdotes from the DOE. Criminal justice experts can lament the state of the FBI. Any Republican administration is subject to the whims of the permanent bureaucratic class, which consists of nearly three million people. 

This, of course, is the impetus for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Heritage is just one think tank, and its now-infamous proposal is a drop in a sea of Washington policy ink. The issue shouldn’t be about Heritage, and it shouldn’t even be about Donald Trump. American liberals correctly understand the importance of government staffing and have treated the issue accordingly. They have defined the narrative and hammered it relentlessly.

Institutional Rot Will Destroy Trump’s Legacy

It seems most American conservatives are content to give this issue the abortion treatment, dismissing it as a losing battle rather than crafting a truthful, resonant counter-narrative — in short, embracing something difficult. Too much of the already-limited conservative rhetoric on this topic has focused on theoretical questions of power-wielding that belong in a university political science department. Even respectable conservative commentators are too willing to accept the framing of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Meanwhile, the Left is committed to a bumper-sticker-friendly dictatorship narrative. It isn’t hard to grasp why it is winning — and why the cultural-imperial flag still flutters at our embassies.

Government staffing is a policy issue, but it shouldn’t be dismissed as an electoral one. We hear about Obama-to-Trump union voters, South Texas Hispanics, and Florida Men, but the “institutional-rot” voter is undeniably part of the Trump coalition and a forgotten one at that. For a President Trump concerned with legacy-building and a Republican Party anxious to maintain a coalition that can navigate a tightening map, it should register as a demographic that needs some shoring-up. 

For now, there might be just enough of the 2016 anti-establishment magic, just enough hope — however naïve — that liberalism hasn’t completely trampled democracy in our liberal democracy. If Republicans continue to fumble this issue, who knows how many will decide civic participation is a futile exercise, as countless Britons reportedly have done?

Institutional rot is the 11-foot ladder scaling Trump’s legacy-defining wall. Republican leadership would do well to confront it. Mr. Trump, tear down that flag! 

Michael O’Shea is a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute. Follow him on X: @Michael_F_OShea