Woke No More: Trump’s Cultural Counterrevolution

In the brief but consequential span of his first one hundred days back in office, President Donald J. Trump has accomplished what few political prognosticators dared predict: he has effectively uprooted the ideological weeds of Wokism and salted the cultural soil in which they grew. No more euphemisms, no more seminars on microaggressions, no more bureaucratic caste systems in which one's skin tone or pronouns dictate one's place in the pecking order. Instead, what has returned, quietly, but powerfully, is a principle that once animated the founding of the republic: merit.

This is not a claim made lightly. Nor is it an attempt to engage in rhetorical hyperbole. It is, quite simply, an empirical observation. What David Sacks aptly termed a "vibe shift" in the cultural wind is more accurately understood as a sea change. And it is not merely cultural. It is also legal, institutional, and political. Trump did not simply declaim against Wokism, as many conservatives have for the past decade. He has begun to dismantle it root and branch, issuing executive orders with the precision of a surgeon removing a metastasized growth from a once-healthy body politic.

Let us begin with the most consequential policy maneuver: the elimination of "disparate impact" as a basis for federal action. Disparate impact theory, for those blessedly unfamiliar with its doctrinal arcana, held that even facially neutral policies could be deemed discriminatory if they produced uneven outcomes across racial or gender groups. That is, a colorblind policy could still be racist, if the results did not match the demographic ratios preferred by federal ideologues. This was never law in the constitutional sense. It was an ideological invention smuggled in through bureaucratic fiat and judicial activism.

By issuing an executive order that nullifies disparate impact as a criterion for federal enforcement, Trump has done more than overturn a policy. He has delegitimized a worldview. He has said, with characteristic bluntness, that equality of opportunity is the American standard, not equality of result. He has realigned government with reality.

To see the magnitude of this change, one need only recall the fever pitch of 2020, when every Fortune 500 company was scrambling to hire DEI consultants, every federal agency was appointing equity czars, and every university seemed to be competing in a tragicomic race to see who could confess their systemic sins with the most performative piety. These rituals of ideological abasement have now vanished from the halls of government. The "equity" offices? Defunded. The unconscious bias trainings? Canceled. The bureaucratic appendages of progressive moralism? Amputated.

Of course, critics will protest that these changes are cosmetic or symbolic. But that misses the point entirely. Culture is upstream of policy, but policy can redirect the flow. When the federal government, the largest employer in the United States and the most powerful patron of the credentialed class, disavows Wokism, the reverberations are not trivial. They are tectonic.

Consider the reaction of private industry. Many once-ardent apostles of DEI are now quietly shuttering their diversity offices and pivoting, with awkward abruptness, back to concepts like "performance," "excellence," and "productivity." These words were never outlawed, of course, but they had become suspect, relics of a pre-reckoning America. Now, they are resurgent. Merit, once slandered as a fig leaf for privilege, has been restored to its rightful place as the lodestar of excellence.

And what of the academy? Here, the battle is not yet won, but the siege has begun in earnest. Harvard University, that citadel of elite progressive thought, now finds itself under federal scrutiny for racial discrimination. The irony would be delicious if it were not so overdue. After years of engineering admissions to fulfill ideological quotas, Harvard now faces the question it once asked so cavalierly of its applicants: why should we let you in? If the answer is no longer race, what remains is merit.

Some will recoil at this restoration, mistaking it for regression. But this misapprehension rests on a failure to grasp what Trump has done. He has not reinstated some bygone order of exclusion. He has struck down the pretense that identity should be the measure of justice. The civil rights movement marched under the banner of colorblindness. It was the DEI movement that declared this principle naive or even dangerous. Trump has simply reclaimed the original moral grammar.

This, then, is the essence of the collapse we are witnessing. Wokism, like all ideological projects untethered from reality, has imploded under the weight of its own contradictions. A theory that treated unequal outcomes as evidence of discrimination, but that celebrated racial preferences when they favored the right groups, could never endure. A worldview that exalted victimhood as virtue and taught citizens to see oppression in every interaction was destined to fail.

But to fail on its own timetable might have taken decades. Trump accelerated the collapse by refusing to dignify its tenets. He did not debate on their terms. He declared them illegitimate. And by wielding the powers of the executive branch to undo their institutional scaffolding, he made their retreat visible and undeniable.

Perhaps most importantly, he gave ordinary Americans permission to say what they knew in their hearts: that fairness is not racism, that excellence is not oppression, and that truth cannot be subordinated to ideology. For too long, dissent from Woke orthodoxy was treated as moral treason. Now, it is once again the hallmark of courage.

Some may ask: is Wokism truly dead? Or merely sleeping? Might it return, hydra-like, in new guises? These are fair questions. Ideologies rarely vanish entirely. They morph, rebrand, and seek new hosts. But the defeat of Wokism in the first 100 days of the Trump administration has not been merely symbolic. It has been systemic. The tools of enforcement have been dismantled. The bureaucracies have been defunded. The language of law and policy has been clarified.

And in their place, the classical virtues have returned. Liberty. Equality before the law. The dignity of the individual. The presumption of innocence. The primacy of achievement over ancestry.

In the final accounting, Wokism was not merely a political project. It was a metaphysical one. It sought to reorder reality around a vision of endless grievance, perpetual guilt, and permanent revolution. Trump, for all his populist bravado, has responded with something more radical still: a return to sanity.

One hundred days in, and already the fog is lifting. America is not yet cured of its delusions, but it is recovering its sight. The regime of DEI is not just in retreat. It is in ruins. And in the rubble, something older and better is being rebuilt: a republic where merit matters, truth is not negotiable, and no citizen is required to apologize for existing.

That, in the end, may be the greatest achievement of all.

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