Since Donald Trump’s improbable first win in 2016, pundits have passed countless hours trying to understand how his rise, and the populist movement that powered it, have changed American conservatism. If Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party was, famously, a three-legged stool consisting of social traditionalists, free-market champions, and foreign interventionists, Trump’s MAGA coalition has swelled its ranks, at peril of some internal contradiction. In today’s GOP, Middle East hawks sit next to America First isolationists, former Goldman Sachs executives beside tariff truthers, immigration hardliners with H1B exceptionalists, and Christian Zionists with self-professed antisemites. Over the course of a turbulent decade in and out of power, Trump at times seems to have kept the movement together through sheer force of personality.
The offensive against Iran that Trump’s administration launched on February 28 may pose the most significant challenge to the coalition to date. Having campaigned as a “peace president,” Trump now presides over an immediately unpopular war and has angered many in his base who voted to end the foreign entanglements he too claimed to hate. In a move that may presage a larger split, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned from his post on March 17, citing his belief that “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined [Trump’s] America First platform.” (Kent went on to claim that the last two decades of American intervention abroad had been “manufactured by Israel.”)
To understand these developments, we invited Suzanne Schneider, the author of two recent pieces in our pages about MAGA coalitional politics, and Osita Nwanevu, who reviewed Sam Tanenhaus’s door-stopper biography of William F. Buckley this past fall, to discuss the responses to the war in the MAGA movement, the fracturing of conservative media, and what might happen when Trump retires from politics, however that may come to pass. —Dahlia Krutkovich
Dahlia Krutkovich: I’d like to start by asking to what extent we can understand President Trump as truly having broken with twentieth-century conservatism. Earlier this month his administration started what many fear will be another “forever war” in the Middle East, but his posturing around the attack is noticeably different from that of his predecessors. Where do you both see continuity, and where do you see something genuinely new?
Osita Nwanevu: When Donald Trump arrived on the scene, people marked him out as different from the Republican establishment in a few crucial respects. One, of course, was his opposition to American intervention, but there was also his focus on immigration and his rhetoric on trade—that we’d been ripped off with NAFTA, that our approach to trade policy had allowed other countries to take advantage of us. And I’ve been thinking a lot, especially in the last few weeks, about how much of any of that is left.
For the reasons that Suzanne writes about so eloquently in both of her recent pieces, I already believed that Trump’s break from the Republican establishment on immigration was overstated. There has always been a nativist current in conservative politics, and Trump didn’t even initiate this latest turn. In 2007 The New Yorker published what I think is one of the most important pieces of political reporting in the last twenty years, an article by Ryan Lizza about how John McCain and Mike Huckabee were bewildered by Mitt Romney’s hard line on immigration during the 2008 Republican primary—Romney was introducing words like “amnesty” into the mainstream immigration debate. Tom Tancredo, a nativist congressman from Colorado, was also in the field, of course, but Tancredo was a crank. Romney was this respectable, moderate Republican ginning up angst about immigration—which he continued to do in 2012. So to my mind, that aspect of Trumpism was already baked into the future of Republican politics.
The things that you could say were genuinely novel about Trump, from my perspective, were his stance on trade policy and his willingness to critique intervention abroad. But in just the last month alone, both of those positions have been fatally undermined. As far as trade goes, we had a very chaotic and nonsensical year of back-and-forth on tariffs, but nothing in the way of a serious coherent policy. Now the Supreme Court has functionally upended that whole effort. And even in his first term, Trump passed the USMCA, which was not a total rejection or repudiation of NAFTA as much as a revision of it. The biggest legislative accomplishment of that first term was a big package of tax cuts; he’s continuing a deregulatory agenda. In most respects, he’s still recognizably a Republican president as far as economic policy is concerned.
And now of course we have this war with Iran, which was preceded by the assassination of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani in Trump’s first term, and by last year’s strikes on the country’s nuclear sites, this past Christmas’s strikes in Nigeria, and January’s episode in Venezuela. So at this point, the idea that he was going to represent a turning of the page from the maximalist, interventionist American foreign policy of the last few decades has been totally undone.
In substance, what we’re left with is a Republican president who is maybe 30 percent more openly bigoted than the Republicans who preceded him. He’s also more willing to openly flout the law and the constitutional order. But I don’t know how much else there is.
