There is a threshold beyond which think tanks cease to be places of elaboration and become organs of political transformation. The United States under Trump’s second administration seems to have crossed that threshold. Around the president, foundations, research centers, networks of jurists, policy laboratories, and personnel incubators orbit, as in every major democracy. In this phase, however, these bodies do not merely produce ideas for power. They produce power as a “form”: they select men, prepare texts, train cadres, consolidate chains of loyalty, offer the coalition a moral grammar, and turn diffuse social fears into administrative decisions. The culture war that fractures the United States thus ceases to be merely a political confrontation and becomes the inspiration and matrix for regime re-engineering.

The America First Policy Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Renewing America, the Claremont Institute, and, in a more sectoral but no less revealing way, the Center for Immigration Studies should not be read as a simple catalog of organizations close to Trump. They are places where Trumpism is trying to solve its deepest problem: moving from mobilization to duration, from motion to institution, from electoral insurgency to state-form. The stakes are not merely ideological. They are geopolitical in the fullest sense of the term: the United States will not remain a superpower simply because it possesses fleets, dollars, bases, and technological capabilities, but only if it can turn resources into strategy and strategy into continuity. When society becomes tribalized, vertical and horizontal trust erodes, the legitimacy of traditional mediations thins, and foreign policy ceases to be the system’s upper floor and becomes the projection of the internal cold civil war. Structures are then needed to translate resentment and rage into architecture and grand strategy.

Trumpism has never been a coherent doctrine. Rather, it has been a device for simplification. It took a complex world and reduced it to a single question: who decides? Who decides at the border, in schools, in courts, in factories, in alliances, on digital platforms, in universities, in federal agencies? Because this question arises in a society that feels deprived of its capacity to command, the answer can only be theatrical, moral, muscular, and grounded in the concept of a new “we.” But theater alone does not govern. To govern, infrastructure is required. Reliable cadres, drafts of executive orders, trained personnel, recruitment databases, legal interpretations, policy networks, places of formation, and, above all, an overarching principle capable of holding together the coalition’s disparate layers: a working class anxious about status, the moral right, economic nationalists, impoverished middle classes, anti-woke conservatives, a business world impatient with regulation, parts of the tech right, the security right, and traditionalist Republicans.

From an Emotional Federation to an Attempted Bloc

This effort to build infrastructure gives concrete form to the passage from coalition to attempted bloc. Not in the classical Gramscian sense, but in a more American, pragmatic, and plebiscitary way: transforming an emotional federation into a durable system of power. The Heritage Foundation understood this before many others, building Project 2025 as infrastructure grounded in four pillars — policy, personnel, training, and playbook — designed to enable a conservative administration to take office with an apparatus already partially in place. AFPI followed a more organically Trumpian path: not disciplining the movement from the outside, but giving it a home, a lexicon, a personnel pipeline, and continuity.[1]

In January 2026, during the event “Defining Issues and Strategies: America First in 2026,” AFPI claimed that 91% of its federal recommendations had already been implemented or were being implemented, and that its alumni served in seven cabinet departments. On its website, the institute also continues to present itself as a structure led by nine former cabinet members and more than fifty former high-level White House officials. These promotional self-representations must be read with caution. Precisely for that reason, however, they deserve attention: in politics, propaganda matters most when it stops being pure aspiration and begins to describe, at least in part, a reality or, at minimum, a trend.[2]

The boundaries among the political laboratory, the government, and the apparatus are blurring. This is no longer a simple revolving door but a vertical integration of meaning production, personnel selection, and decision-making capacity.

America First Policy Institute: The Emerging Party-State

AFPI is the most revealing case because it was not born as a traditional conservative foundation but as the organized projection of Trumpian movement politics into policy. Formally, it belongs to the ordinary geography of Washington’s policy industry; politically, however, it is grafted onto the Florida of mature Trumpism. The issue is not legal. It is territorial and symbolic. Its orbit passes through Palm Beach, through Mar-a-Lago, through the circuit of events in which Trumpian power recognizes, selects, and celebrates itself, and through a state affiliate, AFPI Florida, that makes Florida not only an electoral market but also a laboratory of government. The institute aims less to persuade the establishment than to replace it. It functions as a diffuse proto-ministry: it sets priorities, recruits personnel, prepares operational drafts, and aligns the campaign’s language with the administration’s. This is why its profile is so different from both the Heritage Foundation and the foundation conservatism of the Reagan cycle.[3]

