Defund the Left: Trump’s Cultural Warfare Explained

Since assuming power in January, President Donald Trump has ordered the destruction of the so-called administrative state (social services, regulatory agencies), revoked and threatened to revoke funding from universities that don’t bend to his political will, and attempted to eliminate anything resembling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs from government, public education, and public health. His administration has also targeted law firms that are even tangentially connected to the prosecution of Citizen Trump. Recently, he issued a memorandum directing the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, a fundraising arm of the Democratic Party, on unsubstantiated right-wing conspiracy claims of accepting foreign contributions. In his effort to defund the left, he’s made America McCarthyite again.

This war on the left and crusade to defund it is not new, although conservatives have never waged it on this scale. This assault has a familiar Republican pedigree, even if the 47th president has taken it to unrecognizable extremes and used a chainsaw rather than a scalpel, as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush’s presidencies did to defund the left. Democrats, for their part, have no equivalent.

The transparent tactic of political warfare is already resulting in widespread unemployment of civil servants, the dangerous weakening of the nation’s public health apparatus, and the dismantlement of scientific research ranging from tuberculosis treatment at Harvard to breast cancer detection methods at Michigan State University.

Masha Gessen, a journalist who draws on her formative years in Putin’s Russia to write about autocracy, observes that Trump is attempting to construct a “mafia state,” defining it as an “absolutely centralized system in which one person…the don, distributes money and power.” Gessen makes comparisons to Russia under Putin, and Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Combining the leadership methods of Chairman Mao and Michael Corleone is a shocking methodology for an American president, but it is not entirely without precedent.

If you go back to the 1980s, the Reagan administration was quite open about trying to defund what it saw as federally supported left-wing projects, such as the Great Society program Volunteers in Service to America, better known as VISTA. Almost from its beginning in 1964, Republicans saw the program as a hotbed of radicalism, even though it was the domestic analog to the Peace Corps, President John F. Kennedy’s signature effort to promote American goodwill during the “long twilight struggle” against communism.

Sam Brown, who served as the ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) under President Bill Clinton, was the director of ACTION, a federal domestic volunteer agency, under President Jimmy Carter. (ACTION oversaw VISTA and other volunteer programs such as Foster Grandparents and the Service Corps of Retired Executives, and it was, in the 1990s, folded into the Corporation for National Service, the umbrella agency for AmeriCorps.) Brown has personal experience with Republican “defund the left” zealotry. When I asked him, over email, to recall his undermined tenure at ACTION, he wrote,

There was a full-on Congressional attack, led by [the late Republican Representative] John Ashbrook [of Ohio], to eliminate funding to organizations funded by ACTION, which I led at the time. They targeted specifically ACORN, Illinois Public Action, and Mass Fair Share, all organizations organizing voter drives and local anti-poverty efforts. They called hearings in the House and used a series of exhausting document requests, meetings, detailed follow-up questions requiring very substantial staff time to respond, and press releases to try to exhaust administrative staff and discredit these organizations and, collaterally, ACTION as the funding agency.

The investigation found nothing of substance but, in the words of Brown, “sucked the life out of many staff and made it more likely that future grants would go to less […] effective organizations.”

Brown offers a succinct assessment of why Republicans moved to discredit ACTION and are now implementing a similar strategy fueled by a cocktail of growth hormones: “Republicans want to defund those they perceive as not only wrongheaded but as their enemies. This is particularly true of any organization organizing for change since that is a longer-term threat to them.”

Reagan accelerated the defunding-the-left tempo. Acting on the counsel of the Heritage Foundation, whose policy agenda, Mandate for Leadership, explicitly called for the elimination of subsidies and tax breaks for “public interest groups,” the Reagan administration attempted to eliminate tax exemptions and grants (sound familiar?) for any organization that practiced “political advocacy.” Due to widespread opposition from religious organizations, charitable groups, and even trade associations, upset that new rules would have restricted their lobbying, Michael Horowitz, then the Office of Management and Budget Counsel and a prominent conservative attorney in the decades since, ended up promulgating a less restrictive set of rules. It is worth noting that the Heritage Foundation is also responsible for the authorship of Project 2025, the playbook of the current Trump administration.