Suzanne Schneider: There is a somewhat obvious continuity between the MAGA right and certain twentieth-century conservatives like Pat Buchanan, or even William F. Buckley, as Osita’s piece very persuasively argues. Both of those figures were skeptical of immigration and, at least to some extent, foreign intervention. It’s worth recalling that Buckley’s first public speech was to the America First Committee, a forerunner to today’s isolationist right that more than accommodated antisemitism and fascist apologetics. But of course ideological projects are always composite in nature, so the question seems to me less a matter of “continuity or rupture” than of which strand of the conservative movement has the upper hand at any given time.
I also think we miss important continuities if our view of American conservatism is too narrowly defined by the period from the end of the cold war to the election of Donald Trump. Those twenty-five years or so were the apex of Washington Consensus conservatism, of neoconservative interventions abroad and neoliberal economic policy at home. Many of the post-liberal writers I’m interested in, people like Patrick Deneen or Oren Cass or Yoram Hazony, will say that the “conservativism” of these years was just liberalism dressed up in a more traditionalist guise, because its champions never questioned the idea that politics should be organized around the autonomous individual and that liberty is a matter of conveying and protecting individual rights. They had no sense of a collective, social, or common good.
In contrast, post-liberals sharply distinguish the libertarian project (in all its forms) from genuine conservatism, arguing that the latter requires a commitment to social cohesion that is incompatible with unrestrained individualism. Pushing the arc back before 1989 helps us see the currents that flow into today’s new right from a time before libertarianism become an integral part of the Republican coalition. Some thinkers push this narrative arc way back to the aristocratic politics of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which, according to Patrick Deneen, were built on class-straddling bonds of mutual obligation, noblesse oblige that protected the little guy from the scourges of industrial capitalism. It’s historical bunk, but it is interesting to see people casting about for older models of what it means to be a conservative.
What I find fascinating today is the projection that goes on around Trump. This is ultimately because he is an incoherent and in some ways vacuous figure who lacks firm ideological convictions. As a result, there is so much room for competing factions within the MAGAverse to see him as their guy, or at least to see him as creating openings for them, because he is willing to take on the establishment on various issues—certainly rhetorically, and in some more material ways as well, like imposing tariffs by presidential fiat and reducing pharmaceutical prices by striking deals with drug companies.
In the economic populist arm of the movement, for instance, we have someone like Josh Hawley, who, as Osita has written about, seems to be interested in expanding the social safety net for those he deems real Americans, and who views Trump as heralding a new style of Republican politics that is more kindly disposed to state intervention in the market. So too do Oren Cass and the American Compass set see Trump’s willingness to question economic orthodoxy about globalization and trade as a political opening. They think, “Here’s a president who’s willing to intervene in the economy, who doesn’t think that markets will magically distribute goods in the way that is most beneficial to all.” Because he’s willing to break from the neoliberal premise that markets should operate independently from the state and be insulated from democratic pressures, certain coalitional partners think they can get him on board for this or that issue.
I think the same was true of the noninterventionist America Firsters, from intellectuals—like the right wing of the Quincy Institute and people like Curt Mills at American Conservative—to everyday Americans who were sick of wasting blood and treasure on foreign wars. As many people have noted by now, it was Trump’s willingness to break with the conservative establishment over the Iraq War that helped him win the 2016 Republican primary.
I agree with Osita that even if Trump seems inclined to entertain some of these ideas, we’ve basically gotten standard GOP policies in effect. At the same time it’s important not to underestimate the extent to which groups dissatisfied with the status quo project their fantasies of rupture onto his presidency.
This war with Iran is perhaps the most glaring continuation of the status quo to date—and it’s not one the noninterventionists can ignore, no matter how willful their fantasies. Nick Fuentes recently called for his followers to either sit out or vote Democrat in the 2026 midterms. His influence is contested, but he’s certainly one bellwether for the America First wing of the MAGA movement. How consequential a crack in the coalition might this war create?
