TRUMP AND HIS DOMESTIC POLICY AGENDA

Foreword

While international media attention is focused on Ukraine, Trump is advancing his domestic policy agenda in America and making significant progress, crucial to regime change in the United States. Until now, America has been the nation of the future, a nation that has done everything and its opposite in the name of progress. The American-led world order, American hegemony, was dreamed of and then built starting in the 1990s on the belief that it embodied progress and the ultimate goal of human development. But this faith has deteriorated, creating an identity crisis in the United States, divided to the point of endangering national cohesion. 

Thus, the American crisis has produced a ruling class, the Trumpian one, that is against progress. The attack on progress is an attack on the liberal elites of both the right and the left, whom Trumpians accuse of having de-Americanized America. It is an attack on progressive ideology, on the belief that a class, an enlightened elite, must lead the rest of the recalcitrant population toward a goal it has identified as the holder of truth and moral superiority.

Therefore, it is an attack on the basis fostering progressivism, namely liberalism, an attack on the concept of liberal democracy and the idea that America must support and lead a liberal world order. Trumpians do not believe it is possible to have a world order centered on a single country, America, which has exercised its global leadership since the end of World War II.     

It is an attack on liberalism and the liberal principles of the Founding Fathers, which this Trumpian ruling class believes are no longer adequate to hold society together.

Cohesion is so low, the hatred among people toward institutions and American history is such that the main factor of American power in recent decades is lacking: if you are attacked, you put aside all internal divisions and unite, then you turn against the enemy who attacked you to defeat him decisively. Lacking this cohesion, if you get slapped, instead of uniting, you disintegrate further.

Liberalism

By relativizing all truths and refusing to claim ultimate validity, liberalism undermines its own foundation. Relativism leads to disorientation, and disorientation awakens the longing for authority. Thus, liberalism’s intellectual weakness is unmasked, legitimizing a return to discipline, order, and power politics. If freedom degenerates into arbitrariness, then an authoritarian elite must set the course. This reasoning can be heard in the rhetoric of Trump-aligned ideologues. The talk of a “strong man,” of “law and order,” of borders and simple rules reflects precisely this longing for a new kind of authority.

This fundamental critique of liberalism resonates with the distinction between negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty means freedom from coercion (the classical ideal of liberalism). Positive liberty, by contrast, means the ability to shape one’s life meaningfully and to embed oneself in larger contexts. But liberalism focused almost exclusively on negative liberty. It guaranteed rights but offered no answers to the question of how people should use this freedom. And so, the liberal promise remains ambivalent: it liberates, but it also overwhelms.

Once freed from external constraints, individuals are suddenly tasked with shaping their own lives. Yet not everyone has the resources, the education, or the inner drive to use this freedom constructively. Many lack the strength to take the difficult path toward insight and maturity.

How to weaken liberalism?

One way to weaken liberalism is to grant enormous powers to the president through the unitary executive theory, developed by some influential figures in the Trump administration. The theory of the unitary executive suggests that Congress has very limited or no power to limit the president's authority over the executive branch. Proponents of this theory argue that Article II of the Constitution vests all executive power in a single president, giving the president sole control over the executive branch and the power to remove any subordinate officials at will, unhindered by congressional statute or interference.

The Constitution essentially vests the president with all executive power: there's nothing he can't do. He can fire any official, not just political appointees but also career ones, and no agency is completely independent. All executive power is concentrated in the president, and the administration's first moves have been in this direction. Just remember all the firings, the dismantling of entire agencies. What happened next? The federal courts, the federal judges, blocked almost all of them, as was largely predictable.

But the Trump administration used legal tools to immediately appeal to the Supreme Court, which, having a conservative majority (five of the six conservative justices are Catholic), made decisions, albeit partial, favorable to Trump's agenda. The Supreme Court ruled on June 27, 2025, that federal district courts likely exceeded their equitable authority by issuing universal preliminary injunctions that stop government policies from being enforced nationwide. The Court held that such injunctions provided broader relief than necessary to address the specific harms faced by the plaintiffs in the case, suggesting that universal injunctions are an inappropriate use of equitable power.

A universal injunction is therefore a precautionary measure taken by a judge who suspends a law pending a review of its validity. This measure was used as a political tool. As soon as a law was passed that the opposition deemed harmful, the opposition would file a lawsuit in a court with its own political leanings, and the judge would block the measure (judges, not just federal ones, are elected by the people and campaign as if they were politicians, drawing on political parties).

What's happening to the US Supreme Court?

So what was happening? During the Trump administration, Democrats in Washington, DC, where the judges are almost all Democrats, appealed to a court to block Trump's measures. The Supreme Court has banned lower court appellate judges from blocking lay-offs in federal bureaucracies and restructuring of federal bureaucracies. This doesn't mean it has ruled in Trump's favor and authorized the theory of a unitary executive: it has simply allowed him to proceed, reserving the right to decide and reaffirming its competence and authority on such matters.

Another example is immigration. This summer, the Supreme Court appears to agree with the Trump administration's broader plan, namely to stop illegal immigration, excessive immigration, and strengthen the presidency. This does not, however, mean closing every channel to immigration.

