Alex Hinton, Rutgers University – Newark

At the start of his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2025, President Donald Trump declared, “The golden age of America begins right now!”

A month later, Trump’s supporters gathered at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Oxon Hill, Maryland, from Feb. 19-22 to celebrate the advent of this golden age.

Gold glitter jackets, emblazoned with phrases like “Trump the Golden Era,” are for sale in the CPAC exhibition hall. There, attendees decked out in other MAGA-themed clothing and accessories network and mingle. They visit booths with politically charged signs that say “Defund Planned Parenthood” and collect brochures on topics like “The Gender Industrial Complex.”

Another booth with a yellow and black striped backdrop resembling a prison cell’s bars was called a “Deportation Center.” Attendees photographed themselves at this booth, posing beside full-size cutouts of Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan.

Former Jan. 6 prisoners, including Proud Boys’ former leader Enrique Tarrio, have also been a visible – and controversial – presence at CPAC.

The conference’s proceedings kicked off on Feb. 20 with an Arizona pastor, Joshua Navarrete, saying, to loud applause, “We are living in the greatest time of our era – the golden age!”

Many subsequent speakers repeated this phrase, celebrating the country’s “golden age.”

For many outside observers, claims of a golden age might seem odd.

Just months ago during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said that an American apocalypse was underway, driven by a U.S. economy in shambles and major cities overrun by an “invasion” of “illegal alien” “terrorists,” “rapists” and “murderers.”

Now, Trump’s critics argue, the U.S. is led by a convicted felon who is implementing policies that are reckless, stupid and harmful.

Further, these critics contend, Trump’s illegal power grabs are leading to a constitutional crisis that could cause democracy to crumble in the U.S.

How, they wonder, could anyone believe the country is in a golden age?

As an anthropologist of U.S. political culture, I have been studying the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement for years. I wrote a related 2021 book, “It Can Happen Here.” And I continue to do MAGA research at places like this year’s CPAC, where the mood has been giddy.

Here are three reasons why the MAGA faithful believe a golden age has begun. The list begins, and ends, with Trump.

1. The warrior hero

Trump supporters contend that after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attacks, which they consider a “peaceful protest,” Trump became a political pariah and victim.

Like many a mythic hero, Trump’s response was “never surrender.” In 2023, he repeatedly told his MAGA faithful, “I am your warrior, I am your justice.”

Trump’s heroism, his supporters believe, was illustrated after a bullet grazed his ear during an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania in July 2024. Trump quickly rose to his feet, pumped his fist in the air and yelled, “Fight, fight, fight.”

The phrase became a MAGA rally cry and, in February 2025, it has been stamped on CPAC attendees’ shirts and jackets.

After Trump’s 2024 election victory, many Trump supporters dubbed it
“the greatest comeback in political history.” MAGA populist Steven Bannon invoked this phrase at a pre-CPAC event on Feb. 19.

When Bannon spoke on the CPAC main stage on Feb. 20, he led the crowd in a raucous “fight, fight, fight” chant. He compared Trump with Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and called for him to run again for president in 2028.

This is despite the fact that Trump running for a third term would violate the Constitution.

2. A wrecking ball

The MAGA faithful believe that Trump is like a human “wrecking ball,” as evangelical leader Lance Wallnau said in 2015. This metaphor speaks to how Trump supporters believe the president is tearing down an entrenched, corrupt system.

The day Trump took office, MAGA stalwarts underscore, he began to “drain the swamp” with a slew of executive orders.

One established the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is devoted to eliminating government waste. DOGE, led by billionaire Elon Musk, has dismantled USAID and fired thousands of government workers whom MAGA views as part of an anti-Trump “deep state.”

Musk stole the show at CPAC on Feb. 20. Speaking to a cheering crowd, Musk held up a large red chain saw and yelled, “This is the chain saw for bureaucracy.”

Speaker after speaker at this year’s CPAC have celebrated this and other wrecking-ball achievements on panels with titles like “Red Tape Reckoning,” “Crushing Woke Board Rooms” and “The Takedown of Left Tech.”

3. The Midas touch

A golden age requires a builder. Who better, the MAGA faithful believe, than a billionaire businessman with a self-proclaimed “Midas touch.” This refers to King Midas, a figure in Greek mythology who turns everything he touches into pure gold.

“Trump Will Fix It” signs filled his 2024 campaign rallies. And MAGA supporters note that Trump began fixing the country on Day 1 by “flooding the zone” with executive orders aimed at implementing his four-pronged “America First” promise. In addition to draining the swamp, this plan pledges to “make America safe again,” “make America affordable and energy dominant again” and “bring back American values.”

