What does the future hold for Trump’s political movement? First we must determine which forms will prevail.
What does the future hold for Trump’s political movement? First we must determine which forms will prevail.
H ow much of “Trumpism” will survive in the Republican Party now that Donald Trump is gone from the White House? That is the hot question of the day on the right. Much depends, of course, on whether Trump himself is able to stage a comeback in 2024, but there are still years of political battles and midterm elections between now and then. We can’t answer what Trumpism will look like without Trump in office or running for office until we decide what “Trumpism” is in the first place.
Despite vigorous efforts to refashion “Trumpism” into a single, coherent set of ideas, the fact is that there were multiple new things that Trump brought to Republican politics. Not all of those things necessarily go together. Some were more helpful to Trump and the party, some harmful. Some are likelier to endure in the party than others. Predicting the future of Trumpism will be easier if we try to untangle its different strains. Let us consider the twelve major flavors of Trumpism, ranging from the good to the very ugly.
1. Kitchen-Table Trumpism
The most appealing and persuasive argument for Trump’s reorientation of Republican thinking goes like this: The party had lost its way by embracing a “Zombie Reaganism” that prioritized professions of fealty to conservative ideals, veneration of the name of Saint Ronnie, and efforts to proclaim oneself “severely conservative” (in Mitt Romney’s words). The party’s leaders made too many promises they couldn’t deliver or had no intention of trying to deliver.
In this telling, Republican policy proposals lost their tether to Earth. Leaders such as Paul Ryan talked about budget deficits and entitlement and spending cuts that were fiscally responsible at the macro level, but were of no interest to ordinary voters. Republicans pledged to repeal Obamacare, eliminate cabinet departments, and turn the tax code into a postcard, but never made a serious effort to make any of this happen. The mismatch between the promises and the realities left them to explain to the folks back home that, “Hey, at least we reduced the rate of growth of spending below what the other side wanted,” a claim that the average voter had no means to assess.
Meanwhile, leading Republicans threw red meat to the party’s populist wing that they themselves did not believe in or intend to pursue. George W. Bush ran on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. John McCain pledged to “complete the danged fence” along the border. They never really tried.
Some of this indictment is unfair, but there is enough truth to it to constitute a lesson the party was too late to learn. Reagan himself, after all, did not win because he promised to be a conservative purist; he promised people concrete things and common-sense ideas, and they learned to identify these things with the conservative philosophy that underlay them. Trump came fresh into Republican politics, knowing nothing of the arguments and battles that came before him; he did not speak the language and had not read the white papers or the founding texts. What he grasped were the things simple enough that voters could see and feel, and then he discarded the rest.
Of course, Trump made his own share of illusory promises — he didn’t wall off the whole border and make Mexico pay for it, he didn’t strike great trade deals with China, and he didn’t “drain the swamp” — but he jettisoned small-government conservatism and fiscal conservatism, threw away the bar graphs, and refocused Republican rhetoric on a combination of kitchen-table economic concerns and culture-war fights.
A kitchen-table agenda that combines tangible promises with a willingness to engage on the cultural concerns that animate Republican voters is not a pure invention of Trumpism (my own view is that Republicans should be, among other things, the cost-of-living party), but it is something that future Republican leaders can take away from the Trump era. That does not mean that Republicans should abandon all consideration of fixing the existential threats to the nation’s finances, but Kitchen-Table Trumpism is unlikely to go away, and it shouldn’t.
2. Common-Man Trumpism
“I love the poorly educated.” That was one of Trump’s most-mocked lines, but it reflected something he did quite well: make the less-educated, less-sophisticated members of the party’s base feel truly welcomed and at home in Republican gatherings. Trump was, despite (and sometimes because of) his birth to a wealthy family and his Ivy League education and jet-set lifestyle, a guy with a giant chip on his shoulder about being looked down upon for his crudeness, his ignorance, and his low-class taste. The man was in the pro-wrestling business, how could he look down on anyone?