The failure of their war on the non-profit sector did not prevent the Reagan White House and OMB from executing a broader, defund-the-left initiative. Reagan led a relentless assault on the Legal Services Corporation, a federally funded non-profit established by Congress to provide legal aid to the poor. Reagan’s combative posture was not due to “fiscal responsibility” but ideology. Believing that attorneys who work in legal aid are a progressive monolith, Republicans called for the dismantlement of the LSC. Reagan cut their funds by hundreds of millions when those efforts failed.

Meanwhile, Reagan also initiated the policy of staffing government agencies with far-right extremists who harbor hatred for those very agencies. During his two terms, he oversaw the appointment of hundreds of bureaucrats who took Reagan’s rhetoric to heart, such as the infamous declaration, “Government is not the solution to any problem. Government is the problem.” Two of the young bureaucrats were current Fox News host Laura Ingraham and conspiracy theorist provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, who in 2014 pleaded guilty to one felony count of violating voter laws.

Conservative parties exist in every democracy, but there is no tangible equivalent to Republican anti-statism and anti-government militancy. The Conservative Party in the United Kingdom and the Conservative Party in Canada do not run candidates who pledge to destroy the institutions they are vying to lead.

In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich coalesced conservative advocacy groups to, in the words of CLEAR, an environmental watchdog, “Defund the left” by targeting “federal funding of non-profit advocacy organizations.” When George W. Bush became president in 2001, his resident Machiavelli, Karl Rove, pushed for tort reform as a weapon against a class of Democratic donors and agents of legal reform: trial lawyers. In the words of Paul Burka, the former senior executive editor of the Texas Monthly, Rove aimed to “create a permanent Republican majority.”

Rove was also instrumental in accusing ACORN, the now-defunct consortium of community organizations, of “voter registration fraud.” Due to a manipulatively edited video from right-wing propagandist James O’Keefe, who posed as a pimp and asked an ACORN staffer for tips on evading the law, the wrecking ball hit its target. Republicans in Congress, with the aid of mute and frightened Democrats, stripped ACORN of funding.

Over its multi-decade history, ACORN had scandals and failures, including embezzlement by high-ranking staff. There was, though, never evidence of voter fraud—quite the contrary. The principal reason that Republicans defenestrated ACORN is that it was effective at legal voter registration, ushering racial minorities from low-income areas into the electorate.

Peter Dreier, a professor of political science at Occidental College, wrote that the assassination of ACORN “reminds us that America’s current polarization wasn’t inevitable. It was manufactured, a product of the web of big business, conservative media entrepreneurs, and right-wing politicians that led to Trump and his efforts to challenge science, the press, civil liberties, and public policy based on evidence.”

Rove and the W. Bush administration also encouraged tort reform efforts to limit plaintiffs’ ability to launch effective lawsuits and to limit damages. The effort had its policy arguments about supposedly helping businesses thrive in a litigious world. Still, its aim was also to limit the political effectiveness of American trial lawyers who were emerging, along with Hollywood, as a significant source of funding for Democratic candidates at the local, state, and national levels.

Although the efforts of pre-Trump Republicans to defund the left were odious, they, at least, had some basis in reality. They were also narrowly targeted.

Trump, in contrast, has launched a culture war against scientific research, America’s elite colleges, the Cold War icon Voice of America, and, indeed, entire swaths of society that he and his aides have called leftist rather than aiming at modest government agencies or one part of the American bar.

His targets for liquidation are those that William F. Buckley railed against in the 1950s and that Rush Limbaugh labeled as the “four corners of deceit” in the 1990s – government, academia, science, and media. It is a truism to say that “ideas have consequences.” Well, the consequences of the right wing’s anti-intellectualism, suspicion of multiculturalism, desire to impose Christianity on secular life, and growing contempt for science are now creating financial and, in all likelihood, physical carnage.

