President Trump’s Friends and Enemies

January 25, 2025 by Stephen Soukup

Trump’s challenge is to focus on restoring prosperity and unity, avoiding the value-driven polarization that could deepen America’s politicization.

For years, President Trump’s political opponents have warned that he represents a profound threat to democracy, that he is a fascist, and even, perhaps, Hitler reincarnated. He will destroy everything great and wonderful about the United States and will turn it into his twisted version of Nazi Germany.

Of course, such hysterics have always been risible. Whatever Trump’s flaws may be, he has never posed a totalitarian risk, and even if he did, the nation’s republican institutions are more than capable of withstanding an attempt to consolidate and abuse power—from a politician on the right at least.

It is ironic, however, given the manias of his opponents, that at this point in his political journey, Donald Trump actually has a unique opportunity to reinvigorate the nation’s founding spirit and reinforce its position as a beacon of hope to men and women everywhere who yearn for liberty and justice.

Ever since the 1960s, and especially since Barack Obama’s presidency, the American social zeitgeist has been increasingly politicized. Starting from the radical feminists’ proclamation that “the personal is political,” slowly but surely, every aspect of American life has become more and more ideologically saturated, leading to our present condition in which everything is politicized and men, women, and even children are unable to find any respite from politics.

As many observers have noted (including yours truly in the conclusion to my book on the politicization of business and capital markets, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital), our current social and cultural scenes very much resemble the “total state” described by the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt—who became the crown jurist of the Nazi regime—analyzed and decried what he saw as the blurring of the line that separated the state from society. This mixing of the two realms, he argued, fostered a permanent state of argument, hostility, and change—in the political realm. Schmitt called this the total state, which he defined as a society that “no longer knows anything absolutely nonpolitical.”

Schmitt went on to suggest that all of this would, in time, compel the people to demand a return to order, leading them to trade their sovereign democracy for a sovereign dictatorship.

Most people who are acquainted with Schmitt’s work (and his willingness to befoul himself and his legacy to join the sovereign dictatorship) are primarily familiar with his “friend” and “enemy” distinctions. In the total state, people and groups come to see others as “friends” or “ene­mies” and to divide up along those lines.

But Schmitt’s theory is more complicated than just that. After all, humans have been dividing themselves into friend and enemy groups since before they were technically humans. This is the way of the world; men, women, wolves, and whatever else segment themselves off into clans or packs, comfortable among their friends, viewing all others as enemies.

Schmitt’s contribution to the friend/enemy dichotomy is the emphasis he placed on “values.” In the total state, the distinction between the two groups is not necessarily defined by traditional dualistic moral concepts like “right and wrong,” “good and evil,” “beautiful and ugly.” Rather, Schmitt argued that the “political enemy” “need not be morally evil or esthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is nevertheless, the other, the stranger . . . each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence.”

In other words, to Schmitt, the modern, post-Enlightenment world is one in which “values” increasingly define our social order, and nothing is free of value-laden political calculation.

Unfortunately, Schmitt was mostly right. In our society today, people love or hate one another based on whether or not they support abortion, on their views about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, on their attitudes about transgender people, especially transgender kids, and whether biological males can become biological females (and vice versa); on their perception of white privilege; on their approach to climate change; and on and on it goes. The United States is now an almost perfect representation of the total state, with friend and enemy group determinations based purely on values.

Or at least that was the case until last November.

Donald Trump won the presidency for one reason: he alone among our presidential candidates since at least 2000 chose to focus almost exclusively on voters’ material interests rather than their values interests. Indeed, he explicitly repudiated the oversaturation of American life with politics and value expressions. He promised to cut taxes, rein in inflation, focus the military on its mission rather than its diversity, pursue a policy of energy abundance, and get the federal government out of the game of promoting values and back to work for the entirety of the American nation. Donald Trump’s campaign was focused explicitly and purposefully on delivering tangible economic benefits rather than victories in the culture wars.

It is no coincidence that Trump picked up considerable support from demographic groups that have, historically, leaned Democratic. Hispanics, black men, blue-collar workers, married women, and countless others shifted toward Trump specifically because he promised to end the federal government’s total war on values and culture and to fight on their behalf for a better economic future.

Some political observers wonder whether Trump drove the change in the political zeitgeist or merely rode the shifting social and cultural winds to victory. The answer to that question is “yes”—which is to say, a little of both. With its over-the-top, all-out obsession with politics and values, the previous administration alienated many people. Trump, in turn, sensed that alienation and built his campaign to take advantage of it. Trump and his advisors were both lucky and brilliant.

The test now for the new administration is a difficult one. This first week of the second Trump presidency has been invigorating and intoxicating. Undoing all of the values-laden social engineering conducted by the last administration was necessary and cathartic. The return to neutral political and values ground provided a just and welcome starting point for this presidency. Ongoing efforts to undo the damage done will also be necessary and will also be invigorating.

Nevertheless, the president and his allies would do well to remember that the broader cultural and historical forces are against them and that they run the risk of becoming too intoxicated with undoing the values onslaught of the last several years and decades. The voters elected Trump to Make America Great Again. If he does so, history will remember him well and will, perhaps, see him as a transformational figure. If he gets too caught up punishing his values-defined enemies, however, he will be just one more political leader who contributed to the politicization of everything, paving the way for the sovereign dictator.

Stephen R. Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)