Trump’s ability to bond with these voters in this way was more important than ever in an age of “cancel culture” and wokeness, when not knowing the right words and the right cultural signifiers — many of which seem to change daily — can get you fired and hounded from society. The divide in class attitudes is much starker than in the social-egalitarian world described by Alexis de Tocqueville in his travels across 1830s America, and many educated, professional Americans don’t even see it.
Trump, again, was not the first Republican to find ways to appeal to voters down the educational, economic, or social ladders. Abraham Lincoln played up his self-educated, log-cabin origins while being broiled as an ape by the East Coast press. Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech invoked his humble origins and disconnect from country-club Republicanism. George W. Bush got a lot of mileage out of the media mocking his speaking style. With the downfall of John Weaver — the man behind the McCain 2000, Jon Huntsman 2012, and John Kasich 2016 campaigns — we may have a respite from presidential campaigns that actively sneer at the party’s own voters.
The challenge for Republicans going forward, of course, is that some of the same ways in which Trump embraced his sometimes-unruly fans also turned off the kinds of upper-middle-class professional suburban voters that the party also needs. My own longstanding view is that the party should choose more leaders who are (unlike Trump, unlike the Bushes, unlike Romney, and unlike McCain) not born to wealth or privilege, as a start — candidates at home in the world they climbed into, but also at home in the world they came from. There may be no perfect balance — Reagan and Lincoln came closest to it, bonding with working-class voters while also being smart, eloquent, competent, and prepared — but the need for a more common touch than you get from Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush should be an enduring lesson and legacy of Common-Man Trumpism.
3. Showman Trumpism
A third element of Trumpism was the man’s showmanship. Trump always treated politics as entertainment. He strutted around the stage with swagger and brio. He was funny, and sometimes drew in crowds by the sense that he was being naughty, saying and doing things you aren’t supposed to say and do as a candidate for the highest office in the land or as president. His tweets, for all of their many faults, were not stuffy and did not sound as if they had been run through a committee or a focus group. Whatever else you could say about Trump, he was never boring.
This, too, can be a positive lesson one can take from Trump. Yes, there is a case for sobriety in our leaders, and for the republican simplicity that eschews an Obama-style cult of celebrity. And there are still many Republican senators and governors who are dry, reassuring figures. But realistically, in today’s media and cultural landscape, the stodgy reliability of Gerald Ford or Dwight Eisenhower wouldn’t sell at the presidential level. Trying to match Trump’s flair for showmanship and his decidedly masculine sense of domination of the stage may not work for everybody, and may keep some more restrained personalities from national tickets even if they would be good at the job. But aspiring to a looser, more entertaining presentation is a good idea in any public or sales business, let alone politics.
4. Fortress Trumpism
When people talk about Trumpism as an ideology, they usually mean Fortress Trumpism: the three-cornered nationalist stool of hostility to immigration, trade, and foreign intervention. None of these ideas are new in Republican politics. Pat Buchanan promoted them in the 1990s, Ron and Rand Paul took up the cause of a less assertive foreign policy, and Romney took a hard turn to the right on immigration in his presidential bids, especially in 2012 (remember “self-deportation?”). Sentiment against illegal immigration had been building for some time at the state and congressional level, and was beginning to spill over into a more generalized preference for restricting even the volume of legal immigration. That said, Trump represented a distinct break from the views of Bush, McCain, Ryan, and McConnell, and from Romney’s foreign-policy and trade stances. As recently as 2012, Sean Hannity was declaring that he had “evolved” to favor pro-immigration reforms including amnesty. That is hard to imagine of any talk-radio or cable figure on the right today.
Where will these three related strands go in the future? On immigration, the party is almost certainly not going back anytime soon to grand bargains and trying to blur the distinctions between the parties — especially not given how radicalized in the other direction on immigration the Democrats have been over the past decade and a half themselves. Immigration itself has temporarily disappeared as an issue in a time of lockdowns and global restrictions on travel. Then again, the romance of the new American who loves the country was on prominent display during the Republican convention this summer. The default position of being “against illegal immigration, not against immigration” is likely to reassert itself as a result.