This Floridian rootedness should not be mistaken for localism. Florida is not the province of Trumpism; it is its extra-federal capital. Mar-a-Lago is the court; Palm Beach, the political-financial salon; Tallahassee, the regulatory laboratory; and Miami and the Latino corridor, the demographic terrain of the new coalition. AFPI is positioned within this triangulation: Washington, Miami, Mar-a-Lago. DC translates the line into government; Florida produces the climate, loyalty, personnel, and imaginary. The American right has other fortress states — Texas for the border and energy, Tennessee for religious and cultural conservatism, Ohio for industrial populism, and Arizona for the migration frontier — but none concentrates in the same space the political residence of the leader, the administrative model of DeSantis, a large Republican electoral basin, a network of think tanks, the anti-woke university laboratory, the Latino-conservative projection, and the liturgy of Mar-a-Lago.

Sociologically, AFPI responds to a precise need of the Trumpian right: institutionalizing the insurgency without normalizing it too much. To part of the base, Heritage may still seem too closely tied to old conservative Washington, its codes, its mediations, and its cautions. AFPI, by contrast, presents itself as the home of the America First movement. Its function is to reassure the coalition that this time the old intermediaries will not seize power. This is why its weight is less ideological than anthropological.

The proof lies in the personnel pipeline. Brooke Rollins moved from AFPI to the Department of Agriculture; Linda McMahon to Education; and Kevin Hassett, who had chaired the institute’s Board of Academic Advisors, leads the National Economic Council. They are joined by other figures who moved from the institute to the White House or to cabinet-level positions: Pam Bondi, former chair of the Center for Litigation and co-chair of the Center for Law and Justice; Doug Collins, former chair of AFPI Georgia; Scott Turner, former chair of the Center for Education Opportunity; Lee Zeldin, former chair of the China Policy Initiative and Pathway to 2025; Heidi Overton, former Chief Policy Officer and vice chair of the Center for a Healthy America; Lea Bardon, former Director of Development Operations; and Matthew Whitaker, former co-chair of the Center for Law & Justice. Alongside this core is a broader band of sympathizers or figures in AFPI’s orbit, such as Tulsi Gabbard, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and Mehmet Oz, who do not come organically from the institute but gravitate within the same geographical, political, and administrative ecosystem.[4]

The pipeline’s composition confirms the point. Pam Bondi is not only a former leader of AFPI’s legal area who moved to the Department of Justice; she is also a politically constructed figure in Florida, where she served as state Attorney General. Bob Rommel and Erika Donalds root AFPI in state politics, especially on the decisive terrain of education. Scott Singer ties the institute to conservative municipalism in South Florida. Other lesser-known figures — Austin Ferrer, John Daly, Justin Holtsnider, Richard Lawson — indicate that the connection extends beyond the national showcase to a network of staffers, lawyers, administrators, and political operators formed within the Floridian circuit. For AFPI, then, Florida is what Washington can no longer be: not the place of mediation, but the place of loyalty.[5]

AFPI is therefore the infrastructure that enables Trumpism to say: we will not again be translated, filtered, corrected, or sterilized by a hostile administrative class or by a conservatism willing to welcome the movement only on the condition that it be domesticated. This is where its geopolitical function originates. AFPI helps transform American social regression into a grammar of government: job insecurity into trade protectionism; the middle-class crisis into selective industrial policy; resentment toward the progressive cultural apparatus into a struggle over schools, public language, and the university; and anxiety over material vulnerability into reshoring, technological sovereignty, priority for the Western Hemisphere, and the fusion of industry, trade, and national security. It is not merely a research center. It is a machine for converting internal malaise into the form of the state.

