Confirmed as the United States Secretary of Agriculture in 2025, these are the individuals shaping the decisions that undermine democracy.
Summary:
Brooke Leslie Rollins, Trump’s nominee for secretary of agriculture who has little experience in the field, is a long-time advocate of far-right causes beginning with her fifteen-year stint at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) where a number of far-right activists, including Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, built their careers. Rollins joined the first Trump administration in February 2018 and served in various capacities over the next two years. Prior to leaving the White House, Trump nominated Rollins to serve on The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission to promote a “patriotic education” that deemphasizes tragic aspects of American history such as slavery and pushes conspiracy theories concerning the role of progressives creating a “deep state.” Rather than teach facts, the commission aimed to indoctrinate students into its version of a whitewashed history. Since leaving the first Trump administration, Rollins was one of the founding members of the far-right think tank America First Policy Institute (AFPI), described as a “White House in waiting,” serving as its president and CEO. In this position, she railed against “Critical Race Theory” being taught in public schools, which it is not, lashed out against announcements of prominent “firsts” for people from minority groups, and opposed political movements for social justice on the false premise that they are “violent.” She has been a prominent voice supporting Trump through his legal problems, referring to them as “weaponized” and “politically-motivated.”
In Her Own Words:
“Identity politics is fundamentally incompatible with the principle of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Proponents of identity politics rearrange Americans by group identities, rank them by how much oppression they have experienced at the hands of the majority culture, and then sow division among them. While not as barbaric or dehumanizing, this new creed creates new hierarchies as unjust as the old hierarchies of the antebellum South, making a mockery of equality with an ever-changing scale of special privileges on the basis of racial and sexual identities. The very idea of equality under the law—of one nation sharing [Martin Luther] King’s “solid rock of brotherhood”—is not possible and, according to this argument, probably not even desirable.”
- The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, p. 33, January 2021
“Far from creating an omniscient body of civil servants led only by “pragmatism” or “science,” though, progressives instead created what amounts to a fourth branch of government called at times the bureaucracy or the administrative state. This shadow government never faces elections and today operates largely without checks and balances. The founders always opposed government unaccountable to the people and without constitutional restraint, yet it continues to grow around us. ”
- The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, p. 13, January 2021
“The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. The ideas that drove this change had been growing in America for decades, and they distorted many areas of policy in the half century that followed. Among the distortions was the abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of “group rights”…The justification for reversing the promise of color-blind civil rights was that past discrimination requires present effort, or affirmative action in the form of preferential treatment, to overcome long-accrued inequalities. Those forms of preferential treatment built up in our system over time, first in administrative rulings, then executive orders, later in congressionally passed law, and finally were sanctified by the Supreme Court.”
- The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, p. 15, January 2021
“Americans that receive an honest and genuine education on the American founding are able to point out the hypocrisy and big government lies of the left’s “equity and inclusion” crusade. They recognize that these are mechanisms intended to divide the American people based on skin color for political gain, not to achieve true equality. The Biden administration could not allow for that. Instead, in typical fashion, Biden called for the Domestic Policy Council to “embed equity principles across the federal government” in an effort to combat “systemic racism.” In practice, these efforts have amounted to attempts to distribute or deny government resources to Americans on the basis of race, and have been successfully challenged in court for violating non-discrimination laws.”
- Brooke Rollins, Op-Ed America First Policy Institute, November 2, 2021
“Americans who remember the violence of 2020 will find it all familiar. Then, as now, there was a proximate trigger in events, and then, as now, the actual strategic aim of the so-called [Black Lives Matter] protestors—really insurrectionists—was to sow chaos and, not at all coincidentally, compel particular policy and electoral outcomes. We know what happened in 2020, even if the press and the regime have done their best to bury that memory or retrofit it as a righteous and mostly peaceful movement for justice. That fraught year saw American communities set afire, American law enforcement ambushed and murdered, American citizens subject to ideological show trials by fanatical roving mobs, and American institutions rush to acquiescence lest they be targeted. In any other country, it would have been called seditious insurrection and met with force. And probably it should have been.”