These themes run through the remarks of almost every CPAC speaker, who offer nonstop praise about how Trump is securing the country’s borders, increasing energy independence, repatriating who they call illegal aliens, restoring free speech and reducing government regulation and waste.

CPAC speakers said that Trump has already racked up a slew of successes just a month into his presidency.

This includes Trump using the threat of tariffs to bring other countries to the negotiating table.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters are pleased that he has been working to cut deals to end the conflict in Gaza and the war between Russia and Ukraine, while reorienting U.S. foreign policy to focus on China.

House Speaker Mike Johnson expressed the prevailing MAGA sentiment when he stated at CPAC that Trump “wrote the art of the deal. He knows what he’s doing.”

American exceptionalism restored

The golden-age celebration at CPAC centered on Trump and his mission to “make America great again.”

Speaker after speaker, including foreign conservative leaders from around the world, paid homage to Trump and this message.

During her CPAC speech, Liz Truss, the former prime minister of the U.K., stated, “This is truly the golden age of America.” Truss, who does not have a current political position, told the CPAC audience that she wanted to copy the MAGA playbook in order to “make Britain great again.”

The MAGA faithful believe that Trump is restoring an era of American exceptionalism in which the U.S. is an economic powerhouse, common sense is the rule, and traditional values centered on God, family and freedom are celebrated.

And they believe in a future where the U.S. is, as Trump said in his inaugural address, “the envy of every nation.”

Alex Hinton, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University – Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Anthony Pereira, Florida International University

Brazilian politics are getting more dramatic again.

The South American country’s attorney general filed five criminal charges against former President Jair Bolsonaro and 33 others in its Supreme Court on Feb. 18, 2025, detonating political shock waves. The charges include plotting a coup d’état to prevent Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidency. The other defendants include several former prominent officials, including a former spy chief, defense minister, national security adviser and Bolsonaro’s running mate.

Lula took office in Brazil for a third time in January 2023, after he defeated Bolsonaro in the 2022 presidential election. Bolsonaro, a right-wing politician allied with U.S. President Donald Trump, had served the previous four-year term. Bolsonaro and his codefendants are also charged with trying to poison Lula and assassinate his vice presidential running mate, Geraldo Alckmin, and Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes; participating in an armed criminal organization; and seeking to violently overthrow the democratic rule of law. He denies doing anything wrong.

As a professor of Brazilian politics, I believe that Bolsonaro’s legal troubles threaten to definitively end his political career. There’s also a possibility that the 69-year-old former president will be sentenced to prison. But, at the same time, the charges could also galvanize Bolsonaro’s base – playing into a narrative that sees the right-wing leader as stymied, unfairly, by the government he used to run.

No sash passed

Bolsonaro’s behavior before, during and after his second presidential campaign was unusual for any president seeking another term. He claimed, when he was still in office, that Brazil’s electronic voting system was not secure and predicted that fraud might crop up in the 2022 elections.

Although he never produced any evidence to support this claim, he promoted it on social media, fostering skepticism about the election among some voters.

Bolsonaro never formally conceded his narrow electoral defeat to Lula in October 2022, insinuating that instead the election had been stolen. In 2023, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court ruled that he had abused his power and banned him from running for political office again for the next eight years.

Instead of attending Lula’s inauguration on Jan. 1, 2023, where he would have been expected to participate in the traditional passing of the sash from the incumbent to the incoming president, Bolsonaro flew to Orlando, Florida, on Dec. 30, 2022. He stayed in Kissimmee, Florida, for the next three months.

That meant Bolsonaro was not in Brazil when thousands of his supporters rampaged through and vandalized three government buildings in Brasília on Jan. 8, 2023. The incident was strikingly similar to Trump supporters’ assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The new charges accuse Bolsonaro of taking part in a conspiracy to delegitimize the elections. The indictment also alleges that after the results were announced, Bolsonaro and the other defendants encouraged protests and urged the armed forces to intervene, declare a state of siege and prevent the peaceful transition of power from Bolsonaro to Lula.

Possibility of prison

The evidence in this indictment is based, in part, on plea-bargained testimony by one of the alleged conspirators, the former presidential adviser and army Lt. Col. Mauro Cid.