Heritage Foundation: Restoration as Procedure

Heritage performs a different task. If AFPI is the organic projection of the movement, Heritage is the great machine for doctrinal translation. Its strength lies not in being more Trumpian than others, but in offering Trumpism what it struggles to produce on its own: administrative discipline. Project 2025 is precisely this: the attempt to turn conservative revolution into procedure and to dismantle the administrative state into a sequence of feasible governmental actions. It is not only a matter of writing manifestos, but above all of preparing personnel, training, and actions. In other words: occupying Washington with a replacement apparatus.[6]

The current American right does not simply want “less state.” It wants a differently oriented state: lighter where it believes capital, energy, technology, and accumulation must be freed; harder where it believes border, order, family, school, and identity must be defended; more selective in distinguishing between activities to be encouraged and those to be struck; and more aggressive toward what it considers the ideological capture of the apparatus. The old Market/State binary no longer adequately describes the New American Right. Trumpism tends to produce a selective state: deregulatory at the top, coercive at the margins, protective of insiders, and punitive toward what it perceives as a threat to cohesion.

Heritage offers two solid foundations for this process. The first is a theory of administration as a battlefield. The second is a morally elevated lexicon that frames the fight against bureaucracy as more than a purely technical dispute. Family, civil religion, constitutional sovereignty, originalism, critique of the administrative state, recovery of economic freedom, and executive verticality are presented as parts of a single restoration. If AFPI preserves the movement’s emotional temperature, Heritage seeks to translate that temperature into doctrine and procedure.

Heritage, too, while remaining Washington’s great doctrinal apparatus, intersects with Florida at a decisive point: the transformation of education into a field of government. The link is not a headquarters but an experiment. Project 2025 provides the language of administrative restructuring; Florida shows how that language can become state act, appointment, board, educational standard, war on DEI, accreditation review, and redefinition of the public university. The appointments of Adam Kissel, a Heritage visiting fellow, and Scott Yenor to the University of West Florida board confirm that the conservative battle over the university does not remain in papers but enters the governing bodies of higher education institutions. Here, Florida serves as the proving ground for restoration as procedure: what Heritage theorizes for Washington is anticipated, with state instruments, in the Floridian laboratory.[7]

Center for Renewing America: The War for Command

Russ Vought and the CRA occupy a distinct role. Vought, in addition to being the soul of this think tank, serves as the point of contact between ideology and the machine of power. The Center for Renewing America, which he founded in 2021 after his first stint at the Office of Management and Budget, was established with an explicit mission: to fight the woke and the weaponized bureaucracy and replace them with a line centered on God, Country, and Community. When, in January 2025, Vought formally left the CRA to return to leadership at the OMB, the bridge between think tank and state became concrete. The man who had articulated a theory of conflict with the apparatus re-entered the institutional role from which that apparatus could be disciplined.[8]

In a system that has for decades operated through delegations, agencies, relative autonomy, and dispersed powers, Vought’s Trumpism aims at verticalization. Winning elections and mobilizing are not enough. The apparatus must be reconquered. Appointing top officials is not enough. Chains of loyalty, recruitment criteria, and modes of implementation must be redefined. Denouncing the deep state from the stage is not enough. That accusation must become an operational criterion for restructuring the relationship between political power and administration. In this sense, Vought matters less as an abstract theorist than as an engineer for reducing friction between political will and the state machine.

From a geopolitical perspective, the form of external power will increasingly depend on Trumpism’s ability to impose internal discipline. A transactional and conditional foreign policy grounded in burden shifting, the priority assigned to industry, selective commitments, the growing importance of the Western Hemisphere, and the reduction of universalist claims require a compact decision-making center. If the United States is to be less an architecture and more a negotiating lever, less a guardian of order and more a selective power, the executive must be able to move with less internal friction. The administration’s official language also reflects this objective: the 2025 NSS links the rebirth of American power to border control, industrial priority, energy security, technological competition, and the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. At the fiscal level, this is also evident in the language Vought used to present the “skinny budget” for 2026, stating that “we are finally funding strength and stopping the funding of decline”.[9]

For the Center for Renewing America, the link to Florida is less personal and more structural. Russ Vought is not a product of Floridian politics. The CRA remains a Washingtonian command center. Yet its central idea — bending the apparatus to executive will, reducing bureaucratic autonomy, and transforming the denunciation of the deep state into a technique of government — finds a state-level prefiguration in Florida. DeSantis’s Florida has shown that post-2016 conservatism cannot confine itself to cultural protest: it must intervene in agencies, remove administrators, discipline universities, condition local governments, and use the law as a pedagogical and punitive instrument. In this sense, the CRA is not Floridian by biography but by grammar: it shares with the DeSantis model the idea that the right should not only limit the state but also use it to rebuild command.[10]

