During its first month in office, the Trump administration has unleashed a whirlwind of executive actions that have taken both his enemies and allies by surprise. Americans are not accustomed to the conservatives of the Republican Party taking advantage of electoral wins. In victory, Republicans typically talk about “reaching out across the aisle” in trying to appease the left, while the only “reaching out” victorious Democrats do is to grasp spoils and squeeze their opponents’ throats.

Not so Donald Trump. Having survived assassination plots and cynical attempts to imprison him for life on specious charges, Trump is not taking any prisoners. The 47^th president is like a general overlooking his defeated enemy fleeing the field of battle and then telling his captains, “Run them down!” It’s refreshing to see a leader on the American right expand his control after victory. Trump’s executive orders that take territory from the left include:

• Declaring a national emergency at the border and accelerating the deportation of illegals.
• Ending “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) policies within federal agencies and DEI preferences in federal contracting.
• Ending the federal funding of abortion.
• Cracking down on the deep state bureaucracy by forcing federal workers to return to the office and encouraging buyouts; and, in some cases, threatening the existence of entire federal agencies.
• Destroying USAID and uncovering the bizarre and ridiculous cultural destabilization projects it funded, including the spreading of LGBTQ ideology across the world.

Even more significant than these changes was Trump’s alteration of U.S. policy regarding Ukraine, Russia, and the European Union.

The full impact of these changes began to be felt in Europe when U.S. Vice President JD Vance delivered a speech to the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 14. Vance reiterated Trump’s comments that the Ukraine War should be ended and that Europe should do more to pay for its own defense. Vance then rebuked EU leaders for the political repression of their own citizens and for unleashing mass migration from the Third World. Vance expressed shock over comments made by former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton in January. Breton praised the cancellation of Romania’s election when a candidate critical of NATO won. He hoped Germany would annul any election in which the right-wing Alternative for Germany party won.

“These cavalier statements are shocking to American ears,” Vance said. “For years, we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy.”

Vance went on to intimate that the EU was acting more like the Soviet side in the Cold War, which “positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent.”

“Consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections,” Vance said. “Were they the good guys? Certainly not.”

“The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”

The shock on the faces of the assembled EU leaders was palpable, and they met Vance’s remarks with stony silence. In the days that followed, the chairman of the conference, German diplomat Christoph Heusgen, appeared close to tears during his closing remarks. “After the speech of Vice President Vance on Friday, we have to fear that our common value base is not that common anymore,” Heusgen said.

Vance’s remarks were historic in that they marked a break between the U.S. and the EU’s globalist leaders, who have been operating totalitarian, open-borders, and culturally leftist regimes across Europe. They have inflicted this tyrannical rule with the support of American Democratic Party leaders, deep state bureaucrats, and nongovernmental organizations like USAID.

The real consequences of this break followed days later in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when U.S. and Russian leaders met and made a number of significant steps toward thawing relations between the two countries and ending the war in Ukraine. The U.S. and Russia will restore staff at their respective embassies in Moscow and Washington, and after the meeting, Trump harshly criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for suspending elections in Ukraine and suggested that this leader bore some responsibility for instigating the war. President Trump also intimated that Russia should be readmitted to the G7.

These events left European leaders aghast, but neither they nor Zelensky had any say about the rapprochement between the U.S. and Russia.

Back in the U.S., the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, still dominated by neoconservatives, expressed unhappiness about recent events in Munich. The WSJ editorial board called the events in question “discouraging, not least [for] making concessions to Vladimir Putin without getting anything in return.” Before the Munich meeting, the Post ran an editorial by the militantly neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies insisting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio must set the record straight on Trump’s “America First” policy. Trump’s stance should highlight “strength, not retreat.” The U.S. should encourage European leaders to spend more on their own defense but should also make clear that the U.S. would stand by Europe and Ukraine and take a firm hand against Putin.

Instead, the “firm hand” presented to Putin was a handshake.

It’s not hard to see in the WSJ and Post editorials an attempt to harmonize Trump’s “America First”policies with the neoconservative agenda. This program entails proxy wars with Russia, the escalation of conflict with Iran and China, and the projection of American power across the globe in the name of “our democracy.” The neoconservative press is still high on our superior values, as if we’re both an unassailable global hegemon and the source of global political morality.

It’s increasingly clear that these assumptions are questionable. U.S. debt at $36 trillion is in nosebleed territory, and the U.S. population, especially its younger cohorts, is suffering from high inflation and increasingly unable to afford housing or find quality work. The U.S. empire has built some 800 military bases to project power across the world, but at home U.S. infrastructure is crumbling, crime and drug addiction are rampant, and social institutions, like traditional marriage and nuclear families, are collapsing.

The U.S. military is overstretched, and recruitment has been lagging over the past decade. In Asia, China has emerged as the leading regional power and is running economically neck-and-neck with the U.S. China has also been taking steps to counter U.S. naval power in the South China Sea. The Trump administration’s attempts to end the war in Ukraine are thought to be part of a pivot toward countering China. But we might ask whether it makes any more sense to send the American military to fight China in its own backyard over Taiwan than to fight Russia over Ukraine.

Yet the impulse to try to dominate the rest of the world springs eternal. In early February, former State Department official Mike Benz, who has been tracking abuse of USAID by Democrats to fund their own patronage network and left-wing causes overseas, delivered a confusing message to his right-wing MAGA supporters. While it’s great that USAID is being destroyed, he said, in reality most of its programs will continue—even “transgender dance parties”—except under new ownership at the U.S. State Department, under Secretary Rubio. Benz acknowledged that the MAGA base that put Trump into power may not like this reality, but the rainbow-flag cultural programs are important to destabilize the socially conservative enemies of America, like China, Venezuela, and Iran. This should be no surprise, explained Benz, since the first Trump administration “greenlit the same women’s empowerment, LGBT, ethnic minority, seemingly woke things simply to advance Trump’s stated U.S. foreign policy.”

Days after delivering this message to his online supporters, Benz took this message to Tucker Carlson’s audience, giving an example of why it would be in America’s interest to fund “transgender dance parties” in Venezuela if it helped to oust from power President Nicolás Maduro. Significantly, Benz didn’t find a receptive audience in this milieu. “It’s not at all clear that overthrowing Maduro is in America’s interest,” Tucker said.

A loud exile community in Florida wants it—more foreigners who come here bringing their stupid feuds into our country and using political donations to make the U.S. government settle their scores. It’s like, ‘Get out of here!’ It’s totally not our problem. I feel that about the Gaza thing, and I feel that as an American it’s a totally fair position to have…. Two, there is a moral quality to it. If you are going to say the United States is better than other countries, then you can’t just assassinate people you don’t like, you can’t just totally destroy their social fabric. You have to make a straightforward, honorable case and allow the people of that country to decide using democratic means, because you are for democracy. And if you aren’t for democracy, then don’t say you are.

In his response, Tucker articulated a true “America First” position against the hackneyed uniparty defense of the American Empire, one that presupposes a runaway intelligence community and military intervention across the globe.

Attempts to redefine “America First” into what is essentially the same old neoconservative/neoliberal consensus of past decades may unfortunately win out. But so far, it seems that Trump and Vance are trying to chart a new course.

(This editorial will appear in the March 2025 print issue of Chronicles Magazine.)