• U.S. Foreign Policy
• United States

May 29, 2025, 5:00 AM View Comments ()

U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration have moved so fast since retaking office that it is easy for observers to lose sight of the forest for the trees. The wide-ranging scope of the administration’s actions, along with the frequent inconsistencies, norm-breaking methods, and apparent rush, can give the impression that there’s no overarching plan.

Yet those who see the administration’s doings as just an incoherent jumble of actions reflecting the personalistic whims of an impulsive, mercurial president are missing the larger picture.

Trump and his team are pursuing a relatively cohesive vision, one best understood as a combination of four major interrelated endeavors: a sociocultural project, an economic project, a political project, and a foreign-policy project. To understand where Trump is trying to take the United States, it is necessary to understand each of these projects on its own terms. Added together, they aim to rewrite the values, norms, and goals central to the United States’ national identity, redirecting the country onto a fundamentally more conservative, inward-looking, and less democratic trajectory.

1. A conservative society

Trump’s first project is a sociocultural transformation of American society, seeking to make it fundamentally more conservative across many dimensions.

The Trump administration defines “conservative” in both familiar and new ways. It embraces long-standing culture-war priorities, including law and order, so-called traditional social values, and a greater place for religion in public life. But it layers onto this a pointed anti-elitism, manifested most sharply in its attacks on elite universities, that contrasts with the economic and cultural elitism traditionally associated with American conservatism.

These values have shaped the issues at the forefront of the Trump administration’s sociocultural agenda. Scorched-earth immigration policies are intended to foster law and order, reduce white status anxiety, and decrease job competition for working-class Americans, while the strenuous attempts to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in both public and private institutions reflect the administration’s desire to undo what it regards as a decades-long progressive reengineering of society.

Alongside these two major thrusts, the administration is pursuing an array of additional social policy changes, drawing from either traditional culture-war views or the new MAGA populism. These include loosening gun control regulations, restricting access to abortion and birth control, prioritizing Christian values in public life, increasing school choice, decimating the Department of Education, reshaping policies related to transgender people, attacking the medical consensus on childhood vaccines, among other policies.

2. A remade economy

As they reshape society, Trump and his team also seek to remake the U.S. economy. They emphasize major elements of the orthodox conservative economic agenda of recent decades: lower taxes, reduced regulations, and higher energy production, especially using fossil fuels. Although these echo previous Republican administrations, the Trump team is taking them much further—not just trimming regulations, for example, but attempting to deconstruct the regulatory state root and branch, and not just ignoring the climate crisis but actively reversing efforts to address it.

To these familiar conservative economic priorities, the administration has added a more Trumpian goal: reconfiguring the U.S. economy toward greater domestic manufacturing. The flamethrower-like imposition of tariffs serves this goal, though it also reflects the president’s love of tariffs as a means of punishing other countries for what he believes are hostile trade policies toward the United States and for giving him leverage to use elsewhere.

Alongside Trump’s conventional economic policies are actions that involve financial self-dealing for the president and his family, advisors, and supporters. These include eliminating accountability guardrails, such as firing inspectors general of federal agencies; rewarding contributors in unprecedented ways, like pardoning a convicted felon who donated to Trump’s 2024 campaign; allowing Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team to attack federal entities responsible for legal and regulatory oversight of Musk’s business endeavors; creating a personal Trump meme coin and then rewarding its investors with a special presidential dinner; and much else. For some observers, self-dealing “is such a defining theme of this administration” and best understood as an economic goal of equal or even greater importance than any of its stated national economic aims.

Read More

America Still Has a ‘Values-Based’ Foreign Policy

It’s increasingly difficult to understand Trump’s foreign policy without an ideological lens.

Argument

|

Oren Samet

How America Blew Its Unipolar Moment

An international order founded not on institutions but on hegemonic benevolence proved impossible to sustain.

Argument

|

Max Bergmann

When the Supreme Court Stood Firm on Habeas Corpus

Stephen Miller’s recent remarks about suspending the writ echo attempts at presidential overreach after 9/11.

Analysis

|

Julian E. Zelizer

3. A new political system

Trump and his team are also seeking to restructure the U.S. political system so that executive authority is controlled by a president who reigns supreme over all other parts of the executive branch, is fully dominant vis-à-vis all other parts of the government, and is able to suppress or at least greatly limit domestic criticism and challenges.

In pursuit of this super-presidentialist vision of the executive branch, Trump has asserted expanded power over independent agencies, taken steps to gain greater political control over the civil service, and empowered DOGE to lead a weakening and depletion of federal bureaucracy. Trump is injecting greater partisanship into civil-military relations. He seeks even tighter control over the heads of federal agencies, appointing poorly qualified people who lack the professional authority for the positions they occupy and placing political “minders” around agency heads to ensure they do his bidding.