Claremont Institute: The Civil Theology of Restoration

The Claremont Institute weighs less as a reservoir of postures and more as a reservoir of meaning. Its function is to provide Trumpism with a philosophy of decadence and a metaphysics of restoration. If AFPI and Heritage work primarily on organizational translation, Claremont focuses on the moral status of rupture. Here, political conflict is not narrated as ordinary democratic alternation but as a regime crisis, the corruption of the national canon, and a struggle for the survival of the American order. The July 2025 presentation of the Statesmanship Award to J.D. Vance, introduced as a key figure in the “Golden Age Agenda,” signals this function well: it is not only about preparing acts and appointments but also about explaining why the nation must be remade.[11]

Michael Anton best illuminates this cultural and narrative level. His weight does not derive from an organizational capacity comparable to that of AFPI or the CRA, but from having given Trumpism one of its founding narratives. With The Flight 93 Election, published in 2016 under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, Anton articulated a thesis destined to leave a lasting mark: the idea that the American political moment was no longer one of ordinary choice among legitimate options but a terminal emergency in which the stakes were the survival of the country itself, as part of the right continued to imagine it. In this narrative, Trump was not the ideal candidate but the last instrument available to break a trajectory of dissolution. Anton did not invent Trumpism, but he offered it a tragic legitimation, a grammar of exception, and an all-or-nothing rhetoric that transformed support for Trump from a tactical choice into an act of salvation.[12]

His subsequent trajectory confirms this function as a hinge between vision and apparatus. After his first stint in the Trump administration, Anton returned in 2025 to the center of the government machine as Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, a post he left on September 15, 2025. In that role, he brought to the executive branch a lexicon already developed in Claremontian circles and in writings such as The Trump Doctrine, which reinterprets American foreign policy in terms of the national interest, the selection of commitments, the distrust of liberal universalism, and the primacy of internal cohesion over foreign mission. With him, the Claremont Institute ceased to be only the place where decadence is diagnosed and became, albeit for a limited period, one of the points from which that diagnosis sought to be translated into a strategic line.[13]

Anton, however, does not exhaust Claremont’s function. The institute’s specificity lies in providing Trumpism with a civil theology: a vision in which the present is not only inefficient but degraded; the elite is not only incompetent but usurping; institutions are not simply unbalanced but denatured; and the order to be restored is not a lost equilibrium but a betrayed truth. Hence its deeper influence: not so much in the number of its men in the executive branch as in its ability to shape the lexicon of power. America’s cold civil war becomes a concept; the struggle against bureaucracy becomes political anthropology; and the confrontation with Europe, China, and liberalism turns into a dispute over the very definition of the West.

For this reason, Claremont’s weight must be measured by observing how a part of the American right has redefined the stakes: no longer the simple administration of primacy, but the battle over who Americans are and in whose name they must command.

Claremont does not need to relocate to Florida to matter there. Its function is to provide the right with a civil theology of restoration; Florida offers the terrain on which that theology is institutionalized. In 2023, Claremont published a report on Florida universities opposing DEI and presented it in the context of DeSantis’s campaign against progressive higher education. Scott Yenor, a figure in the Claremont orbit, participated in DeSantis’s West Palm Beach roundtable on the DEI scam in universities; Charles Kesler, another Claremontian, was among the trustees appointed by DeSantis to the New College of Florida. Florida thus becomes the point of contact between the Claremontian diagnosis of decadence and institutional engineering: the discourse on regime crisis enters university governance.[14]

Center for Immigration Studies: The Border as Sacrament

The Center for Immigration Studies reveals another decisive truth: in Trumpian America, the border is where sovereignty becomes visible. Jon Feere returned in 2025 as Chief of Staff at ICE; Todd Bensman, formerly a Senior National Security Fellow at the center, joined the administration as an adviser to Tom Homan, the Border Czar. This is not an administrative detail. It is proof that the immigration dossier has become the privileged laboratory where Trumpism fuses security, identity, public order, and regional geopolitics.[15]

The border is no longer merely a territorial line. It is the point at which the state proves its existence. Blocking, selecting, expelling, ordering: these are elementary, almost liturgical gestures through which part of the country believes it can see command reasserted. This is why immigration is not treated as a simple economic or humanitarian issue. It is constructed as an existential threat and as a narrative key capable of explaining almost everything: crime, fentanyl, wage pressure, welfare crisis, civic fraying, territorial resentment, erosion of citizenship. CIS is where public policy becomes a rite confirming power.

