CNN
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Across a wide range of issues, President Donald Trump is seeking to impose the restrictive social agenda that has spread throughout red states onto blue states that have almost uniformly rejected it.
In a flurry of early executive orders, Trump has threatened to cut off federal funds for states, cities, hospitals and universities unless they adopt a wide range of conservative social policies, such as banning transgender girls from competing in high school sports and ending diversity programs in education and employment.
Since most red states have already adopted these policies, the principal effect of Trump’s orders is to attempt to impose these ideas on Democratic-controlled states that have already considered them at the state level, and virtually without exception, spurned them.
“For most of my adult life, I grew up understanding that one of the cores of the conservative platform was empowering states’ rights and (encouraging) state laboratories of democracy and the like,” said Nick Brown, the Democratic attorney general in Washington state, who has sued Trump over several of his early executive orders. “At least what we are seeing in the first weeks of the presidency so far is a real abdication of that philosophy. (Trump) is trying to impose his will across a myriad of issues.”
This escalating confrontation presents a striking shift in roles for the parties. Generally, Democrats over the years have supported establishing uniform national rules for civil rights and civil liberties as a way of expanding rights. As Brown noted, it’s Republicans who have typically argued for preserving states’ flexibility to set their own rules.
Trump’s push is engineering a role reversal not only for the Republican Party, but also for the federal government itself. The federal government has often stood aside as states have restricted rights — as during the nearly seven decades of Southern segregation between the landmark “separate but equal” 1896 Supreme Court decision and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But it’s been rarer for Washington to overturn rights that already were guaranteed in the states. Congress, for instance, never intervened to overturn state laws prohibiting interracial marriage (before the Supreme Court eventually did so in 1967), but neither did it approve the occasional legislative proposals to institute such a ban nationwide.
Trump, in a striking departure, is now using national power to try to override rights the blue states have protected.
“It’s quite clear that this is an effort to commandeer the federal government to win the culture war, so to speak, once and for all,” said Jonathan Friedman, manager of the US free expression program at PEN America, a group that supports free speech.
The Trump offensive marks a new stage in a battle that has been intensifying for years.
During Joe Biden’s four years in the White House, Republican-controlled states approved a towering wave of socially conservative legislation on many of the same issues that Trump is now targeting through his executive orders.
This eruption of red-state activity reversed the dominant policy direction in civil rights and civil liberties for more than half a century. Since the 1960s, the principal thrust of actions by Congress, the executive branch and especially the federal courts has been to raise the floor of rights guaranteed to all Americans nationwide and to reduce the ability of states to restrict those rights — a process that historians and legal scholars have described as “the rights revolution.”
During the Biden years, Republican-controlled states pushed back against this centralizing trend across a broad range of issues. Republican legislatures and governors advanced a common agenda establishing new restrictions on voting access; transgender rights; and how teachers can discuss issues relating to race and gender in the classroom. After the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, red states rushed to ban or severely limit the procedure. But those restrictions made almost no inroads in blue states.
That divergence is evident across every major social issue conservatives have prioritized in recent years. For instance, according to the Movement Advancement Project, 25 states have barred transgender girls from participating in high school sports, but the only one of them that voted against Trump in 2024 was New Hampshire, where Republicans control the governorship and state legislature. New Hampshire is likewise the only one of the 27 states that have barred gender-affirming care for transgender minors that voted against Trump in 2024.
Each of the 19 states that ban abortion before fetal viability also voted for Trump in 2024. Fifteen states, similarly, have taken steps to restrict DEI programs within their borders; all of them voted for Trump in 2024. PEN America calculates that 19 states have either passed state legislation or imposed regulations restricting how teachers can discuss race-related issues, gender identity or sexual orientation; all those states backed Trump in 2024, except, again, for New Hampshire. Of the 21 states that have barred schools from mandating that students receive the coronavirus vaccine, all but New Mexico and New Hampshire voted for Trump. Twenty-nine states allow residents to carry concealed weapons without a permit; the heavily rural New England neighbors of Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire are the only ones on that list that didn’t support Trump last year.
the amendment’s defeat.” class=”image__dam-img image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image__dam-img–loading’)’ onerror=”imageLoadError(this)” height=”1600″ width=”2400″ loading=’lazy’/>“I think we are more divided on some very, very important society and cultural issues,” than in a very long time, said Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “The last time I think we were this divided were in the late 1850s and 1860s. We’re not in a civil war, but I think these issues are so important and Americans are so divided on this that we are in, in essence what is a cold war” between the red and blue states.
Democrats tried to slow the red-state social policy offensive during the Biden era, but failed almost completely. During his first two years, the House Democratic majority passed bills codifying Roe v. Wade to restore abortion rights in every state and raising the floor of national voting and LGBTQ rights in ways that would have voided some of the key red state initiatives. But those bills were all blocked by the GOP-led filibusters in the Senate. Biden’s Education Department issued regulations that would have blocked states from implementing blanket bans on transgender participation in school sports, while leaving schools free to limit their participation in some cases, but ultimately withdrew that proposal in his final days amid political and legal pushback.