Free traders have been shell-shocked by the Trump era, having thought that they won the argument so decisively it no longer even required discussion. They have their work cut out in rebuilding popular support for trade. Then again, many free traders (myself included) have been convinced in the past five years to see trade with China less as a trade issue than as a national-security and American independence issue. The Democrats have their own internal fissures on trade, which will give Republicans some space to work the issue out without the same sort of polarization that exists on the immigration front.
Foreign-policy anti-interventionism, bordering on isolationism, has a long pedigree in America, and a long one among Republicans and conservatives. That tendency was submerged under the Cold War consensus that was forged when Eisenhower defeated Robert Taft for the nomination in 1952, and endured until it was fractured over the Iraq War. Trump, famously, was the first American president in decades to start no new foreign wars and no new foreign military interventions.
Even so, Trump’s national-security team was hardly stacked with isolationists, and he continued to engage with American allies and strike new international agreements. Prominent Trump allies such as Tom Cotton are hardly stay-at-home pacifists. The nature of our foreign-policy challenges may put questions of intervention on the back burner for a while — or they may burst back upon us far sooner than we expect, as they did in 2001.
Either way, it is likely to be events that dictate how long the hawks remain out of power in the party. Sooner or later, an issue will arise in which the dovish wing of the Democratic Party doesn’t want America to stand up for itself or to the bad guys, and Republicans will have a prime opportunity again to reclaim their traditional advantage of muscular foreign policy. Don’t count on Fortress Trumpism as a permanent winner in Republican foreign policy.
5. Bare-Knuckles Trumpism
One of the main grievances of a lot of conservatives with past Republican leaders, especially presidential candidates, was that they did not fight back hard enough. George W. Bush had a deliberate rope-a-dope strategy — stay on message while the other guy gets increasingly hysterical. It worked well for Bush in two national elections, but ultimately at the cost of an accumulation of unrebutted anti-Bush narratives that had devastating political consequences for the party in 2005–08.
John McCain and Mitt Romney, perhaps in part out of fear of the media’s hair-trigger accusations of racism against anyone who criticized Barack Obama, each pulled major punches at critical junctures. McCain distanced himself from the Jeremiah Wright story and other Obama-background issues — issues Hillary Clinton was not too timid to raise. McCain blanched again at the outset of the first debate: He shied away from leveling Obama with a “how dare you?” attack over Obama’s complicity in raking in cash from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, then resisting regulation of them leading to the housing crisis. That was a line of attack perfectly suited to McCain; he tried it out on the trail, but blinked on the national-debate stage. Romney, who was ruthless in debates with Republican opponents, repeated McCain’s mistake against Obama: He backed down and wouldn’t defend himself when Candy Crowley of CNN ganged up with Obama against Romney on the Obama team’s lies about Benghazi. Neither of these failures of nerve cost Republicans those elections by themselves, but they left a sour aftertaste for Republican partisans.
Trump, from the very beginning, took things to the opposite extreme. He lobbed every sort of personal insult at his critics and foes: their personal appearance, their parents, their wives, their children, and their ethnicity. He spread conspiracy theories implicating them in murders and assassinations. He brought Bill Clinton’s rape accuser to a debate with Clinton’s wife. He retweeted white nationalists if they were willing to go after the press. He made himself an icon of “going there when other Republicans won’t” by loudly embracing the insane theory that Barack Obama was secretly born in Kenya. Trump didn’t care if his attacks were fair, or true, or within the bounds and norms of the system. He didn’t even care if they were effective. Going on offense was his natural instinct, which he indulged to the maximum. The final end of this was his incendiary speech on January 6.
It was the bare-knuckles aspect of Trump, as much as his showmanship, short attention span, and poor preparation and impatience with detail, that made it difficult for him to provide any sort of reassuring or unifying national leadership during the coronavirus pandemic. It was the inability to disengage from an argument or give ground that led him into the “very fine people” trap.