-Brooke Rollins writing for the Claremont Institute’s American Mind, May 7, 2024
“We have to understand chaos as a well-honed and deliberately constructed institutional capacity of the American Left. Since the Obama years, we have seen successive waves of violence and civic takeover unleashed upon Americans and American communities, under a variety of pretexts—from Occupy Wall Street to Ferguson to the 2017 Inaugural protests, to various Women’s Marches, to the 2020 insurrection—and now this. This phenomenon represents the development of a series of operational capabilities, both physical and ideological: the ability to seize city centers, cut transportation arteries, occupy targeted facilities, combat or deter law enforcement, and psychologically dominate the societal commanding heights in academia, media, and governance. It is all of a piece, and all mutually reinforcing.”
- Brooke Rollins writing for the Claremont Institute’s American Mind, May 7, 2024
History of Far-Right Activism
Rollins began her career in the 1990s working as a litigator for Hughes & Luce, L.L.P., in Dallas, Texas, on complex commercial litigation after graduating from law school. She also was a clerk for United States Federal District Judge Barbara M.G. Lynn. Rollins cut her teeth in politics by serving as the deputy general counsel to Texas Governor Rick Perry, and later as his Policy Director, at times appearing in the media as a surrogate. Her only background in agriculture is growing up on a family farm, having been involved in 4-H in high school and later, and involvement in her children’s show cattle careers.
Rollins then worked for fifteen years, from 2003 to 2018, at the far-right think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), self-described as a “non-profit, free-market research institute” based in Austin, Texas. During this time, she helped to make the organization an influential force in Texas politics, and advocated for policies that favored voucher programs for schools and private education, as well as the aggressive use of fossil fuels, and opposition to environmental protections. This approach to education would be taken up by her former boss Rick Perry, who once called for the Department of Education to be eliminated in a 2012 Republican presidential primary debate. The TPPF is also notable for holding climate-denialist views, and for its more recent election denialism.
Prior to joining the Trump administration in 2018, Rollins hired Kevin Roberts for the position of executive vice president of TPPF, who would later go on to head the Heritage Foundation and the rights-stripping Project 2025 (for more on Project 2025, see the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s (GPAHE) reporting here).
She remains close to TPPF and congratulated them after they chose a new president in October 2021, as well as when former TPPF Executive Vice President Kevin Roberts joined the Heritage Foundation the same month. Rollins returned to TPPF in 2021 to sit on the group’s board of directors.
In the first Trump administration, she began as the assistant to the president for intergovernmental and technology initiatives in the Office for American Innovation in February 2018. In May 2020, toward the end of the administration, she was appointed the acting director of the United States Domestic Policy Council. In this capacity, she served as a member of the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic education” 33 days before Trump left the presidency. Much of the work she and her partners did on this commission, which downplays the role of issues such as slavery in American history, she would take to the America First Policy Institute (AFPI).
Rollins is currently the president and CEO of the far-right think tank AFPI, described by Politico as a conservative “White House in waiting.” Rollins founded AFPI in 2021 in order to serve the agenda of a future Trump administration and organize a coalition of sympathizers ready to join it.
In her position at AFPI, Rollins defended Trump at every step after Biden won the presidency. She referred to every indictment of Trump as a “weaponization of government,” and in April 2023 chastised the “regime of elite interests rather than a genuine representation of the people” that, according to her, sought to “curb, stop, indict, hinder, impeach, remove and depose” Trump. In July 2024, she wrote in a Fox News opinion piece that this amounted to “a coup against a sitting president.” On July 1, 2024, she published a statement that celebrated the Trump v. United States Supreme Court decision, which gives a sitting president immunity from prosecution for certain actions taken while in office.
In November 2024, Trump nominated her to serve as the next secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, despite having little experience in the agricultural sector. As the head of AFPI, however, her nomination, along with at least seven other members of the think tank who will be joining the new administration, shows the far-right group’s influence.