In this sense, Trump’s purge is more Maoist than Buckleyite. Republicans, from Barry Goldwater to George H.W. Bush, may have complained about elite universities, but they made no effort to crush them. (Bush 41 of Andover and Yale said during the 1988 campaign that Michael Dukakis’s views were born in a “Harvard Yard boutique,” but the university’s president, Derek Bok, had no reason to fear the Skull & Bones man.) Trump, like the warriors of the Chinese Communist Party, is engaged in wholesale destruction. In 1966, the People’s Daily of China published its call for the Cultural Revolution. “Sweep away all the cow demons and snake spirits,” the editorial demanded, calling on the proletariat to “completely eradicate all the old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits that have poisoned the people of China for thousands of years.” The campaign against the “Four Olds” was critical to Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, setting off massacres, book-burning efforts, the erasure of history and renaming of public sites and territories, and the purging of “class enemies” from institutions, political and social, large and small.

The Trump administration has restrained itself from mass murder. Still, it has initiated a Mao-like financial and reputational purging of entire sectors of the country, public and private, that it deems “woke” (rather than bourgeois). In simple terms, the president and his goon squad are waging war against their political opponents, even punishing those whose only “crime,” according to Republican justice, is guilt by association.

The Chronicle for Philanthropy reports that, due to the Trump regime’s war on the non-profit world, non-profit organizations have laid off 10,000 workers in 70 days, but that figure has undoubtedly grown. It’s hard to track various federal judges issuing restraining orders against Trump’s henchmen.

Nature begins a report on the grim crisis facing higher education with a brief list of illustrative examples: “A test for lead contamination in water, a project to measure the oldest light in the Universe, and a study of heat and drought’s effect on the brain are all on ice after President Donald Trump’s administration halted research grants to several elite US universities.” The same story describes “labs on the brink” and public health projects meeting an abrupt end.

An everyone-does-it cynicism defines Trumpism. The fantasy-minded Republicans may accuse Democrats of trying to defund the right, but there is no real-world equivalent. “Defund the Police” was a chant after George Floyd’s murder, but the Democratic Party never embraced it. The defense budget has gone up under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. There’s no Democratic effort to defund agriculture or the oil industry to savage red-state voters. As a general proposition, Democrats seek office to use government as an effective tool to promote the general welfare. Republicans, acting per the motto of Ronald Reagan, see “government as the problem.”

It all operates under what is essentially an illusion. Republican apparatchiks and reactionary bloviators claim that they are merely guarding themselves against a vast left-wing conspiracy. Still, the reality is that there is hardly anything resembling an organized political left in the United States.

Tina Nguyen, a once-rising right-wing media star, details her years with Breitbart and the Daily Caller in her exposé, The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right Wing (And How I Got Out). The most fascinating passages are those about her time trying to track down a story on how the Democratic Party “builds a bench” and advances itself through American culture and institutions. Instead of finding a progressive octopus with tentacles reaching into every corner, she saw hundreds of poorly funded grassroots organizations reacting cycle-to-cycle with no real capacity to execute a long-term plan.

While it is undoubtedly true that the campus culture of elite universities leans left, and as recent investigations of antisemitism have demonstrated, the upper ranks of academia have significant problems, the belief that the entire industry operates in concert as a political indoctrination center is tantamount to an acid flashback. Most institutions of higher education, from community colleges to regional state schools, are apolitical in official comportment and student activity.

Furthermore, there is simply no Democratic equivalent to the current Trump sledgehammer exercise against universities and non-profit organizations. When I asked journalist and former Dean of Columbia University School of Journalism, Nicholas Lemann (a Washington Monthly contributing editor), about the infliction of severe pain on universities, he said, “It would be like if because people on the left grumble about oil companies, the next Democratic President just declared, ‘Ok, there will be no more oil companies,’ and started doing things to make them go bankrupt.” d

Lemann referred to the “blitzkrieg” against higher education as “far, far beyond McCarthyism at its worst.”

McCarthyism ruined lives, weakened American institutions, and demonstrated the dark heart of right-wing ideology that opposes and endangers nothing less than representative democracy. In only a few months, and in the name of their own “cultural revolution,” the Trump administration has placed America on the edge of a much greater catastrophe.

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