Donald Trump Takes On America's Elite

The US President appears determined to demolish the pillars of US liberalism.

- Guy Chazan

In between trying to end the war in Ukraine, picking fights with judges and refashioning the federal government, US President Donald Trump dropped into the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington last week — his first visit since installing himself as its new chairman.

Mr Trump has promised to rid one of the US' leading arts venues of "woke" influences, "drag shows" and "other anti-American propaganda", and usher in a "golden age in arts and culture". "We have to straighten it out," he told reporters on Air Force One. That mission is part of a multipronged assault on some of America's elite institutions, an offensive whose scale and intensity have stunned the country's liberal establishment.

From Hollywood to New York's Upper East Side, America's bien pensants are reeling from the return of Mr Trump, the man from Queens who prefers the company of UFC fighters and manosphere bros to liberal luminaries.

In recent weeks, his administration has targeted Columbia University, dismantled the US Agency for International Development, and shut down Voice of America in what, to many, looks like a calculated campaign against bastions of liberal opinion.

"What the Trump people have realized is that capturing the state is not enough," said Mr John Ganz, a historian and author of When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, And How America Cracked Up In The Early 1990s. "They also have to put pressure on the other defensive positions of liberalism, which is where its real power is — in the media and academia."

Ever since former US president Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, presidential candidates have tried to get elected by railing against all-powerful elites. They often temper the populist rhetoric once in office.