Even as the Democratic drive to override the red-state social agenda from Washington stalled, conservatives largely ran out of new states willing to adopt these policies.
Republicans in some states that have already approved restrictions on transgender rights or classroom discussion of race and sexual orientation are still considering bills to tighten them. But there are few signs that the core conservative social policies are poised to advance beyond the states that have already adopted them. “I am pretty sure every single state across the country has introduced some kind of anti-(transgender) bill since 2020,” said Logan Casey, director of policy research for the Movement Advancement Project. “But … with the youth medical care bans and the sports bans, we’ve come close to, if not already hit, the limit on the number of states that will enact these bans.”
Friedman, of PEN, likewise says, “I do not see that a number of red states were moving aggressively to pass these bills against K-12 schools with the same tenacity we saw a few years ago.”
On abortion, the movement has actually been in the opposite direction, with voters acting through ballot initiatives to overturn the bans that Republican-controlled legislatures approved in some states, including Ohio, Missouri and Arizona.
All of this suggested that as Trump returned to office the nation had reached a kind of uneasy equilibrium on some deeply divisive social issues. Despite the hope of Democrats, Republicans in the 2022 and 2024 elections easily retained control of the governorships and state legislatures in the states that imposed many of these restrictive policies, including the new limits on abortion access.
But as Jake Grumbach, a University of California at Berkeley political scientist who studies state decision-making, points out, Democratic governors and state legislators in blue states “haven’t been defeated” for rejecting these ideas. Each side of our national political divide, he argues, has carved out its own sphere of influence on these questions.
“An era of national partisan polarization and nationally coordinated parties … has created a situation where you can see parties’ national agenda through their state governance, particularly in areas where states have more control over, those social issues,” Grumbach said.
The aggressive early moves from Trump and the Republican Congress seek to shatter this tenuous balance and restore a national set of rules on most of these issues by mandating that all states adopt the restrictive approaches approved in the red states.
Through executive orders, Trump has threatened to cut off an array of federal funding sources for states, cities and private entities that refuse to ban the participation of transgender girls in high school sports; gender-affirming care for minors; DEI initiatives; COVID vaccine mandates for school children; and discussion in K-12 schools of what his order called “radical, anti-American ideologies” revolving around discussion of gender identity and racial discrimination.
Trump demonstrated his determination to follow through on those threats during his tense exchange last week at the White House with Maine’s Democratic Gov. Janet Mills. After Mills told Trump she would follow federal and state law in responding to his threat to cut off education funding to the state unless it barred transgender girls from school sports, Trump brusquely declared, “We are the federal law.” Hours later, the Education Department announced it had launched an investigation into Maine’s policy.
Even as Trump pursues these executive branch efforts, House Republicans are expected to approve legislation that would mandate that every state require proof of citizenship to register to vote — an idea that has only been adopted in two states controlled at the time by Republicans (Kansas, whose law was struck down in federal court, and Arizona, whose law was partially blocked). Congressional Republicans have also introduced legislation that would override blue state gun control laws by requiring every state to honor a permit to carry a concealed weapon granted in any state.
On a related third front, the administration is pursuing litigation and executive branch actions to constrain the ability of blue states to deviate from conservative policies even within their own borders. The administration is suing Illinois and New York to overturn state and local laws that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. It has revoked the approval granted under the Biden administration for New York City to implement its congestion pricing fee on commuters. And it is already moving to revoke California’s authority — which it has wielded since the 1970s — to set its own clean air and automotive fuel efficiency standards, as Trump tried to do during his first term.
The biggest exception in all this activity is abortion. Though most House Republicans have previously endorsed legislation that could have the effect of banning abortion nationwide, the GOP has apparently abandoned those efforts for now amid the calls from Trump to let states decide the issue. (The biggest uncertainty around abortion is whether Trump will try to use the Food and Drug Administration’s nationwide authority to restrict access to the abortion medication mifepristone even in the states where abortion remains legal.)
The cumulative effect of Trump’s agenda, Grumbach noted, would be to carry the federal government into unusual territory: actively erasing rights that now exist in some states, such as the blue places that allow gender-affirming care for transgender minors and for transgender girls to compete in school sports.
With some important exceptions, Grumbach said, Congress and the federal courts have usually contributed to restrictive periods in US history by allowing states to rescind rights, as they did during segregation. “It’s very rare for anybody in the presidency or Congress to do anything except the sin of omission, or the sin of doing nothing, as states restrict rights,” Grumbach said. But now, even compared with Trump’s first term, the administration “is using more institutional tools and pushing the boundaries way more” to pressure Democratic-controlled states into retrenching rights.