The attorney general has also accused Bolsonaro and his associates of being linked to businessmen who paid for buses to take Bolsonaro supporters to Brasília so they could participate in the Jan. 8 attacks, which caused damage estimated at 20 million Brazilian reais (US$3.5 million). And the indictment alleges that the coup plot failed because the commanders of Brazil’s army and air force refused to support the conspiracy, although the commander of the navy did, which explains why he was named as a defendant.

If Brazil’s Supreme Court accepts the charges, which seems likely, the legal battle will begin. If Bolsonaro is convicted, he could go to prison.

Bolsonaro’s defense team, for its part, says that the charges are “inept” and unconvincing. His lawyers expressed confidence that they could win the case.

Narrow path

Bolsonaro and his supporters have long criticized Brazil’s Supreme Court, arguing that it has exceeded its constitutional powers and become a judicial “dictatorship.” They have also pushed for Congress to grant amnesty to everyone who took part in or helped carry out the Jan. 8 attacks, including Bolsonaro.

To date, Brazil’s Supreme Court has convicted 371 people for participating in the attacks. Those convicted have received prison sentences of between three and 17 years.

Unlike in the United States, however, there has been a broad consensus in Brazil that the attacks were illegitimate and unacceptable. This consensus includes many lawmakers on the right and center-right in Brazil’s Congress, as well as in state and local governments.

So, although the example of Donald Trump returning to the presidency and pardoning the participants in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol inspires Bolsonaro’s supporters, his path to achieving a similar result is narrower than was Trump’s.

Meanwhile, Trump’s media company, which owns Truth Social and Rumble, sued Moraes, the judge Bolsonaro is accused of plotting to kill, for ordering the suspension of social media accounts and thereby undermining the First Amendment rights of U.S. citizens. The case was filed in federal court in Tampa, Florida, on Feb. 19.

Any trial of Bolsonaro and the other alleged coup plotters could spark a political struggle.

Brazil’s right wing is currently divided between advocates of hard-line Bolsonarismo – a disruptive ideology that advocates social conservatism, a lightly regulated economy, militarism and a strong executive branch – and a more pragmatic conservatism that works within the conventional rules of politics and is mainly focused on patronage and the management of the spoils of office.

Should Bolsonaro and his fellow defendants be tried in the Supreme Court, those hard-liners could be mobilized and energized.

They would see the trial as the political establishment’s persecution of their political hero. And a struggle to find Bolsanaro’s successor, most likely between his son Eduardo and the former president’s wife, Michelle, would ensue.

The successor would claim the mantle of opposition to Lula, who is eligible to seek a fourth presidential term and claims to want to run for reelection in 2026 – when he would be about to celebrate his 81st birthday.

High stakes

There are, to be sure, some Brazilian politicians who are more moderate than Bolsonaro and would also like to run against Lula next time. They would bring much less baggage to that presidential race.

Their candidacies might offer a possible return to the relative political stability Brazil had experienced for almost two decades before 2013, when the main dividing line in Brazilian politics was between coalitions led by the center-right Social Democratic Party and the center-left Workers’ Party.

To be clear, it’s hard to overstate the potential consequences of the Supreme Court’s deliberation and judgment in this case.

The trial, should it occur, would be televised and also have a geopolitical dimension, because it would be closely watched by advocates of hard-right populism in other countries across the Americas and beyond. The stakes are high.

In the meantime, I have no doubt that Bolsonaro’s supporters will try to use his legal woes to rally his political movement. The judgment of Brazil’s Supreme Court, should it decide to hear this case, could therefore end Bolsonaro’s political career. However, no matter what happens, I believe that Bolsonarismo would still be alive and well as a political force in Brazil and a factor in the 2026 elections.

Anthony Pereira, Director of the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center, Florida International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

James L. Perry, Indiana University

On top of efforts to fire potentially tens of thousands of federal workers, an early executive order from President Donald Trump’s second term seeks to reclassify the employment status of as many as 50,000 other federal workers – out of more than 2 million total – to make them easier for the president to fire as well.

The order has already been challenged in court by two federal workers’ unions and other interest groups, though no judge has yet issued any orders. The Trump administration is drafting rules to put the order into effect.

The Conversation U.S. politics editor Jeff Inglis spoke to James Perry, a scholar of public affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington, to understand what the order is trying to achieve and how it would affect federal workers, the government and the American public. What follows is an edited transcript of the discussion.

What is the standard situation for government employees?

In the 1820s and 1830s, President Andrew Jackson popularized the idea that the president could, and should, hire supporters into government jobs. But by the early 1880s, there was concern on the parts of both Democrats and Republicans that the victor would control a lot of workers who would serve the president, not the American people whose tax dollars paid their salaries.