Schneider: My reading is that this rift will have real political consequences for Trump. It’s been building for some time: you already saw critiques of Trump-the-interventionist coming out over the summer and into the fall from Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Fuentes. What’s telling is that now someone like Megyn Kelly, a more mainstream figure—despite her earlier clashes with Trump, she endorsed him in 2024 and attended the inauguration—has joined them. And while most elected Republicans are falling in line for now, there are almost daily reports of how much unease the war has caused within the party ranks looking ahead to the midterm elections.
What isn’t clear to me is the extent to which this discontent penetrates the White House, because Trump is just so glued to what’s on Fox News, and a portion of this divide is generational, which also translates into a split between old and new media. I’m sure some people, like JD Vance, do understand the extent of the problem. I’ve been taking note of Vance’s subtle attempts to signal that he’s not completely on board with the war, with Trump acknowledging in recent days that they have “philosophical” differences concerning the strikes. Picking Vance as VP was supposed to institutionalize the isolationist wing of the movement and bring it into the White House. Vance has routinely invoked his experience in Iraq to make the case against foreign wars, nation building, and democracy promotion, and I sense that he realizes this war could go badly very quickly, and that, as Trump’s presumptive heir, he might be the one saddled with having to explain it to the American people.
Nwanevu: I’m less certain that the partisans who say they’re abandoning Trump over Iran will really do so. I think that’s partially because of what Suzanne pointed out earlier, that Trump is very good at being all things to all people, and is really the only major figure in American politics who does promise—as illusory as that promise might be—to go to battle with the political establishment. People want to believe in him, because who else is going to offer them that kind of opportunity?
The people who oppose intervention have these moments of pique, and then they reconcile themselves to Trump anyway. I don’t know what happens to that pattern when Trump is no longer in the picture and isn’t the figure keeping his coalition together—do we have more serious ruptures once he leaves the scene? I’m not sure, but Trump has been able to disappoint his people again and again and again, and it hasn’t meant all that much so far.
Does the beginning of this war tell us anything meaningful about the long-running battle between the interventionist and noninterventionist wings of American conservativism? The noninterventionists seemed to be gaining strength in the last ten or so years, but this war seems to be yet another indication that material power and influence continue to elude them.
Nwanevu: Why exactly the interventionists—the “Blob,” as Ben Rhodes has called the foreign policy establishment—tend to win out across eras is more opaque to me than, say, why the Chamber of Commerce types seem to always win on the economy. Several years ago, I did a piece about this group that met here in Baltimore called the H.L. Mencken Club. I’d call them part of the tweedy section of the alt-right. Paul Gottfried, one of the figures mentioned in Suzanne’s review of Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards, was involved with them. They’re not groypers, but, if I had to put it reductively, frustrated, racist college professors and white-collar types. I talked to multiple people there who said they had actually voted for Obama in 2008, even though they believed in the inferiority of black people and obviously opposed most of his social agenda. They supported him because they were that perturbed by the war in Iraq, not just because of its foreign policy consequences but because it had led to the destabilization of the region and fueled immigration to Europe and the United States.
At the same time, I feel one of the few things I’ve learned in the last few years is just how earnestly and sincerely committed many of the neocons in the Never Trump crowd—the other end of the spectrum from the America Firsters—were to the grand ideological project of spreading Western values. I think there’s a narrative on the left that Iraq was invaded purely for oil, purely to advance the interests of American capital. Aspects of that might be true, but I also think that Bill Kristol really did believe you could bomb Iraq into democracy. I didn’t fully understand his politics until I saw him and many other people in that crowd become militantly anti-Trump largely on the grounds that Trump, here and abroad, had abandoned the liberal democratic crusade as they understood it.
Schneider: To that end, there’s absolutely no emphasis on “the day after” in Iran. It’s tempting to call this the neocons’ revenge as it were, but this episode is quite distinct from previous interventions. If you watch Hegseth’s briefings, the administration has basically framed our action so far as: “We’re just bombing things.” We’re destroying things, we’re using “overwhelming force,” but we’re not doing nation building. The idea that we have some sort of responsibility for putting this region or these countries back together again—which was so crucial to the neocon logic—is completely abandoned here. We can even think about this as a concession Trump is making to the more skeptical portions of his coalition.
