Irish politics is showing symptoms of the US culture wars — we wanted to know why

Just like other cultural influences have been exported from the US, so too could the often hateful, toxic rhetoric of this new era of Maga politics, nowhere more obvious than Irish anti-migrant protestors waving Trump flags and wearing ‘Make Ireland Great Again’ hats

Fri, 27 Feb, 2026 - 01:00

Mike Sheridan

I’m what the kids call an "elder millennial". I was born in 1982 and grew up the youngest of three siblings in the 90s on the northside of Dublin. The area where I grew up was working class and it could be tough at the best of times, so when we got our first cinema in 1991, the UCI (United Cinemas International) in Coolock, I was pretty much there week in week out. It didn’t really matter what was showing, it was the escapism that appealed to me.

With the occasional exception, almost every movie at UCI came from the US. I distinctly remember getting lost in the world of My Girl when I was eight. In my teen years, it was Scream, Swingers, Grosse Point Blank, TV shows like Dawson’s Creek and The X-Files, music from Foo Fighters and the Smashing Pumpkins. It wasn’t an active obsession with American culture — American culture just seemed to be omnipresent in my life.

Almost organically celebrities started becoming politicians. Ronald Reagan was a little before my time, but when Arnold Schwarzenegger announced he was running for governor of California on The Tonight Show in 2003, it felt significant.

Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, had a disastrous political run alongside John McCain in the 2008 presidential election against Barack Obama. Despite it, she landed a reality TV show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, and, for a time, was the face of the Tea Party movement, a reactionary, often religious fundamentalist group of Republicans who positioned themselves as “fiscally conservative”.

Palin was a failed politician but she had name recognition and that mattered when you needed air time on cable news to get your message out to the world.

In many ways, Donald Trump is the final boss of this culture. Prior to his political career, very few people in Ireland knew who he was outside of a Home Alone 2 cameo and maybe catching some repeats of The Apprentice.

The latter gave him a broadly consumed public persona he ran with — the billionaire businessman who knows how to get a deal done. When he ran for president in 2015, he was considered a joke by the media, but he struck a chord with the American public and suddenly, inexplicably, the former host of a reality television series was the leader of the free world.

Mike Sheridan: 'Just like other cultural influences have been exported from the US, so too could the often hateful, toxic rhetoric of this new era of Maga politics. Othering people became a sport.'

He did so by taking different elements of the Tea Party movement, conservative political figures like Pat Buchanan, and adding a brash commentary initially aimed at Mexican migrants.

Crucially, he led with a charismatic personal brand he had spent decades cultivating. When he gives speeches, Trump has the cadence and pacing of a comedian, just with less funny punchlines and more dire consequences.

It became clear to me, in the wake of his first election win, that if the inclusive, inspiring message of someone like Barack Obama could travel around the world, then so too could the nefarious elements of Trumpism.

This was the starting point for the documentary, Amplified: The Exportation of the Culture Wars.

Just like other cultural influences have been exported from the US, so too could the often hateful, toxic rhetoric of this new era of Maga politics. Othering people became a sport.

I wanted to speak to people in the US and Ireland about the damage this new type of political strategy is having on the discourse. Exacerbated by social media, society is becoming more and more polarised. Trump has given political and other public figures a permission structure to be the worst version of themselves.

Mis- and disinformation are increasingly rampant and the truth is becoming worryingly subjective. There is no more tragic example of this than the recent killing of two American citizens on the streets of Minneapolis by members of Ice and the Trump administration’s gaslighting response.

In the aftermath of the Dublin riots in November 2023, a flood of US political figures posted about the incident.

Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson dedicated an entire show to Ireland, claiming Irish people were “rising up”. According to both men, Ireland was also apparently heading towards a “civil war”.

Donald Trump Junior even chimed in, spreading misinformation about the health of one of the children from the horrendous attack that sparked the rioting.

An anti-immigration protest in Dublin last year. Picture: Collins

The nucleus of the film is this: instead of championing an understanding of policies and educating people on the nuances of how government works, many politicians and figures of influence are instead pointing the finger at minorities and giving specific groups of people the blame, particularly, as the film highlights, migrants and members of the trans community.

The culture wars and the notion of “left and right” are at the forefront of this, particularly since covid. The amount of wannabe Irish political figures I’ve seen use the word “woke” or brand something as a “left agenda” is increasing, and is obviously a tactic imported from the US.

Next time you see a fringe political figure use that phrasing, ask them what they mean exactly and wait for “woke” to make an appearance. I’m shocked it’s not pointed out more.

Monoliths are a bad idea, but they’re convenient. You can put people in a box, ignore any semblance of nuance in their perspective and move on with your day. But the core issue is that the idea of a left and right ideology is very different in the US than it is in Ireland.

Our Government would be branded extreme socialists by influential figures in the US purely because we have a public healthcare system — something that is somehow a hot button issue there.

It’s not just Ireland that has felt the impact of this imported culture war rhetoric at a political level. Former British prime minister Liz Truss has repeatedly attempted to insert herself into the Maga movement.

Rishi Sunak gave it a bash at his final Conservative conference before a shellacking by Labour. “A man is a man and a woman is a woman” he said, quite unconvincingly, to cheers from members of the Tory party.

Some of the last things we filmed for Amplified were protests in Dublin in spring 2025. Among the protests, which was primarily related to migration, there were multiple people waving Trump flags and others with ‘Make Ireland Great Again’ hats, just like the red Trump ones, but, y’know, green.

I found the latter genuinely astounding — what kind Ireland do these people want to go back to, exactly? I’m not sure if there’s a more obvious example of an American import than that.