The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Power Among America First Think Tanks

Nobody in this world says they want power. They say they are fixing a failure. The America First think tank ecosystem of 2026 is no different. Its organizing myth is a diagnosis: we won the election but lost the state. From that diagnosis flows everything else, the policy factories, the personnel databases, the legal justifications, the philosophical training programs, the judicial pipelines. Each piece covers a different layer of the state. Together they form something that has no real precedent in American political life: a parallel governing apparatus built to bypass the machinery that defeated the first Trump term before it could fully begin.
The America First Policy Institute opened in 2021 with a $20 million headquarters a few blocks from the White House. Brooke Rollins, Larry Kudlow, and Chad Wolf are among its leaders, all former senior administration officials. It does not function like a traditional think tank because it was not designed to. Traditional think tanks produce long-form papers and wait for influence. AFPI drafts executive orders and ready-to-sign legislation. By its own account, over 86 percent of its drafted policies were advanced or enacted in the first hundred days of the current administration. That number is not primarily a metric. It is a status signal directed at the coalition: we are not theorists, we are operators. The distinction matters enormously inside this world. Status flows to whoever can move an idea from draft to enactment fastest. AFPI claims jurisdiction over that pipeline.
The Heritage Foundation under Kevin Roberts represents a different but complementary jurisdictional claim. Heritage has moved away from its Reagan-era identity as a producer of policy white papers toward something more structural: control over personnel. The premise is simple and was proven by the first term’s failures. Ideas without people to implement them produce nothing. A hostile mid-level bureaucracy can slow, distort, or quietly bury any policy initiative regardless of how well-designed it is. Heritage responded by building a database of ideologically vetted lawyers, regulators, and administrators ready for placement across federal agencies. Status inside this coalition no longer comes from being cited in a policy debate. It comes from being placed. The most powerful figures are those who can deploy a loyal cadre into positions that actually run the machinery of the state.
The Center for Renewing America, led by Russ Vought, fills a third role. It supplies the legal and cultural arguments that justify the dismantling project: ending birthright citizenship, restructuring the administrative state, expanding executive authority. Vought functions as a permission-giver. His coalition does not merely interpret existing law. It claims jurisdiction over what the state is permitted to do and provides the moral vocabulary to make those claims stick. Without this layer, the policy factory and the personnel machine lack the legal cover to operate at full speed. With it, actions that might otherwise face immediate challenge arrive pre-justified.
The broader network extends beyond these three nodes. The Claremont Institute provides philosophical grounding and trains a rising intellectual class to understand this moment not as normal politics but as a regime-level struggle. That framing matters because it raises the stakes of every policy fight to something existential, which justifies the urgency and the methods. The Federalist Society runs the judicial pipeline, securing long-term institutional permanence through clerkships and judgeships in a way that no single administration can easily reverse. Together these institutions cover every layer of the state: the drafting of policy, the staffing of agencies, the legal justification of action, the philosophical interpretation of the moment, and the long-term shaping of doctrine through the courts.
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory illuminates what this ecosystem is actually doing beneath the surface of its nationalist language. Every coalition presents its preferred definition of legitimate authority as the obvious description of what effective governance requires. AFPI claims that policy matters only if it can be implemented immediately. Heritage claims that implementation requires personnel alignment. The Center for Renewing America claims that restructuring requires legal justification. Claremont claims that action requires philosophical grounding. The Federalist Society claims that gains require judicial permanence. None of these claims acknowledges that institutional interests, the pre-positioned drafts, the databases, the donor networks, the training pipelines, shape the definitions themselves. Each presents its version of effective governance as a patriotic necessity visible to anyone serious about restoring sovereignty.
Stephen Turner’s critique of expertise cuts deeper still. What looks like a coherent governing philosophy is also a jurisdictional war over who gets to count as the legitimate operator of the state. The America First ecosystem does not compete for status through citations or conference panels. It competes through implementation. The goal is not to influence the gatekeepers at the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings, or the Atlantic Council. It is to replace them entirely, with a parallel structure that has its own donor base, its own media, its own fellowships, and its own conferences. The claim underlying the whole project is that existing institutions are captured and biased, which justifies building an alternative system and declaring it the authentic one.
What makes this ecosystem stable, and what Turner would find most analytically significant, is the sincerity of its participants. These are not cynical operators who understand themselves to be constructing a rival elite hierarchy. They believe they are restoring democracy and reclaiming sovereignty from a class of unelected technocrats who captured the state over decades. That belief allows the status competition to operate without self-awareness. The personnel database feels like patriotism. The policy factory feels like service. The legal justifications feel like constitutional fidelity. The incentives of the game run beneath the surface of the conviction, invisible to the players precisely because the conviction is genuine.
The lesson the first term taught was structural. Winning an election is not the same as controlling the governing machinery. The America First ecosystem was built to close that gap. Whether it succeeds or produces its own form of captured governance, a rival elite replacing the one it displaced, is the question the next several years will answer. Turner would note that revolutions in who counts as the legitimate expert do not automatically produce better governance. They produce new gatekeepers who believe, with equal sincerity, that their authority is different in kind from the authority they replaced.