It’s striking that democracy promotion is no longer part of the interventionist agenda as we’ve soured on democracy at home and as our system has grown less responsive to people’s needs. One of the mistakes many liberals in the US have made is to continue appealing to democracy in the abstract, absent the system delivering any real material benefits. They ask people to “believe” in democracy even as our government proves useless in the battle against the forces making our lives more insecure, stressful, and unaffordable. What Americans are offered in lieu of policy solutions is violence of a media-friendly, literally spectacular sort, of which ICE raids are only one recent example.
Thinking across the domestic/foreign policy firewall, we can see how democratic decline at home also helps explain the apparent lack of strategic planning in Iran. I mean, it’s astounding how little clue these people seem to have about what they’re doing. They didn’t seem to consider the inevitability of regional escalation and what that would mean for American interests there, or think about economic disruptions, outward migration, or terrorist attacks. There’s not even a pretense of a plan for what might come. They do not understand the situation within Iran, the fractured nature of the resistance, the strength of the regime even without Khamenei. What they’re straining to communicate is that they understand how to drop bombs. What they want from our foreign wars seems to be, mostly, social media fodder—montages of things exploding, without even feigning concern for the worth of human life.
This is borne out even on the level of the two operation names, right? Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Epic Fury perhaps speak for themselves.
Nwanevu: But at the same time Trump has said both that he will have to personally approve the successor government in Iran, and that he’s open to putting troops on the ground. I agree with you, Suzanne—it’s very clear that they don’t know what they’re doing, and that they’ve abandoned the vision of bringing democracy to the places where we intervene. That is a relic of a bygone era. But whether or not they know it right now, and whether or not you call it “nation building,” they’ve functionally committed themselves to some kind of stabilizing process—if only to steady the flow of oil.
The administration wants to shape the futures of Venezuela and Iran in ways that align with American material interests as they understand them. And they think they can take shortcuts around deep political change in both cases—they’re willing to accept a dictatorship or a puppet regime, they’re not interested in the American public seeing photos of ink on the thumbs of new voters at the polls. But I think we’re all going to figure out the extent to which they’ve actually managed to evade the tensions of internal politics there.
A central part of the historical narrative that has formed around the invasion of Iraq is about the buildup: that cable news was besotted with the idea of war, and you couldn’t find a dissenting voice in a national newsroom. Today, while Fox News and the president’s favored One America News Network are certainly excited about this war, there are also figures like Tucker Carlson and the conservative blogger Matt Walsh who are broadcasting their displeasure to millions of viewers. A significant share of the MAGA base, in other words, is consuming what is essentially an oppositional narrative. How do you think a fractured right-wing media landscape might be contributing to a lack of coherence within the administration?
Nwanevu: You’re right that there’s no real consensus about this operation. And really, conservatism has never been a fully unified movement. But I do think that things have changed—people who would have been small players in the movement twenty or thirty years ago can now command their own large audiences. The conservative media scene used to be dominated by Fox News and National Review. It’s not clear that any one outlet has the power to unilaterally influence debate in the same way anymore. Tucker Carlson has an audience as least as big as Fox and Friends, and that matters.
But I do wonder how broadly many of the debates we’re talking about reach Trump’s base of voters, or the lion’s share of voters who constitute the Republican electorate. Despite the angst about Iran among people who you might very generously call conservative intellectuals, or conservative influencers, or whatever, we still see overwhelming support for the war among registered Republicans: opposition is only around 15 percent. Republicans as a whole seem willing to follow the administration’s lead on this, and I honestly think that that’s true on most issues. So, like the dispute between Kevin Roberts and the rest of Heritage over Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, or between Nick Fuentes and the Christian Zionists on Israel, these fights seem intellectually meaningful, and they might show the tectonic plates of the Republican Party shifting in certain ways, but you have to wonder about the extent to which any of them durably matter at scale.
I feel like I have to say often that the kind of people who voted for Donald Trump are also the kind of people who, for the most part, voted for Mitt Romney and John McCain. When all is said and done, most of the people who constitute the Republican electorate are animated by things you’re not going to find reading the Claremont Review of Books. Much of what’s driving people is negative partisanship. As in, “We believe the Democratic Party stands for certain things and certain people, and we’re not those people.” So whether the person listed as a Republican on the ballot is some kind of libertarian or some kind of post-neoliberal populist, we’re going to vote for them because they’re not a Democrat. I think that’s what it boils down to for most.