Rewriting History
Rollins was notably a part of Trump’s attempts to promote a “patriotic education” as a part of the 1776 Commission he formed only 33 days prior to leaving the presidency (it was dismantled after Joe Biden became president).
Members of this commission included Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn and the college’s Professor in Constitutional Government Matthew Spalding, who directed the work of the commission (for more on Hillsdale College, and its far-right bona fides, see GPAHE’s previous reporting here). Other members on the commission included Claremont McKenna Professor Charles R. Kesler, Heritage Foundation fellow Mike Gonzalez, and Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant. Another member, Alexandra Caro Campana, is now affiliated with AFPI’s Center for 1776.
The move was seen as an effort to counter the work of academics who seek to shine a light on some of the more problematic aspects of American history, including slavery and segregation, which Rollins and her allies would like to downplay. They reject such efforts as The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which shines a light on the role of slavery throughout American history and the role of Black people in the foundation of the country, which is mentioned in the Commission’s final report.
Another, “subversive” tendency identified by the authors of the report is Critical Race Theory (CRT), which became a far-right target around the same time. They also believe progressives have unleashed “Cultural Marxism” on society, which they tie to 20th century Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote about how social change occurs by way of changing “cultural hegemony.” Trump and his allies argue that history lessons on race and slavery teach students to “hate America,” and divide the nation as a means to undermine the Constitution. In an opinion piece, Rollins wrote that teaching these topics to students led to a decline in “national pride.”
In the 1776 report, the authors counter critics who claim the founders were hypocritical because of their support for slavery while simultaneously claiming all men are created equal, and they argue that the “Western world’s repudiation of slavery” rendered the American project unique. In the section, “Challenges to America’s Principles,” the authors include subsections on “slavery,” “progressivism,” “fascism,” “communism,” and finally “racism and identity politics.” In the section on the progressive movement, which appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, they deride what they consider to be a derivation from the “universal truths” enshrined in the Constitution by the founders over two hundred and fifty years ago.
In the same sub-section, they also refer to a “fourth branch of government called at times the bureaucracy or the administrative state,” and a “shadow government” that “never faces elections and today operates largely without checks and balances,” a subtle reference to Trump’s “deep state” conspiracy theory.
In the section on “racism and identity politics,” the authors welcome the Civil Rights Movement, but immediately chastise the subsequent “programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders.” This includes “affirmative action in the form of preferential treatment, to overcome long-accrued inequalities.” The report ends by calling for a restoration of “patriotic education that teaches the truth about America.”
Rollins has held these views for a long time. While at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), Rollins advocated for “reform” of education along these lines, calling for school vouchers and an increasing privatization of public schools.
Racial Justice Opponent
In her opinion pieces published on AFPI’s website, Rollins opposed the university-level academic discipline of CRT, which theorizes that racist outcomes often come from the way that the legal system and institutions of power are designed despite a supposed policy of “colorblindness.” She uses CRT, a topic that is only discussed in academic settings, to take aim at unrelated efforts to promote inclusionary practices in public schools for children.
Rollins regularly lashes out at groups the moment a person of color is celebrated for their achievements. For example, during the 2023 Super Bowl, she wrote that the “Race Obsessed Press” was focused on the “least important thing,” meaning that both teams were headed by Black quarterbacks, a first. When Biden promised to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court in 2022, she stated that this would be “illegal in any other setting,” a reference to employment discrimination.
In The American Mind, a publication from the far-right Claremont Institute, she opposed mass movements for social justice such as Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, Occupy Wall Street, and others. In an article on “political violence,” she writes that “chaos,” “intimidation,” and “violence” were inherent characteristics of these movements, regardless of evidence to the contrary. (For example, the Black Lives Matter protests that emerged in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in 2020, were largely peaceful, with only five percent of the more than 10,600 demonstrations involving any demonstrators engaging in violence according to ACLED). Notably absent from Rollins’ piece on political violence was the Capitol insurrection promoted by her former boss, Trump, on January 6, 2021, as well as the spike in racially-motivated terrorism over the past decade.