The geopolitical link is direct. The 2025 NSS explicitly links Western Hemisphere security, the fight against cartels, migration control, nearshoring, the containment of external rivals, and the stability of neighbors. Latin America, the Caribbean, the southern border, and homeland security are no longer separate dossiers. They form a single, expanded internal security belt. In this framework, CIS does not merely provide arguments against immigration: it helps construct the representation of the Western Hemisphere as the first periphery of the American civil war.[16]

CIS is less Floridian in the composition of its personnel and more Floridian in its field of application. Its theme — the border as the place where sovereignty becomes visible — finds in Trumpian Florida a second frontier. Not the land border of Texas or Arizona, but the Caribbean, Latin American, maritime, migratory, and symbolic frontier. The construction in the Everglades of the detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” supported by DeSantis and aligned with the Trumpian federal priority on deportations, shows that Florida is not only the state of the school culture war. It is also one of the places where immigration, public order, emergency, political spectacle, and punitive sovereignty merge into a single representation. If Texas makes the physical border visible, Florida makes the hemispheric border visible: the Caribbean, Latin America, the Venezuelan and Cuban diaspora, drug trafficking, asylum, deportation, internal security.[17]

The result is that the Floridian New Right today weighs more than the New Right of any other state, not because it produces the entire doctrine by itself, but because it concentrates its functions. California still has pieces of the tech right and of intellectual anti-progressivism; Texas has energy, border, territorial scale, and Republican power; Ohio gave J.D. Vance the populist grammar of industrial decline; Arizona remains a migratory and conspiratorial frontier. But only Florida brings together in a single theater Trump’s political domicile, the court of Mar-a-Lago, the DeSantis administration-laboratory, the transformation of the public university, the anti-DEI offensive, the AFPI network, Latino-conservative mobilization, the electoral weight of thirty Electoral College votes, and an increasingly dominant Republican delegation. In 2024, Trump won Florida with such force as to confirm the state’s shift from swing state to Republican stronghold; before the vote, Republicans had already surpassed Democrats by more than 1 million registered voters. Florida is no longer the prize to be won. It is one of the workshops that produce the galaxy of the national New Right.[18]

From Social Regression to Imperial Form

These think tanks, then, matter not simply because they influence the president. They matter because they fill the void left by the erosion of the old intermediary bodies. In a phase when parties, major newspapers, the federal bureaucracy, elite universities, and even some traditional Republican pipelines can no longer mediate the national conflict, hybrid structures emerge; neither purely cultural, nor purely administrative, nor purely militant. Together, these structures serve as ideological seminaries, personnel offices, schools of government, norm factories, and points of fusion between the coalition and the state.

The United States needs to establish parallel organs to restore form to its executive branch. This reveals a crisis deeper than the simple alternation between Democrats and Republicans. It indicates that the old regime of legitimacy — the one that held together globalization, international leadership, social mobility, liberal-constitutional consensus, and trust in the impartiality of institutions — is no longer sufficient. The 2025 NSS sets this out almost autobiographically: it describes the previous order as a period of dispersion, cost, and strategic error; priorities shift to borders, industry, energy, technology, shared burdens, selective sovereignty, and the rebirth of society’s moral strength. Trade, investment, artificial intelligence, and the new cyber strategy have translated this grammar into action, linking trade, capital, AI, and cyberspace to national security and the American productive rebirth.[19]

In this frame, Trumpian think tanks are the organs that connect two once-distinct levels: internal social regression and external imperial posture. Loss of trust, status anxiety, culture war, crisis of the future, desire for protection, and need for recognition are transformed into strategy. The foreign is no longer only foreign. It is identity therapy. This is precisely why Trumpism needs apparatuses that can render such a conflict-rich vision manageable. Less universal mission, more internal power infrastructure. Less liberal order as faith, more devices of sovereignty as technique.