The coming months will demonstrate the level at which the Supreme Court is willing to authorize regime change, the ongoing revolution. Indeed, a fierce battle is underway in the United States between Trump and the powers that act as counterweights (checks and balances) to the executive branch, built over more than a century of American history. Therefore, one can speak of regime change by introducing, for example, additional measures that appear separate but are part of this plan, such as deploying the National Guard to Washington.

By seeking to strengthen the presidency, they are also attempting to change the dominant culture in America, a culture that had veered sharply toward wokism, toward a form of cultural leftism deemed harmful and self-destructive.

All this is happening at a time when America is in crisis and Democrats can complain all they want, but the culture they embody no longer interests anyone.

Washington, DC, is a Democratic bastion, but Trump is determined to demonstrate that he can change the situation in that city. Thus, he is even determined to reverse the electoral fortunes.

Deployment of the National Guard

Trump has ordered the deployment of the National Guard from Republican-controlled states like Ohio and South Carolina. The bulk of the troops are not deployed in the most troubled neighborhoods, but in Downtown or Northwest (the wealthiest neighborhood) to guard the seats of power, monuments, and parks.

A spectacular effort, with Trump flexing his muscles. The National Guard has so far arrested around a thousand people, mostly homeless people, clearing out encampments, even in the city's wealthy neighborhoods, and then targeting immigrant communities, seeking out illegal immigrants to continue the rapid deportation rate initiated by the Trump administration.

This move in Washington is a test, a dress rehearsal for what Trump intends to do in other cities governed by Democrats: Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles.... The intent is to exploit the discontent and popular dissatisfaction in large cities, which are increasingly abandoned by people because they are unlivable, with excessive crime, and with utterly inadequate and overpriced services.

That is, it serves to further undermine the credibility of the only place in America where Democrats govern: the big cities. It's also an electoral move that, more generally, also serves to seize control of city governance. When the National Guard was deployed to Los Angeles at the beginning of the summer, the intent wasn't just to quell riots related to raids against illegal immigration, but to target the so-called sanctuary cities that refuse to enforce federal laws on illegal immigration, and which have become havens for illegal immigrants.

It's no coincidence that a large part of California's economy is supported by the exploitation of the labor of illegal immigrants. And that's what the Trump administration wants to target.

Also because the idea is that, beyond a certain quota of non-assimilating immigrants, social cohesion collapses. Trumpians even put forward numbers: beyond 15% of the population being foreign-born, a cohesive population is impossible. This quota has already been exceeded, so they're trying to reduce it. Interestingly, however, this discourse is neither explicitly racist nor explicitly nativist. The point is not to recreate white America. The point is to recreate a center, a heart, a nucleus, a dominant lineage with a culture capable of transmitting and educating, a culture to be passed down to future generations.

So the intent is to remedy the excesses of multiculturalism without abolishing diversity (JD Vance is married to an immigrant, the daughter of Indian immigrants).

Regime Change

This regime change is based on a cultural change in America, which is being pursued through the Supreme Court by intervening in federal powers. To achieve this, a majority in Congress is needed. Therefore, in view of the elections, a law is being redrawn to benefit the Republican Party.

Texas has approved a new electoral map that redraws the boundaries of congressional districts (that's what the electoral colleges in America are called). Thanks to gerrymandering (the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries), a political party can gain significant advantages. It's a fairly common practice in America.

The Republicans governing Texas know that Trump is afraid of losing his House majority, where he holds a razor-thin majority. The number of seats he holds over the Democrats can be counted on one hand. Trump fears losing not only for this reason, but also because Trump's current support is quite low. The Big Beautiful Bill passed this summer, with significant cuts to social spending, has had a negative impact on Trump's electorate as well.

A divisive and dangerous policy

Then Americans are also starting to feel the inflation resulting from tariffs, which could ultimately undermine the Republicans in the House. So much so that the party has ordered, or at least strongly advised, elected officials to avoid rallies and meetings with their constituents, because these meetings often end with tomatoes being thrown at Republican lawmakers, accused of failing to fulfil their duties and being excessively subservient to President Trump.

So Texas approved a new map that will allow Republicans to gain five more seats than Democrats. But this creates districts that have no geographical coherence. It's not a division by neighborhood, but simply a division made for purely political purposes, to favor the election of one member of one party or another.

Democratic-governed California responded to this Texas map by authorizing the Sacramento Legislature to draw a new map that redraws the boundaries to favor the election of five additional Democrats, thus overriding or counterbalancing Texas' decision.

But while California's new map could be rejected by an independent commission, in Texas just a vote by the state Congress is required, which is clearly dominated by Republicans. On the other hand, states like Florida and Indiana, governed by Republicans, have also promised to counter any new moves by Democrats.

Conclusions
All this shows how partisan and apocalyptic politics in America has become. Everything is geared toward the brutal conquest of power, with the idea that if the rival wins, it will all be over. This isn't a way of doing politics: in fact, it's probably one of the main reasons America is tearing itself apart, no longer capable of facing major international challenges. It's a crisis of democracy, because democracy isn't just about winning elections and governing, but above all about respecting the opposition, allowing the opposition to return to power. This is precisely what's being called into question, and not just in the United States.