Will Trump’s approach endure? There ought to be a happy medium between excessive passivity and excessive aggression, but it is undoubtedly the case that future aspiring leaders of the Republican Party will vie to demonstrate that they have the aggression and combativeness to go directly after the Democrats and, especially, the media. This, too, is not a new test: George H.W. Bush turned around his fortunes in the 1988 primary by going head-to-head with Dan Rather, and Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary on the strength of attacking debate moderators. Today, the bare-knuckles approach can be seen in the endless Twitter flame wars between the more-populist members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. But few people in the party possess Trump’s crassness, or his insatiable appetite for conflict for its own sake. As with a number of forms of Trumpism, this one is likely to persist in a more modest form among his successors.
6. Amateur Trumpism
Skepticism of credentialed experts and veneration of businessmen and citizen-politicians are all longstanding trends in Republican and conservative politics. Trump, however, took this to the next level. Not only was he a complete amateur with no experience in government and no background educating himself on public-policy issues or arguments who was easy prey for quack medical ideas, he also showed a repeated distaste for hiring or listening to experienced people. Many of his most vocal followers were reflexively hostile to anyone in Trump’s administration with political, military, legal, scientific, or other relevant experience or accomplishments. This was presented as hostility to the existing Republican establishment and the “Deep State,” but to a certain extent it was also about removing the constraints of people who would point out when facts were misstated, laws ignored, and basic reality disregarded.
The reliance on substandard people often led Trump to grief. From the “Muslim ban” to the census immigration question to the president’s commission on voting integrity, the Bannonites on Trump’s team regularly failed to get things done or took multiple attempts to get it right, leaving the president’s own aims unfulfilled. But even an administration that started by alienating much of the party establishment could not avoid relying on some distinguished and experienced people. Trump’s greatest success, the stocking of the courts with constitutionalist judges, happened because he outsourced most of the job to the “Conservative, Inc.” establishment of Federalist Society legal conservatives.
There is a two-part question about the survival of Amateur Trumpism. One is about candidates. Before Trump, Republicans tended to flirt with amateur politicians (Ben Carson, Herman Cain, Steve Forbes, Pat Robertson) but not settle down with them. Will future primary fields consider it a negative that a candidate has experience and accomplishments in politics, and insist on nominating people who have never done anything for the Republican Party or conservative causes? Time will tell, but I suspect not, even if the periodic temptation of outsiders remains. Trump, after all, was one of America’s most famous men for decades before he ran; not every amateur can match that.
It seems even less likely that future Republican administrations will prefer shutting experienced people out of office, especially given that this would also include turning down veterans of the Trump administration. If anything, it is likelier that the populist-nationalist wing of the party will get more serious about building its own cadre of qualified and experienced people. But then, they won’t be pure populists anymore. It seems difficult for Amateur Trumpism to go pro.
7. Gaslighting Trumpism
One of the most distinctive features of Trump’s governance and campaigns was the commitment to go all-in on untruth. All politicians tell untruths, even outright lies, and few are eager to accept correction. But even compared with compulsive liars such as Bill Clinton or feckless fabulists such as Joe Biden, Trump has been unusual. Not only did he say an absurdly large number of indefensible things — things that were childishly easy to disprove — but his team and his media supporters would insist on revising, if necessary, their entire reality around insisting that those things were true. This is related to Bare-Knuckles Trumpism in the sense that Trump almost never backed down, apologized, or admitted error, even at the cost of turning brief gaffes into multiday major controversies.
As was most obviously on display during the 2020 post-election contest, this approach can be very effective both at driving away people who would otherwise support the candidate, and at bonding his strongest supporters ever more manically to the leader. Like a gang initiation, asking people to profess things that are conspicuously untrue is a much more reliable test of loyalty than merely asking for their agreement on issues. To the Trumpiest segments of right-wing media, this is a good thing: It gives them a competitive advantage over people who are unwilling to peddle falsehoods as facts to people who want to hear them.
As with several of the forms of Trumpism, the shape of Gaslighting Trumpism is driven heavily by Trump’s own personality, though not unique to it. No other leading Republican figure creates or demands anything like the force-field of falsehood that surrounded Trump everywhere he went. The media apparatus that sustained this had already begun blossoming before Trump came along, and much of it will likely outlive him, but it will be difficult for the party to defend a never-ending string of lies from its leader without a leader constantly telling them.