From Advisers to Power to Coproducers

It would therefore be reductive to ask only how many members of AFPI, Heritage, CRA, Claremont, or CIS hold key roles today. The quantitative question matters, but it is insufficient. What truly matters is the qualitative shift: these centers are no longer merely satellites of power. They are coproducers of the new American narrative and administrative regime.

Trumpism has understood that in a de-cohesive society, sovereignty cannot remain an abstract principle. It must become a gesture, a chain of command, an appointment, an executive order, a frontier, a tariff, or a criterion of belonging. For this reason, the think tanks of the Trumpian galaxy are not only places where ideas are produced. They are, above all, instruments through which one part of America tries to remake the country while the country is remaking the world around it.

The United States, which says it wants to reduce commitments, withdraw from universalist illusions, select interests, and bring priorities home, needs, in order to do so, an internal growth of its ideological-organizational apparatus. This shows that the American crisis does not concern only foreign policy. It concerns the very form of legitimacy. In this context, think tanks cease to be an accessory. They become the place where a new material constitution is prepared. Washington remains the place of the federal act; Florida has become the place of the rehearsal. There, Trumpism celebrates the leader, selects personnel, experiments with culture war as administration, turns universities and local governments into battlefields, fuses immigration and internal security, and presents political conflict as moral restoration. This is why the galaxy of Trumpian think tanks must also be read geographically: not as a map of legal headquarters, but as a geography of power. In that geography, Florida is today the densest node of the new American right.

Notes

[1] For the structure of Project 2025, see The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, January 31, 2023; and The Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, 2023. The initiative is presented as a combination of a programmatic document, a personnel database, administrative training, and operational tools for the transition. For the AFPI parallel, see America First Policy Institute, Pathway to 2025, August 17, 2023.

[2] For the cited event and the claim that 91% of the recommendations had been implemented or were in the process of implementation, see America First Policy Institute, Defining Issues and Strategies: America First in 2026, January 8, 2026. For the promotional composition of the leadership group — former cabinet members, White House senior staff, and high-level officials — see Timothy Cama, “Trump-aligned think tank readies for a return to power,” E&E News, August 23, 2024.

[3] On AFPI’s role as a long-term infrastructure for Trumpism, see Alex Thompson, “America First Policy Institute’s 100-year plan for Trumpism,” Axios, March 13, 2025. For the territorial projection, see America First Policy Institute, America First Florida, State Chapter, and the release “AFPI Florida Launches New Chapter Leadership Under Bob Rommel,” February 3, 2026.

[4] For the AFPI personnel pipeline, see the America First Policy Institute institutional profiles for Brooke Rollins, Linda McMahon, Kevin Hassett, Pam Bondi, Doug Collins, Scott Turner, Heidi Overton, Lee Zeldin, and Matthew Whitaker. For positions in the administration, see The White House, Make America Healthy Again Commission, 2025; The American Presidency Project, transition and appointment releases, 2024–2025; and CBS News, Trump administration tracker, 2025.

[5] On the network’s Floridian roots, see America First Policy Institute, institutional profile of Pam Bondi; America First Policy Institute, America First Florida, State Chapter; and America First Policy Institute, “AFPI Florida Launches New Chapter Leadership Under Bob Rommel,” February 3, 2026. For Lea Bardon, see ProPublica, Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure Report: Lea Bardon, 2025, and The White House, Office of Communications, Presidential personnel announcement, January 24, 2025.

[6] For Project 2025 as a machine of administrative translation, see The Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, 2023, and the Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project. The relevant point is not only the content of the proposals but also the combination of programs, personnel, training, and capacity that prefigures executive action.

[7] For the appointments to the University of West Florida, see State of Florida, Office of the Governor, “Governor Ron DeSantis Appoints Five to the University of West Florida Board of Trustees,” January 6, 2025; Kate Payne, “DeSantis appoints conservative think tank members to West Florida board,” Associated Press, January 7, 2025; WUSF, “DeSantis appoints five conservative trustees to University of West Florida board,” January 7, 2025. For the anti-DEI context, see The Claremont Institute, Helping End DEI Across Florida Universities, October 3, 2023.

