On May 30, 2020, five days after the death of George Floyd, the head of a prominent DC-area think tank issued a stentorian condemnation of the killing and the bigotry she said had enabled it. Echoing The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which sought to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery…at the very center of our national narrative,” Kay C. James described racism as a “fatal wound” that had permanently bloodied the American project. “How many more black people must die,” she asked, “until America admits that racism is still a problem in this country?”
Such statements were to be expected from a progressive nonprofit or a virtue-signaling corporation. James, though, was the president of the Heritage Foundation—the conservative think-tank that would go on to develop Project 2025 in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Just five years after James made her statement on Floyd, her successor, Kevin Roberts, would plunge the institution into turmoil by defending Tucker Calson’s interview with a Holocaust denier, Nick Fuentes, who has stated that “white people are every single bit justified in being racist.” (Roberts subsequently apologized.)
The contrast is a synecdoche for the arc of the contemporary right. Haunted by the legacy of “Peak Woke,” conservatives are now rejecting the terms of a cultural settlement that prevailed, with bipartisan support, through Donald Trump’s first term. Behind all the culture-war bluster stood a GOP establishment that was positively tame by today’s standards, less extreme than liberals portrayed it at the time, and more accommodating of progressivism than many Republicans recall.
The first Trump administration celebrated the “contributions of our great minority-owned businesses” and maintained the racial set-asides that gave them preference. The second barred affirmative action in federal contracting.
In 2017, a year after Trump said Caitlyn Jenner could use the women’s restroom in Trump Tower, Texas Republicans killed a bill that would have limited transgender access to public toilets. As of 2026, almost half of US states have passed such measures.
The stated objective of Trump’s first term was border security, a goal that mainstream Democrats professed to share. The stated objective of his second—mass deportations—is anathema to the center-left.
On nearly every culture-war flashpoint, from affirmative action to immigration to transgender issues, the Republican Party has moved to the right of its Trump I baseline, embracing policies and rhetoric that were outside the Overton Window as recently as 2020. The shift cannot be explained by Trump himself, who is if anything a moderate within his own coalition. (Consider his defense of the H-1B program to an exasperated Laura Ingraham.) Nor can it be explained by the regular pendulum swing of partisan politics, given that in his second term Trump has undone not just the policies of his predecessor but those of his first administration.
“The radicalization of the right is best understood as a reaction to the left.”
Instead, the radicalization of the right is best understood as a reaction to the left, which underwent its own transformation over the course of Trump’s first term and, with even greater force, in the aftermath of Floyd’s death. From the race-based allocation of Covid drugs to the proliferation of woke vocabulary in government documents, policies that seemed unthinkable under Barack Obama became the norm under Joe Biden as wokeness hardened into a governing program, conquering institutions and impinging on ordinary life in a way that old-school political correctness never had.
Now, nearly two years into Trump’s second term, the backlash to that program has transformed the conservative movement. “Woke 1” may have peaked, but the backlash to it has been institutionalized, creating a GOP that is more militant—and arguably more effective—than it would have been if Democrats had policed their left flank during the “Great Awokening.”