So the parties came together in 1883 to pass the Pendleton Act stipulating that government workers are hired based on their skills and abilities, not their political views. That law was updated in 1978 with the Civil Service Reform Act, which added more protections for workers against being fired for political reasons.

Those rules cover about 99% of staff in the federal civil service. Currently, there are just about 4,000 political appointees. I’ve seen various estimates that this new executive order would shift at least 50,000 positions from career positions to the political-appointments list.

Some states, such as Mississippi, Texas, Georgia and Florida, have moved to strip employment protections from state government employees, turning protected employees into at-will workers, who can be fired at any time for any reason. These are largely red states, with strong control by Republican governors. Supporters of this move at the federal level argue that at-will employment can work in federal civil service.

This argument is not backed by strong evidence. The evidence supporters offer is that human resources directors, who are often appointees of the governor who changed the statute, claim no one has complained about the change in policy. But that doesn’t include people who are likely to have a different perspective.

It could be that nobody is talking about people being fired for political reasons in these states because they are afraid of getting fired themselves.

What does this executive order change, and why?

The rationale for the new policy is that the administration wants to get rid of federal workers whom leaders perceive as either intransigent or insubordinate – or who they fear might oppose Trump’s policy initiatives. This sets up a conflict between how government workers see their duties and how Trump appears to view them.

Federal employees interviewed by sociologist Jamie Kucinskas during Trump’s first term say they are obligated to look beyond the president’s bidding: They took an oath to the Constitution when they started their jobs, and their salaries and benefits are paid for with taxpayer dollars.

Trump, by contrast, says workers in the executive branch must answer to him and follow his orders.

Trump and others have tried to cloak this effort in language about removing workers who perform poorly at their jobs. That concern is legitimate. The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, which surveys hundreds of thousands of federal workers every year about various aspects of their work and working conditions, indicates that in 2024, 40% of those surveyed said people who perform poorly are not fired and do not improve.

But taking action against only 50,000 of the 2 million-plus federal employees isn’t going to address such a wide problem.

There’s a stereotype that in government it can be hard to discipline or fire workers who are not competent at their jobs. The flip side of that stereotype is, however, false: Private businesses are not better at holding poor performers accountable. Survey evidence shows the private sector has just as much difficulty as the government with getting workers to perform effectively.

There’s room for legitimate disagreement about how far federal employees have to go to comply with presidential directives. The people who think loyalty is the key to merit still might not agree on whether that loyalty is owed to the person sitting in the Oval Office or to the Constitution.

How does this affect government workers?

It’s not clear which positions might be targeted. The order calls them “policy influencing positions,” but drawing the line between policy and administration isn’t always easy.

It’s also not clear whether the change will stick. When the George W. Bush administration reduced job protections for Department of Homeland Security employees in 2005, a major federal workers’ union sued the administration and won.

In the first round of this effort under the first Trump administration, it seemed that most of the people affected would be at the top of the federal hierarchy, probably mostly based in Washington, D.C.

Most of the workers in the federal civil service, though, are not there. They work for the Social Security Administration, giving out checks in Bloomington, Indiana, or other departments and offices around the country. It would be very difficult to classify them as influencing political policy or advocating for policies.

But there are people who are not Senate-confirmed who do have an influence on policy. For instance, at the Department of Justice, assistant and deputy assistant secretaries have influence on civil rights policy or other policies that affect the president’s ability to pursue his agenda. The February 2025 resignation of Danielle Sassoon from her role as U.S. attorney in New York is an example of legitimate divergence between an appointee and the president’s policy direction.

Any workers who lost their protections would likely feel threatened with losing their job and their livelihood. They might, out of fear, be more responsive to the dictates of their superiors.

That might sound good – that if you do what your boss says, you’re doing a good job. But it’s different if your obligations are to the public interest and the Constitution.

How does this affect everyday Americans?

Large majorities of Americans believe government workers are serving the public over themselves. And as many as 87% of Americans say they want a merit-based, politically neutral civil service.

The U.S. has attracted to government service workers who are good at their jobs and able to remain politically neutral at work. Saying that’s no longer important would change the relationship between government workers and their jobs. And it would hurt the nation as a whole if government cannot attract the best and the brightest, or if it sends the best and the brightest packing because they are not comfortable with their work situation, or if they stay but their performance declines.

James L. Perry, Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs Emeritus, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.