Christopher F. Rufo Donald Trump and the Problem of Force In our age of delicate sensibilities, reforms must be pursued through proxies and abstraction.
Conservatism has two modes: peacetime and wartime. When the social order is stable and healthy, conservatives seek to cultivate and maintain institutions. In times of chaos, a different kind of conservatism emerges, focused not on preservation but reform.
Donald Trump is a wartime conservative. Since his first presidential campaign, he has argued that America is in decline and requires drastic measures to restore its national greatness. In the opening stretch of his second term, he has focused on three policies—mass deportations, cost-cutting through DOGE, and higher education reform—that are aggressive and have caused distress across the political spectrum. Some center-right critics have fretted about the president’s potential “overreach,” while the usual voices on the left have accused him of “fascism” and “authoritarianism.”
Neither analysis is correct, but both gesture at the same thing: Trump is using force. American culture has changed to such a degree that these measures, none of them unprecedented, now appear radical. Elites have become so habituated to highly regulated, feminized environments that any hint of force causes apprehension.
Educated Americans have trouble imagining the use of force, largely because they have isolated themselves from it. Ivy League faculty members cannot fathom, say, putting their hands on an MS-13 gang member and physically ejecting him from the country. The educated classes have become so inured to the physical world that many perceive a pink slip or reduced research funding as an act of genuine violence.
Trump, however, is a builder. He intuitively understands that no reform can be achieved without force. Deportation requires physical removal; cutting waste necessitates firing federal employees; and restoring truth in universities means playing hardball against ideologists. These actions are not authoritarian but the product of prudent decision-making under pressure. Trump has used leverage to restore, rather than preserve, institutions that, he argues, have been corrupted.
I believe the president is right on the merits. But he risks losing the public-relations battle. Though the Left’s hyperbole has lost some of its bite, critics have gained some traction by presenting deportations, cost-cutting, and university reform as acts of cruelty against helpless victims.
This might seem absurd to ordinary Americans. Neither MS-13 members nor Ivy League universities are victims in any sense of the term. But public opinion is generated mostly by elites. The Trump administration should therefore consider how to make its uses of force more palatable to that demographic.
The way to do it is through subtlety. In our age of delicate sensibilities, the most politically palatable uses of force are those that are concealed from public view. Rather than making graphic displays of force, the administration should change incentives, rewrite laws, depersonalize its enforcement actions, and turn each element of reform into an abstraction.
For example, on deportation: while the administration is correct to highlight the forceful deportation of foreign gangsters, it would be wise to refrain from making cartoons of deported women, even if some are fentanyl dealers. Instead, the administration should implement employment verification and tax remittances, and reduce illegal immigrants’ access to public services. The only way to deport at scale is to change the incentives such that people deport themselves.
Likewise with DOGE and the universities: enforcement actions should shift incentives and create as little visual material for the Left as possible. Rather than deport a Tufts graduate student or remove gender books from a military library, for example, the administration should simply terminate funding for the university and shut down the military’s DEI department as an administrative unit. To the extent that the administration can depersonalize its reforms, it will accomplish more with less risk.
The Right might lament the necessity of concealing strength. Trump is famous for attending Ultimate Fighting Championship matches, and conservatives generally are comfortable with symbols of force, including firearms. But politics requires operating prudently within a given culture, and the culture of America’s knowledge class is decidedly uncomfortable with the physical manifestations of reform.
This does not mean that the administration should back off from any of these policies. It means that it should pursue them with more stealth—and, ultimately, more success.
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