Most of Trump’s executive orders seeking to impose the red-state social policies nationwide have quickly drawn lawsuits from coalitions of civil rights, academic freedom and free speech groups, as well as Democratic state attorneys general. Lower courts have already issued orders blocking the enforcement of Trump’s executive orders on gender-affirming care for minors and DEI.
David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law School and former national legal director for the ACLU, says it is difficult to generalize about how much leeway courts may provide Trump to condition federal funding on adherence to these policy goals. “The law on the limits of the use on federal funding is a notoriously difficult area to draw clear lines in,” Cole said. “I think we’ll have to see. But I think he’s certainly crossed the line with a number of these rules.”
Cole said that Trump, in particular, risks colliding with a 2013 Supreme Court decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts. In that case — ironically involving the US Agency for International Development, the agency now under siege from Elon Musk’s cost-cutters — the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not mandate how other entities spent their own resources as a condition of receiving federal dollars for an unrelated purpose.
That ruling, Cole said, established that the federal government “can’t use government money to try to control what a recipient says outside of the federally funded program. You can control how the federal government money is used. But you can’t use it as a lever to try to control how the recipient speaks with its own money.”
A federal district court judge in Maryland last week cited that Supreme Court precedent in issuing an order blocking Trump’s threat to cut off funding to educational institutions with diversity programs. Trump’s executive order, wrote District Court Judge Adam Abelson, a Biden appointee, “is exactly what (the 2013 Supreme Court precedent) prohibits—the government leveraging its funding to restrict federal contractors and grantees from otherwise exercising their First Amendment rights outside the scope of the federal funding.”
Cases against the Trump orders affecting transgender people have also argued that they violate the Fifth Amendment, by singling out a particular group for discrimination, and the 10th Amendment, by overreaching into powers reserved for the states.
Brown, from Washington, is one of three Democratic state attorneys general who filed a lawsuit that has already produced a temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s effort to deny federal funding to hospitals and medical schools that provide transition care for transgender minors. Brown acknowledges that the Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices generally have proved receptive to the expansive vision of presidential authority Trump is flexing with his executive orders. But he notes those same justices in 2022 also struck down the constitutional right to abortion and returned that issue to the states.
“They are not the identical situation, but it is hard to have consistency if you are saying abortion should be a state issue and transgender health care should not be a state issue,” Brown said.
The Heritage Foundation’s von Spakovsky seconds Cole’s assessment that when considering Washington’s authority to tie federal funding to other policy goals that courts “haven’t drawn a clear line for anyone to be able to easily figure out at what point does it become coercive and violate the law.” But von Spakovsky, who served in the Justice Department’s civil rights division under President George W. Bush, says the Trump administration has reason to be optimistic that the Supreme Court, with its six-member Republican-appointed majority, will view his key executive orders as “trying to stop unfair discrimination” and uphold it with the same reasoning it applied in its landmark 2023 decision barring the use of racial factors in college admission decisions.
One disagreement above all divides the defenders and critics of Trump’s attempt to impose the red-state social model nationwide. Trump’s supporters frame his efforts as an extension of the attempt through the decades of the “rights revolution” to expunge discrimination based on race or sex — for instance, by barring people assigned male at birth from competing in women’s sports, or prohibiting programs that can disadvantage White men by expanding opportunities for minorities and women.
“I don’t think it’s any different from the civil rights situation in 1965,” said von Spakovsky. “What the president is doing is enforcing basic civil rights laws, and you had a similar divide in the 1960s, unfortunately, when Southern states wanted to continue to discriminate and we said as a nation we cannot tolerate that.”
But those fighting Trump’s efforts see his rapid-fire initiatives as an inversion of the long struggle to raise the floor of basic rights and liberties available in all states. They view Trump’s claim of defending the rights of people assigned female at birth or of Whites applying for college admissions as a thinly veiled excuse to impose discriminatory policies on minority groups, such as transgender people or Black and Latino college applicants. “It’s the difference between fighting discrimination and discriminating,” said Cole. “It’s one thing to use the power of the federal purse to enforce the Constitution, to enforce equal protection, to ensure equality. It’s quite the opposite to use it to violate guarantees of equal protection, to violate guarantees of free expression. And that’s what the Trump administration is doing.”
Trump is trying to apply Washington’s historic role of establishing a national framework of rights to target the very minority groups who federal civil rights power has more commonly sought to protect, especially in recent decades. In the name of preserving rights for some groups (student athletes who were assigned female at birth; White men competing for college admissions; parents who oppose explicit discussion of race or sexual orientation in the classroom), Trump is attempting to retrench the rights available to others (transgender people; racial minorities; teachers, parents and students who don’t want their lessons censored).
Most red states in recent years have struck that same balance. The courts — and eventually the voters — will decide how far Trump and the Republican Congress can go in forcing those red state choices onto the blue states that have so far rebuffed them.