The Giving Review: Philanthropy and The Counterrevolution

In Victor Davis Hanson’s just-released The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement, establishment philanthropy plays a recurring role. By Hanson’s description, major American grantmakers and their grantees were among those on the left whose tactical errors and overreaches helped return Donald Trump to office. Such errors and overreaches, he argues, have continued during Trump’s second term.

A prolific author and commentator, Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has also authored 2021’s The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America and 2019’s The Case for Trump. A 2008 Bradley Prize recipient, he serves on the Bradley Foundation’s board of directors.

Hanson places foundations among the “armies of anti-Trumpers,” along with “the media, academia, the higher echelons of the military, the administrative state, … corporate boardrooms, and popular culture.” The Counterrevolution tells the story of “the eventual political impotence of his various enemies, who for the most part could not find conventional avenues to stop Trump’s second-term agenda either legislatively or executively,” he writes. “These critics conceded his policies were more popular than their own. But that admission only accelerated their furor ….”

Specific examples

Hanson cites the Biden administration’s “sweetheart deals and grants to well-connected progressive foundations, nongovernmental organizations, and various left-wing nonprofits.” He names several “[b]ig-city district attorneys” who “were often funded in their campaigns by George Soros-affiliated foundations and political action committees and were advocates of ‘critical legal theory’ and ‘critical race theory.’”

During the second Trump administration, Hanson mentions “[r]ich left-wing donors—most notably the variously named Soros-funded foundations”—that “often subsidized and sponsored massive street protests against ICE deportations.” He notes,

One result of the 2025 Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts to the bureaucracy was the revelation that billions of dollars of USAID (US Agency for International Development) grants to nongovernmental organizations and domestic financial awards to nonprofits had become a big-government funding service for left-wing political operatives masquerading under the guise of disinterested nonpartisans.

Of protests against Trump advisor Elon Musk, Hanson says they

were often staged—with similar printed signs, coached chants, and printed schedules, and mostly funded by left-wing foundations and political action committees. Ironically, in light of the denunciations of Musk as an oligarch undemocratically interfering in government, many of these marches were themselves subsidized by the billionaire George Soros through various front groups.

As for the “Never Trump Movement of 2015-2016,” it “is hollowed out” and “can no longer, after a decade, sustain the pretense of true-blue, principled conservatism when it has consistently supported left-wing candidates antithetical to its members’ prior lifelong advocacies and when it has often been subsidized by leftist activists and foundations.”

Larger context

Hanson observes that “no previous Republican president or candidate would have deliberately chosen to challenge the combined force of the media, bureaucracies, campuses, foundations, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the Democratic Party ….” Many large nonprofits in particular, he believes, “were controlled by the bicoastal progressive, often indifferent to national elections, and thus politically and intolerantly weaponized”—warranting the reaction against them.

Trump “is conducting a full-fledged counterrevolution not seen in the United States in nearly a century,” Hanson concludes. “If it proves successful, the commanding heights of the media, higher education, popular culture, nonprofits, much of the judicial system, and the administrative state might no longer fuel the ongoing progressive effort to fundamentally transform America into something quite different from what its Founders envisioned.”

For years, if not decades, Big Philanthropy and its grant recipients have been comfortable presenting their work as strengthening democracy, advancing justice, or protecting civil society. Hanson’s The Counterrevolution is a reminder that a lot of their fellow citizens see some of this work quite differently—not as neutral civic beneficence, but as the tax-incentivized exercise of private power in public life.

Philanthropy has reason to consider not only whether Hanson’s counterrevolution might ultimately succeed, of course, but also to at least understand why he—and others who share his view—came to believe there was something to counter.