On the Second Attempt – How Trump’s Government Turned the Rhetoric of the Extreme Right Into Official Policy

The silence is deceptive. Anyone walking today through the streets of Portland, Berkeley, or Charlottesville no longer encounters the heated demonstrations that just a few years ago shaped the image of American cities. Back then, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and other paramilitary groups marched almost every weekend to protest against migration, against “cancel culture,” or against the removal of Confederate statues. But since Donald Trump began his second term, the marches have largely disappeared. Not because the anger has evaporated – but because the White House has already taken over what these groups once went to the streets for. “Things we were saying in 2017 at demonstrations were taboo. Today they are mainstream,” explained Enrique Tarrio, the longtime chairman of the Proud Boys. In one sentence he sums up the situation: The extreme right no longer needs to rebel against the establishment – it has become the establishment.

The agenda of this movement ranges from dismantling diversity programs to claims of an alleged “disadvantage for whites” to the cynical glorification of nationalist authoritarianism. Trump’s policies have not only picked up on all of this but poured it into concrete acts of governance. His administration has installed personnel who in the past distinguished themselves with antisemitic and racist comments, while at the same time implementing measures that form the core of alt-right ideology: mass deportations, raids in factories and on farms staged for the media, the rhetorical staccato of “invasion” and “defense of the nation.”

Particularly telling was the anniversary of Charlottesville. Eight years after the torch march in which neo-Nazis chanted slogans against migrants and Jews, Augustus Sol Invictus, one of the organizers back then, wrote with satisfaction: “In the past you were considered an extremist if you protested against being replaced by immigrants. Today it is official White House policy.” The messages are unambiguous. Abigail Jackson, White House spokeswoman, defended Trump’s course by saying he was the “voice for millions of forgotten men and women who support the widely popular policies he is enacting.” The reality is: What was once a fringe position is today government doctrine.

Still under strong pressure during Joe Biden’s presidency – through prosecutions of the leaders of January 6 and harsh sentences against militiamen – the extreme right has re-formed. The Oath Keepers practically no longer exist, their founder Stewart Rhodes largely disappeared from the public eye. Enrique Tarrio, meanwhile, now produces podcasts and runs a blockchain app called “ICERAID,” which pays informants in cryptocurrency for tips on migrants. Other groups like the Patriot Front do still rely on marches, but figures from the research network ACLED show: The number of right-wing demonstrations has dropped sharply in 2025. Part of this quiet is explained by the legal consequences of the storming of the Capitol. The other part: The Trump government is itself implementing the movement’s demands.

Thus, on the first day of his second term, Trump issued a sweeping amnesty for almost 1,600 convicted Capitol rioters, including men who had attacked police. He signed executive orders with titles like “Protecting the States Against Invasion” and “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” – texts almost word for word from the pamphlets of extremists who committed attacks in El Paso, Buffalo, or Pittsburgh. In February he stopped US development aid for South Africa and at the same time opened a special refugee program for white Africans. Officially it was said that the aim was to “help Afrikaners who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” In doing so the US government took up a central narrative long cherished by far-right circles about the supposed “suffering of the white minority” in post-apartheid South Africa.

t the same time, Trump created space for figures who had already once attracted attention for their closeness to neo-Nazis. Darren Beattie, who had been dismissed during the first Trump term for attending a far-right conference, was brought back into the State Department and later even made head of the US Institute of Peace. On social media he wrote as recently as 2023 that “competent white men must take the lead if you want things to work.” Instead of keeping a distance, the State Department publicly defended the personnel choice.

Similar cases are piling up. Kingsley Wilson, daughter of a conservative commentator, received a top post at the Pentagon even though she had propagated the “Great Replacement” theory online. Paul Ingrassia, who today heads the supposedly independent watchdog agency Office of Special Counsel, had previously defended Nick Fuentes and posted that “exceptional white men” were the real builders of Western civilization.

Even the official channels of the government now spread content taken directly from the arsenal of white nationalist propaganda. The DHS account on X recently advertised for ICE with a recruitment poster and the slogan “Which way, American man?” – an obvious reference to a book by a neo-Nazi from the 1970s. What emerges is a picture of systematic co-option. While right-wing extremism once agitated at the margins of society, it has today moved into the center of power. Amy Spitalnick of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs put it this way: “The rise of the alt-right ten years ago was a backlash against the first Black president. Today their ideas have been normalized at the highest levels of power.”

Trump was never a man of distance. Already in 2017, after Charlottesville, he spoke of “very fine people on both sides.” In 2020 he called out to the Proud Boys during a TV debate: “Stand back and stand by.” Later he claimed not to know them at all. Even after the dinner with Nick Fuentes in 2022 he quickly denied knowing his guest. But this time there is no more backtracking, no half-hearted retreat. His America of the second term is a country where the president no longer merely flirts with the fringes but makes their worldview the basis of his policy. What was once a dangerous liaison is today raison d’état.

The parallels to Europe are unmistakable. What Trump has long since turned into government policy in the White House is unfolding on this side of the Atlantic as creeping normalization. It is the soundtrack of a slow shift that is far more dangerous than any open march: It disguises the takeover of right-wing narratives as serious politics. The so-called firewall is nothing but a Trojan horse. And here too the pattern we have seen in Poland and Hungary is evident. PiS began with attacks on an alleged “threat to the family,” Orbán with the demonization of migrants and “foreign influences.” Today independent media there are destroyed, the judiciary aligned, NGOs criminalized – not by open extremists but by bourgeois-conservative forces who claimed to stabilize the country. This is precisely the transatlantic parallel: While Trump in Washington openly executes what once raged on the far right, European Christian Democrats, with their rhetoric and policies, prepare the ground on which authoritarian systems thrive. What was once fringe is today part of the mainstream – and in that lies the greatest danger to democracy.

What is being experienced in Germany is not an isolated phenomenon. CDU and CSU follow the same pattern we have already seen in Poland with PiS and in Hungary with Orbán’s Fidesz: bourgeois parties that sell themselves as guarantors of the center step by step adopt the narratives of the extreme right – and in doing so pave the way for their social normalization. In Poland it began with warnings about a “threat to the family,” in Hungary with rhetoric against migrants and “foreign influences.” Today independent media there are largely destroyed, the judiciary aligned, NGOs criminalized. It has always taken bourgeois-conservative politicians who pretended to stabilize the country – and in truth laid the foundation for authoritarian systems.

Germany is on the same track. When Friedrich Merz speaks of “little pashas,” when Markus Söder makes asylum seekers scapegoats for social problems, when Julia Klöckner, with softened bourgeois tone, makes the slogans of the AfD socially acceptable, then that is the soundtrack of a shift in discourse that is far more dangerous than any open march. Because it disguises the dismantling of democratic culture as serious politics of the center. The Union calls it a firewall – in truth it is a Trojan horse. What in the US is already government policy is thus being prepared in Europe: a rightward shift that does not begin with torchlight marches but with the rhetoric of a party that still calls itself “Christian.”

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