President Trump and his advisers are embracing the culture wars one month into the new administration, targeting media outlets, cultural institutions, sports and more.
While Trump has followed through on plans to crack down on immigration and reorient U.S. foreign policy since beginning his second term, it is the battles over cultural issues that animated his supporters on the campaign trail that increasingly are making headlines and stirring controversy.
Trump signed an executive order banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports, a pledge that regularly drew raucous cheers during his rallies.
He signed an order ending government support for the use of paper straws.
He fired the leadership of the Kennedy Center and installed himself as chair.
And his White House has blocked The Associated Press from accessing certain spaces because of its editorial guidance on Trump’s order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
None of this is accidental.
The president’s allies and advisers view the actions as a way to rack up wins that resonate with the Republican base, as well as some independents who embraced Trump’s promise to return to “common sense.”
“He may have ironically benefited from that four-year hiatus in terms of the American people’s appetite for some of his policies, because I think they’ve seen the failures of the Biden administration,” said one source close to the White House.
While some Democrats see the focus on cultural issues as an opening to attack Trump for failing to tackle inflation or bring down grocery costs as he promised he would do upon taking office, others say the president’s electoral success underscores how those issues resonate with voters.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) over the weekend suggested the 2024 election was one “based on culture” and should be a wake-up call for Democrats.
“I don’t think the kind of notion that some in my party say, ‘We just gotta turn out more people,’ I think they did turn out more people. And folks that we thought were going to go for Democrats aren’t,” Warner said at a Politico event on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
“I think a lot of that goes back to culture,” he added. “Until you can make a cultural connection, I’m not sure people are going to listen to you on issues.”
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump sought to tap into frustrations among Americans that the Biden administration and Democrats had pushed the country too far to the left on day-to-day issues like sports, arts and entertainment and language.
In his first weeks in office, Trump has used executive orders to battle against cultural institutions that he and other conservatives have deemed too liberal or “woke.”
He has used executive action to target diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across the federal government. Trump directed the government to halt federal DEI programs on his first day in office and placed federal employees working in DEI offices on leave.
Trump went to battle with a major cultural institution, the Kennedy Center, by removing members of its board of directors and putting ally Richard Grenell in charge. Trump vowed there would be “no more drag shows, or other anti-American propaganda.”
One of Trump’s first executive orders stated that the government would only recognize “two genders: male and female.”
The president and his administration have reinstated a ban on transgender troops serving in the military, and Trump signed an executive order banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports.
Most of the foreign assistance spending cuts the White House has touted have not been examples of fraud, but of funds used to support LGBTQ or diversity initiatives abroad.
Most recently, Trump aides have sparred with The Associated Press after the media outlet, which has a global readership, said it would continue to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as such while acknowledging Trump’s order to declare it the “Gulf of America.”
White House officials and other Republicans see the president’s executive orders as delivering on campaign promises and seizing on what they view as a significant mandate from the public to take action on cultural issues.
A CBS/YouGov poll conducted Feb. 5-7 found 70 percent of surveyed voters said Trump is doing what he promised on the campaign trail, compared to just 30 percent who said Trump was diverging from what he had promised.
The same poll found 53 percent of surveyed voters approved of Trump’s job performance through the opening weeks of his term, a notable figure for someone who spent much of his first term with an approval rating in the low 40s.
The CBS/YouGov poll also found 45 percent of surveyed voters said Trump was focusing the right amount on ending DEI programs and on cutting foreign aid programs, a sign some of his culture war battles resonated with the public.
But the same poll found a potential warning sign for Trump, and one that some Democrats are hoping to exploit in the coming weeks: The CBS/YouGov poll found 66 percent of surveyed voters said Trump was not focused enough on lowering prices.
Democrats are expected to ramp up their focus on kitchen-table issues as attention shifts to Republicans’ plans for a reconciliation bill that includes tax cuts and proposed spending cuts that could target programs many Americans rely on.
“Republicans know their biggest liability is that they’re ripping middle-class families off in plain sight — raising the prices they promised to ‘immediately’ lower while taking away health care; and all to make room in the budget for tax giveaways to billionaires and rich special interests,” said Andrew Bates, a former spokesperson in the Biden White House.
“Poll after poll shows voters aren’t being tricked by diversionary bulls— like Trump making himself the head of the Kennedy Center; they were promised costs would drop on ‘Day One,’ and they’re frustrated the GOP’s actively doing the opposite,” Bates added.
