For years, conservatives have complained that while they can win elections, they lose the fight over the institutions that shape American culture. Under Donald Trump’s second term, that long-standing frustration has hardened into a governing project. The aim is no longer simply to challenge “woke” norms or liberal elites. It is to refashion the country’s cultural infrastructure itself, a pursuit that some on the right have treated as their movement’s white whale.
The clearest example came Sunday at the Kennedy Center. Trump didn’t just attend the annual honors, he remade them. After reshaping the center’s board earlier in the year, the White House proposed its own people to honor. Trump then became the first president to host the ceremony, turning what had long been an apolitical tribute to artistic achievement into a tightly controlled statement about which cultural figures deserve national recognition.
It was not a small gesture. The honors have been one of the country’s most visible cultural platforms, a place where the arts were celebrated outside of partisan politics. Trump’s intervention signaled something larger: that the administration sees cultural authority as a prize worth pursuing with the same intensity it once reserved for judicial appointments or tax policy.
This is not happening in isolation. Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order directing federal museums, monuments, and national park sites to present a more “unifying” narrative of American history. The order gives the administration new influence over how the Smithsonian and other cultural institutions curate exhibitions, and it encourages the restoration of monuments and historical markers removed or altered in recent years. Critics argue it is an attempt to narrow the story the country tells about itself.
At the same time, the administration has stepped up pressure on public broadcasting, rolled back diversity and inclusion programs across federal agencies, and tried to get universities to change their curricula by withholding federal funding. Private companies and media organizations have faced what watchdog groups describe as government-led pressure to change personnel or content in ways that align with the administration’s views.
Put together, these actions amount to a broad effort to reorder the country’s cultural norms. They stand in contrast to the conservative complaint of the 2010s and early 2020s, when the right often framed itself as powerless in the face of liberal dominance in universities, arts organizations, and major newsrooms.
On social issues, the left was slowly winning and creating permanency on abortion, changing family structures, and gay marriage.
Trump’s second term has effectively inverted that equation. His administration is using the levers of government to pursue what earlier conservatives mostly talked about: regaining influence over national symbols, public narratives, and the arbiters of cultural legitimacy.
Even the administration’s National Security Strategy reflects this shift. Analysts noted that the document reads less like a traditional geopolitical blueprint and more like a values statement, defining cultural cohesion as a cornerstone of national security. That framing casts museums, schools, media, and even awards shows as arenas where political and cultural authority intersect.
If successful, the administration’s efforts could reshape how the country understands its past and who is centered in its national story. Museums and memorials are not easily rebuilt once their missions change. Honors bestowed by storied institutions tend to shape public memory. And political pressure, once normalized in cultural arenas, rarely retreats entirely when administrations change.
None of this means conservatives will ultimately succeed in capturing their white whale. Cultural institutions remain diffuse, and resistance — from curators, educators, artists, civil-liberties groups, and a culture defined as much by Netflix and TikTok as by Washington — is already taking shape. But what distinguishes this moment is the scale of the attempt. Trump is not treating culture as a side note; he is treating it as central to how he governs. That will become evident soon enough, from how his administration plans to shape the nation’s 250th anniversary to next year’s World Cup to even proposed UFC fights on the White House lawn.
That is the real development of the past year. Conservatives have long argued that culture drives politics. For the first time, a president is acting as if that is true and is using the tools of the state to try to steer the country’s cultural direction for years to come.
James Pindell is a Globe political reporter who reports and analyzes American politics, especially in New England.