With the rest of the government, Trump has foremost sought to limit the ability of the courts and Congress to constrain his power. The president and his team excoriate judges who rule against administration policies, question courts’ authority to limit executive power, and ignore or only partially and slowly obey judicial rulings they dislike. The administration is challenging Congress’s budgetary role by impounding appropriated funds, dismantling federal agencies and other institutions without congressional permission, and seeking to reduce or ignore congressional oversight generally.

The administration is also attempting to circumscribe the power of state and local governments, threatening to withhold funding to specific states and localities to make them conform to federal policy dictates, such as the enforcement of immigration policy.

The administration is working to curtail opposition through legal challenges, financial threats, and rhetorical attacks on political and civic actors. This includes retribution against lawyers associated with past legal actions against Trump, attacks on independent media, Justice Department investigations of political groups that oppose the administration, and attacks on universities and other civic institutions that are seen as not following the administration’s wishes relating to DEI and other issues.

4. A changed role in the world

Finally, Trump and his team are transforming U.S. foreign policy under the general banner of “America First.” They operate from Trump’s conviction that the United States has long put other countries’ interests ahead of its own and suffered from freeloading and mistreatment by others.

Central to this project is withdrawing the United States from its role as a guarantor of the international rules-based security and economic order and instead pursuing transactional deals that directly benefit the United States, emphasizing coercion more than cooperation and immediate national interests rather than broader international values.

On the security side, this means reducing U.S. security guarantees and commitments and shifting defense burdens onto partner countries. The administration’s pursuit of a negotiated peace between Russia and Ukraine and of a nuclear deal with Iran is a major element of this intended reduction—as well as a way to fulfill Trump’s aspiration of being a global peacemaker. Another part of the “America First” outlook is reducing U.S. participation in international institutions and ending or avoiding legal commitments that may constrain U.S. power. Somewhat unexpectedly, Trump has added territorial expansionism to this outlook—in Canada, Gaza, Greenland, and the Panama Canal.

On the economic side, the Trump administration is using tariffs and other forms of economic or diplomatic pressure to compel other countries to reduce tariffs on U.S. goods and to buy more goods from the United States, especially natural gas and oil. The “America First” economic agenda also entails maximizing U.S. access to global reserves of strategic minerals and largely ceasing to provide economic development aid to other countries.

One additional dimension of the United States’ foreign-policy transformation does not fit with this transactionalist outlook but instead has a more ideological cast. Trump is building a network of right-wing populist friends and seeks to advance their political fortunes. This includes leaders such as Viktor Orban of Hungary, Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, and Javier Milei of Argentina, and far-right parties or politicians in opposition to incumbent democratic governments, such as the Alternative for Germany party and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Related to this effort has been the dismantling of most of the United States’ international democracy aid, which the Trump administration has claimed was often being used against these populist leaders and parties.

A unified vision

One can identify plenty of tensions among these four projects. It is difficult, for example, to square the appeals for a reduced role of the federal government with the administration’s intrusive assertion of federal power in certain domains.

But overall, the Trump administration views these projects as mutually reinforcing. Transforming the U.S. economy goes hand in hand with resetting the U.S. international economic posture. Establishing an all-powerful, unconstrained executive is not just a personal goal for Trump but also essential to imposing heavy-handed sociocultural changes and pursuing a highly personalistic foreign policy in which he believes he can “run the country and the world.”

Inconsistencies and tensions are certainly visible within each of the projects. On the economic front, for example, there are sharp conflicts between the goal of creating a business-friendly economy and the aggressive use of tariffs. In the foreign-policy domain, the desire to reduce U.S. security commitments is at odds with Trump’s desire for territorial expansion.

One can trace these inconsistencies to the fact that Trump’s team is comprised of very different political forces and figures. Yet within this group there exists enough basic agreement on the overall vision represented in these four projects to keep moving ahead, inconsistencies and all.

Each project represents a radical break from the past. The sociocultural project foresees a sharp turn away from the core elements of the progressive agenda that has shaped U.S. life in recent decades. The economic project envisages a major restructuring toward greater domestic manufacturing, revised relations with top U.S. trade partners, and a drastically reduced regulatory role for the government. The political project aims for soft authoritarianism defined by super-presidentialist predominance within the executive, primacy of the executive over the judiciary and Congress, and a constrained and compliant civil society. The foreign-policy project wants to eschew the United States’ role as the linchpin of the rules-based international order into an unashamedly self-interested power pursuing narrowly defined economic and security interests.

Taken together, they represent the most profound attempt to reshape the United States and its international identity in living memory. Those who oppose the administration have focused primarily on its methods, which is understandable given how unprecedented, lawless, and reckless many of them are. Yet gaining wider traction requires conveying to Americans the larger trajectory that Trump is pursuing and articulating a counter vision of equal sweep and ambition.