Schneider: I do think it’s worth dwelling on the gap between the 50 percent of Americans who indicated, before the war began, that they opposed intervention in Iran and the 85 percent of Republicans who (as of polling conducted a few days later) supported it. This does suggest some sort of robust ideological media system at work. Nevertheless, I think it’s significant that 15 percent of Republicans were opposed to this war even at the outset. I imagine that latent opposition, harnessed to new media influencers and superstars, will only grow as the war goes badly, which it will.
That said, the Trump White House is trying to create the media landscape it wants, which looks beyond legacy media to appeal to the sort of person who would otherwise be very willing to follow the Fuentes line on the war. The deranged Call of Duty–style montages that the official White House X page puts out are part and parcel of appealing to a younger generation. I just saw one that was a mashup of clips from Braveheart, Top Gun, and Gladiator. This is war not just as video game but as heroic cosplay, where you get to be cast as Mel Gibson. It displays a startling, sickening indifference to the lives of the people actually involved and is deeply antihumanist in the most literal way, because real humans are reduced to media props. But this seems to be part of the strategy. How else to reach young guys sitting in their basements playing video games? This style of content tries to address them directly and appeal to their most vicious, libidinal instincts.
Nwanevu: And to your point, it’s not working. Because young men, like everybody else, pay for groceries and healthcare and so on. And even as far as the extremely online Fuentes crowd is concerned, Fuentes has repudiated Trump on Iran. There was a lot of talk after the 2024 election about how every American man under the age of thirty-five was on the cusp of becoming a Nazi or something. And I think the polls very quickly have shown that whatever drove the young men in question to Trump in that election is already dissipating—they are a constituency that’s still up for grabs, although whether Democrats will actually be able to connect with them is another question.
Going back to the disjuncture between the current administration and the neocons, I was struck by Secretary of State Marco Rubio coming out and saying, essentially, the US took point on the attack because we needed to get out ahead of Israel’s plans to strike. I don’t think Donald Rumsfeld would have ever admitted in a room with a camera that American strategic objectives had been preempted by Israeli ones. Tucker Carlson’s assertion that this war is really the work of the Chabad movement was perhaps preliminary evidence of how this will metastasize.
Nwanevu: As long as you have institutions in American life that are intent on insisting that Israeli interests are synonymous with the interests of Jews in America and around the world, antisemites are going to exploit the American relationship with Israel to their own ends. Obviously, there are many Jewish people who have courageously stood against Israeli policy and are pushing against that conflation. But as long as the Republican Party—and much of the Democratic party, even now—continues to insist that there’s no division between Jews and Israelis, the idea of going to war on Israel’s behalf is going to lead people to ugly places.
One of Suzanne’s points in her piece about Heritage is that antisemitism has been part of conservative politics for a long time. But this crop of youthful, intentionally provocative antisemites is novel in some ways. The internet has atomized some of the conservative movement’s culture—support for Israel within the Republican Party has been sustained in large part by voters’ embeddedness in evangelical church life. And I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that we’re seeing this shift in attitudes among young people as those connections have atrophied.
Schneider: It may be somewhat obvious, but it’s still worth stating explicitly that there are material drivers of antisemitism, of conspiratorial thinking. When the stories elites tell about the world seem not to correspond with lived reality, antisemitism is waiting there. It’s a latent discourse that can be activated as part of a broader skepticism toward elites, toward expertise, toward institutions that are supposed to be the grown-ups in the room. Antisemitism is the socialism of fools, right? What’s interesting about Joe Kent’s resignation letter is the way it evades American imperial responsibility for these wars—they’re all the product of Israeli scheming. I think he’s right to oppose this war and others in the region, but he’s a fool to suggest that it is the tricky Jews who are the only drivers of them. At these points of sustained economic and political crisis, it’s not at all surprising that you have people grasping around for all-encompassing frameworks to explain why the world is the way that it is.
So where are the neocons now? Could we take someone like Bill Kristol as representative of how the peer group has evolved?
