President Donald Trump and his allies returned to the White House with sweeping plans, but a new analysis published in The New York Times argues that the president's "most ambitious project" has completely failed — leaving the United States in a "less dangerous place" than it appeared to be a year ago.

The assessment comes in an op-ed published Saturday — roughly six weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections — by Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner, who contend that the second Trump administration has "finally lost the plot." Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Wehner is a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served as a speechwriter for the three Republican presidents who preceded Trump — Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — and he emerged as a prominent critic of Trump's political agenda even before Trump secured the GOP nomination in 2016.

According to the two authors, Trump has accomplished an alarming amount in his second term and has done much to alter public perceptions. But now, as his power appears to be dwindling, they write, his grandest plans for fundamentally reshaping American society can be judged to have failed.

"Twenty months into his second term, Mr. Trump has remade the presidency and changed what Americans will tolerate from their government and from one another," Rauch and Wehner wrote. "Yet that transformation, sweeping as it is, may prove less important than what Mr. Trump and his allies could not do. They failed at the most ambitious project that they brought to his second term: using the state to remake American society. That failure is a central fact of the past 20 months, and it is why the country is in a less dangerous place than it was a year ago."

As the authors explain it, the administration's primary goal was to "convert the executive branch to a form of government that scholars call patrimonialism, in which the state is run as the leader's personal property and family concern." Under such a system, the "expert bureaucracies and neutral rules" on which American government has relied would have been "subordinated" to Trump's will. The term has deep roots in political science: German sociologist Max Weber used patrimonialism to describe rule in which governing authority operates as an extension of the's own household.

They describe Trump's "sham" legal efforts to extract billions of dollars from the federal government to enrich himself and his family as a clear manifestation of that push. Other examples of the attempted shift, they write, have been "far too many to enumerate," but include his attempts to use the Justice Department to target his enemies and to vilify other adversaries as "vermin."

"So why, despite all that, does the second year of Mr. Trump's second term seem less menacing than the first year?" the authors ask. "Because the patrimonialism and the re-norming, damaging as they are, were only part of what he and his followers set out to do. The largest of their ambitions was something else: the remaking of American society itself."

Rauch and Wehner suggest that history may view the events in Minneapolis at the start of this year as a turning point, when Trump's power began to wane and his efforts to reshape the United States began to crumble. In the wake of the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, local and national pushback saw the administration scale back its ICE surge efforts in the city. The authors also note that the fallout led to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem being fired a few weeks later, and to a reduced public profile for Stephen Miller, Trump's leading immigration attack dog.

"By demonstrating that they could face the spectacle of force and win, Minnesotans shook off their despair and found that they were not powerless," they write. "The moment became a catalyst far beyond the Twin Cities. The mass public saw what was being done in their name and many were repulsed by it. What they glimpsed was that a country can, in fact, be lost, and that theirs had come nearer the edge than they had believed."

Trump and his forces lost other key cultural battles as well, the authors argue. "From outside his home country, but speaking pointedly to it, the first American pope not only defied Mr. Trump but transcended him, demonstrating a moral authority against which the president had no power," they write. The reference is to Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born Robert Prevost, who became the first American pontiff in May 2025 following the death of Pope Francis. "Within the United States, No Kings marches staged some of the largest single-day protests in American history, deploying anger and humor without fear." The demonstration series began with nationwide rallies in June 2025.

They conclude: "Revolutions can fail but still scar the landscape. And Mr. Trump, with just under two-and-a-half years left in his second term, might emotionally and psychologically blow apart. But things are different than they were. The 80-year-old president is losing his grip on power and even his own base. The MAGA movement is fracturing. And the president no longer inspires the fear he once did. We know something today that wasn't altogether clear a year ago: America's civil society is harder to intimidate and rewire than MAGA's cultural revolutionaries hoped."