[8] For the foundation and mission of the Center for Renewing America, see Center for Renewing America, About Us. For Russ Vought’s return to the leadership of the Office of Management and Budget, see Kevin Freking, “Senate confirms Russell Vought as White House budget director,” Associated Press, February 6, 2025.

[9] For the connection among national security, border, industry, energy, and technological competition in the administration’s official framework, see The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December 2025. For the fiscal language and the priority assigned to defense, border, and the reduction of non-defense discretionary spending, see Office of Management and Budget, Fiscal Year 2026 Discretionary Budget Request, May 2, 2025.

[10] For the transformation of Florida higher education into a terrain of conservative government, see State of Florida, Office of the Governor, “Governor DeSantis Hosts Roundtable Exposing the DEI Scam in Higher Education,” March 13, 2023; Curt Anderson, “Florida board bans public funding for DEI at state universities,” Associated Press, January 17, 2024; Johanna Alonso, “DeSantis Seeks to Turn New College Into a Conservative Institution,” Inside Higher Ed, January 10, 2023.

[11] For the presentation of the Statesmanship Award to J.D. Vance and the reference to the Golden Age Agenda, see The Claremont Institute, “Vice President J.D. Vance Receives the 2025 Statesmanship Award,” August 7, 2025.

[12] Publius Decius Mus [Michael Anton], “The Flight 93 Election,” Claremont Review of Books, September 5, 2016. For the subsequent systematization of the emergency reading of the Trumpian cycle, see Michael Anton, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, Regnery, 2020.

[13] For Michael Anton’s role at the Policy Planning Staff, see U.S. Department of State, Michael Anton, Director of Policy Planning, biographical profile; Nahal Toosi, “Michael Anton to leave State Department policy planning post,” Politico, August 27, 2025.

[14] For Claremont’s report on Florida universities and its presentation within DeSantis’s anti-DEI campaign, see The Claremont Institute, Helping End DEI Across Florida Universities, October 3, 2023; State of Florida, Office of the Governor, “Governor DeSantis Hosts Roundtable Exposing the DEI Scam in Higher Education,” March 13, 2023. For the New College of Florida and the appointment of conservative trustees, see State of Florida, Office of the Governor, “Governor Ron DeSantis Appoints Six to the New College of Florida Board of Trustees,” January 6, 2023; Inside Higher Ed, “DeSantis Seeks to Turn New College Into a Conservative Institution,” January 10, 2023.

[15] For Jon Feere, see the Center for Immigration Studies, Jon Feere, author profile: the page records his return as Chief of Staff at ICE after his 2021–2025 tenure at CIS. For Todd Bensman, see the Center for Immigration Studies, Todd Bensman, author profile: the page identifies him as a former Senior National Security Fellow of the center and later as Senior Advisor to Border Czar Tom Homan. For Homan, see Associated Press, “Trump names Tom Homan as border czar,” November 2024.

[16] For the fusion of Western Hemisphere security, migration control, cartels, nearshoring, and containment of external rivals, see The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December 2025. For contextual readings of the strategy and of the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, see Atlantic Council, “Decoding Trump’s National Security Strategy,” January 5, 2026; Brookings Institution, analysis of the 2025 National Security Strategy, December 2025; European Parliament, The 2025 US National Security Strategy: An Exegesis, 2026.

[17] On the detention facility in the Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” see Associated Press, “Deportation flights begin from Florida detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz,” July 2025; Reuters, “Federal judge halts construction at Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz,” August 21, 2025; Associated Press, “Appeals court keeps Alligator Alcatraz open,” April 2026.

[18] For Republican electoral consolidation in Florida, see Florida Division of Elections, Official Results, 2024 General Election, and Florida Division of Elections, Voter Registration Reports, 2024–2026. For Republicans surpassing Democrats by more than one million registered voters before the 2024 election, see CBS Miami, “Florida Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 1 million active voters,” August 12, 2024; WUFT, “Florida GOP widens voter registration advantage over Democrats,” August 11, 2024.

[19] For the translation of the national security grammar into trade policy, investment, artificial intelligence and cyberspace, see The White House, America First Trade Policy, January 20, 2025; The White House, America First Investment Policy, February 21, 2025; The White House, America’s AI Action Plan, July 2025; The White House, President Trump’s Cyber Strategy for America, March 6, 2026; The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December 2025.