Member Newsletter
I noted on Tuesday that, for whatever reason, I’m feeling a relative optimism about the 2024 election. That leads me to speculate: what happens after Trump? I don’t think I’m getting ahead of myself. The question is important and illuminating even if Trump isn’t done with us. Because it goes to the heart of what exactly the Republican Party is today.
It is a commonplace and an accurate one to say that the Republican Party is Donald Trump. When we referenced this yesterday while recording our podcast, Kate Riga reminded us of the party’s 2020 decision to scrap its entire party platform and replace it with, simply, whatever Donald Trump wants. It made sense: the party is Donald Trump. The rest is just fine print, which Trump can make up or change whenever he wants.
But if the party is Trump, what happens after there is no Trump? The conventional wisdom is that the party won’t simply snap-back to it’s pre-2016 Jebbite normality, such as it was. Trump’s remade the party in his own image. Nor was the old Jebbite party particularly normal. I mean, remember all the things we worried about and denounced before Trump took the stage?
But here’s the issue I want to get at. What are the policies that Donald Trump is running on? For these purposes, we don’t need to think in terms of policy documents and white papers or policies designed to fix specific problems or prefer particular groups. We can think about it in the Trumpian terms of which group does he want to hurt? Which foreign treaty organization does he want to explode? Etc.
The one enduring policy and political push of Trumpism is hostility to immigration of all forms. That’s not new to Trump. It was part of the pre-Trump package. Trump brought it into the open and allowed the GOP to embrace it with no caveats. That alone has been transformational in American politics. After that comes hostility to the “Deep State,” which means wholesale firings of government employees and political litmus tests for those who remain or replace them. After that there’s tariffs, maybe? What else?
What we really see in Trump’s policy agenda is a list of promised actions that pretty closely follow the very personal grievances he developed during his first presidency. There’s the idea that an American state exists that is not directly controlled by him. That showed up most clearly and, for him, threateningly in the form of criminal investigations of his actions. It also took the form of a bureaucracy that was not directly controllable by him because of existing laws and government policies he couldn’t easily change or because the bureaucracy was legally and culturally focused on doing X when he wanted to do Y. In other words, the “Deep State.”
Take what seems to be the central focus of his foreign policy: a cut off of military aid to Ukraine. Is that really more than the second- or third-order knock-on effect of the Russia investigation? Whether you see it as a result of Trump’s real ties to Russia or his rage at the investigation, it’s sort of the same difference. Yes, Russia is the global home of traditionalist, revanchist nationalism and Ukraine has become at least a symbol of the opposite. But we’re really still talking about a policy focus which is heavily driven by Trump’s personal fears and animosities. It’s not clear they survive him. If they do, it is likely to be inertial to a great degree.
There’s no question that Trump ushered open revanchist nationalism into American politics. That was new but in many ways it simply brought the old reality out of the political closet. Trump remains the political warlord of a fractured GOP much as he was when he first entered politics in 2015 and 2016. He’s made the party a welcoming place for strongmanism. But it’s not clear what other strongman figure will replace Trump. When he leaves politics, whenever that may be, he may leave it much as he found it.