8. Mirroring Trumpism
Republicans and conservatives have spent years bemoaning the antisocial tendencies of the Left and the Democratic Party. Some of those tendencies have been recurring political liabilities for Democrats and liberals, such as their weak-kneed response when their own political allies riot. Others have been toxic methods of asserting power, such as “cancel culture” and boycotts. Many of these habits have long been recruiting tools for the Right. If you read almost any account of conversions to conservatism in the Sixties and Seventies, for example, you will read a nearly endless parade of “I became a conservative when I saw the Left riot.” In the world of suburban respectability politics, being the party of sober, decent, law-abiding adults has long carried advantages for Republicans.
Yet, one of the most common reflexes of Trumpism is the habit of seeing Democrats or the Left do something bad or even self-destructive that gives the Right the high ground to criticize them, and immediately thinking instead, “Now we can do this too.” The desire to mirror everything Democrats have gotten away with — or even things that have gotten them in trouble — is perverse. The term “whataboutism,” which is used to refer to using the other side’s sins to avoid discussing your own, doesn’t fully capture this attitude, which uses those sins as permission to commit new ones.
The end result of Mirroring Trumpism is to strip away much of the content from the contest between the two sides’ visions of government, politics, and society. It is one of the most alarming forms of Trumpism precisely because it is a rationalization for misconduct. It may prove hard to eradicate, although it was uniquely powerful as a temptation with Trump in charge.
9. Strongman Trumpism
Few themes were more consistent in Republican rhetoric since the Reagan years than celebrating the contrast between the American system and the world’s tyrants, and cheering on those who stood up to them. Sure, American leaders would sometimes mute those contrasts when realpolitik demanded alliances with the Saudi royal family or other oppressive regimes, but the moral inequivalence between us and the bad guys was the dominant form of conservative discourse about our place in the world. It separated conservatives from self-flagellating liberals who engaged in their own foreign whataboutism, and from progressives who admired how foreign despots exercised collectivist power abroad. The habit of looking longingly at how foreign strongmen imposed order in the streets could be found here and there on the right, but it was a decidedly minority view.
Trump arose from that minority, and gave it more prominence. He was gushing in his buttering-up of foreign tyrants such as Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, and Tayyip Erdogan, sometimes in ways that looked very much like genuine admiration. This was not a new thing for Trump that could be explained simply as cynical diplomacy; he has talked this way for years.
A governing corollary of Strongman Trumpism both at home and abroad was Trump’s rejection of the rules of restraint that typically accompany the exercise of power in a republic. Trump spent his whole life in family-run businesses where he could exercise mostly unchecked authority, and he never adjusted to the fact that our system of government is different. Consider the wheedling, browbeating, and veiled threats on display in his now-notorious phone calls with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger. This was an approach that Trump had doubtless used many times before, without impropriety, in business negotiations.
Will Strongman Trumpism endure in foreign affairs? If you listened to the senior foreign-policy people in the administration — most notably Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and Nikki Haley — you would never suspect a shift from the Reagan–Bush era in how we talk about these things. That suggests that Strongman Trumpism is mostly personal to Trump, although the example of the things Trump got away with in imitation of foreign strongmen will unquestionably inspire a few copycats at home.
10. Transgressive Trumpism
A major feature of the Trump phenomenon is that Trump was “politically incorrect.” Trump was thrice-married, a notorious and unapologetic adulterer, at best a borderline sexual predator, and well-known for talking about women in crude sexual terms. Not for nothing was he a favored guest on the Howard Stern show. Trump’s rhetoric was racially inflammatory and insensitive. He offered an all-too-comfortable home to racial and ethnic bigots, and was tongue-tied whenever he was challenged to distance himself from them. To some of Trump’s supporters, these were embarrassing but not fatal flaws. To others, they were a positive asset: a walking repudiation of cancel culture. Yet, the very transgressiveness of Trump gave fuel to the illiberal movement to treat all of his supporters as “deplorables” to be cast out of society’s institutions.
There is, in a liberal society, some value in having people around who say things that are transgressive — whether those things are racist, blasphemous, sexually obscene and immoral, or unpatriotic. The very survival of such speech is a hallmark of liberty. It’s why the ACLU defended the Nazis marching in Skokie. But it is neither a good thing, nor a politically wise one, for a major political party to want transgressive figures as its leaders.
Will there be a groundswell in the future for transgressive candidates? Some will always be with us; the conflict they generate can be good for rallying supporters in safe legislative districts. But as Charlie Dressen once said of a particularly spectacular Willie Mays catch, “I’d like to see him do it again.” Until we see it repeated by someone else, it is prudent to bet against Transgressive Trumpism being transferable to another candidate at the level of national leadership.
11. ‘Rigged’ Trumpism
The Trumpism that emerged most dramatically in the two months after the 2020 election was on display long before then: Trump was the sorest of sore losers. In 2016, he claimed that he lost the Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz because of dirty tricks. He claimed that the existence of caucus and convention states in the West was a sign of a rigged system against him. After he beat Hillary Clinton, he still claimed that voter fraud had robbed him of a win in New Hampshire. This time around, of course, he took sore-loserism to the furthest scorched-earth extent in American history. Trump’s embrace of birtherism could be seen as a species of this as well.
Republicans before Trump sometimes fought hard enough to fend off Democratic mischief (see Florida in 2000), sometimes not (see the Washington governor’s race in 2004 or the Minnesota Senate race in 2008). But the party typically accepted the outcomes of elections. Even during the Trump era, most Republicans have continued to do so; with the arguable exception of Roy Moore, there is no other Republican counterpart to Stacey Abrams at the statewide level. As a result, “Rigged” Trumpism still seems unlikely to become the party’s dominant strain.
12. Donald J. Trumpism
The lowest form of Trumpism of all is simply personal devotion to Trump and, perhaps, his family. This is the form of Trumpism that worries Republicans the most: that there is no substitute for Trump, no moving past Trump, no formula that allows a future Republican to replicate or improve upon Trump’s successes or build a new and different coalition. Donald J. Trumpism means that the party would always be willing to sacrifice any cause, any issue, any electoral victory for whatever interests or angers Trump on a particular day. It means that winning back the White House in Trump’s lifetime is to be actively resisted unless it is through Trump. It means that the determination of who is good and bad in the party turns entirely on whether they personally support Trump. If your Republican enemies list is headed by people with as little in common as Brad Raffensperger, Brian Kemp, Liz Cheney, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Larry Hogan, Doug Ducey, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Richard Burr, and Marco Rubio, you may have fallen prey to Donald J. Trumpism.
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In the long run, the clearest way to determine the durability of Trumpism will be in direct tests of influence such as primaries between highly Trumpist candidates and more traditional Republicans. A core test will be whether Trump himself is able to return to win the 2024 nomination, or deliver it to a member of his family.
On the primary side, Trumpist candidates other than Trump have won some races, but they have lost a great many of their high-profile tests of strength so far. They were unable to oust McCain, Rubio, or Ryan in 2016. Kelli Ward and Joe Arpaio failed to take down Martha McSally in 2018. Steve King lost his seat in a primary. Kris Kobach lost the Senate primary in Kansas in 2020. Chris McDaniel lost the Senate primary in Mississippi in 2018. Corey Stewart lost the gubernatorial primary in Virginia in 2017. When they did advance to statewide races, Kobach, Moore, and Stewart all got destroyed. That suggests that the future of statewide Republican candidates has yet to be claimed for most of the toxic varieties of Trumpism.
A less-direct test will be to watch the behavior of Republican leaders and candidates going forward. Many Republicans who tolerated Trump and refused — even to the end, last weekend — to confront him would nonetheless never dream of imitating his conduct themselves. Some who offered kind words for Trump when pressed will not go out of their way to invoke him in the future. Trump’s lingering personal popularity in the party probably means that Republicans who are not particularly Trumpy in any meaningful way themselves will continue to disappoint those who would like them to steer clearer of the man himself.
The more Republican politics moves on from Trump personally, however, the more the varying strands and flavors of Trumpism are likely to meet different fates.