Nwanevu: Kristol, I think, has long been one of the conservative movement’s most fascinating figures to watch. Again he’s been one of the loudest, most consistently critical voices against Trump. And because Trump represents the antithesis of so many things that he believed in, he now seems, to my eyes, to be negatively polarizing himself toward Democratic positions. And I think a small-l liberal universalism undergirds a lot of that. The same belief system that pushed him to advocate for invading Iraq has driven him to speak out forcefully on immigration, on LGBT rights, and so on. At the same time, he and other conservatives are committed to the idea that being free individuals, in the liberal sense, implies that we ought to have a free-market economy and limited government—though he and the neocons are readier than most on the right to admit that government has a role to play in social provision and making markets work. He’s a centrist.
I do wonder about what will happen when Trump leaves the scene. In the destabilized, upended world of conservative politics that he leaves behind, will we see a resurgence of straight-ahead neoconservatism? Is there a Kristol-like figure who would be able to prevail over the splits in the Republican Party, to eke out a plurality in the Republican primary and then appeal to people who are not Republicans? There are a lot of quote-unquote ordinary voters—suburbanites, people who make a decent amount of money—who have flocked to the Democratic Party over the last ten years because they’re angry about Donald Trump. And I think the idea of a neoconservative appearing before them, jettisoning all the alarming nonsense and talking about keeping taxes low, should scare Democrats. Many polls conducted in the last few years have shown that somebody like a Nikki Haley or a Tim Scott—even though they can’t win a Republican primary—would have done much better in the last couple of elections than Donald Trump did, precisely because among the general public Bill Kristol’s politics are evidently still pretty compelling.
Trump had a very durable, solid minority that turned into a plurality in 2016, even though most people who went to the polls in the Republican presidential primary didn’t vote for him. The establishment was too fractured to successfully oppose him. It’s plausible that amid all of these internal MAGA splits, his leaving the ballot might create an opening for a kind of traditionalist Republican. So I’m not sure we’ve seen the end of Bill Kristol’s kind of politics within the Republican Party, even if Kristol himself is not going to rejoin it anytime soon.
Schneider: I think I’m slightly more skeptical of the prospect that Kristol, or a moderate conservative in general, could return to power, mostly because I think that Kristol’s brand of small-l liberal conservative is a historical anomaly. He and that whole cohort came to power in the post-cold war end-of-history euphoria. The conditions that produced and sustained a Bill Kristol and his mix of democratic individualism, unrestrained markets, and universalism, to my mind, are gone in a fundamental way, wiped away by the 2008 financial crisis and only farther from view after Covid, the ensuing inflationary spell, and the wars in Gaza and Iran.
I take the point that there’s a possibility of splitting the MAGA constituency, but I don’t know if neoliberalism has the base to propel a moderate conservative to an electoral victory. Specifically, I think both the right and the left are trending more market-interventionist; both seek a fusion between economic and political forces that, while not historically unique, is unfamiliar, at least since the end of the cold war period. The classic neoliberal idea of a self-regulating market that operates independently of the state was always a fiction—what’s significant is that fewer people are trying to prop up the lie anymore.
There may be an open question, as well, about whether the institutions that cultivated neoconservatism could still support an entire network of intellectuals around that project.
Nwanevu: I mean, engines of old-guard fiscal and social conservatism like the American Enterprise Institute are still around. They don’t have the same cultural cachet that they once did, but you do also have a few new things emerging—some openly neoliberal communities, the YIMBY crowd, and so on. There’s a lot of money lined up to counter both the leftward shift of the Democratic Party and MAGA populism. And I’m interested in seeing where all of that goes, because if there is going to be a revival of the kinds of currents Kristol came from, it’ll happen there.
Schneider: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. It’s not as though I don’t see a resurgence in this way of thinking per se; it may very well continue to be the Democratic platform. The Democratic establishment is the bulwark trying to keep the walls from falling down at this point, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are speaking to a vanishingly small number of Americans for whom the status quo is working. The irony is that you find New Right figures like Sohrab Ahmari calling for economic policies that are well to the left of what mainstream Democrats are willing to support.
I’m curious about Vance and Rubio as heirs to MAGA. It will be for one of them to fend off—or embrace—Bill Kristol Thought risen from the ashes. Where do these two lead us?
Schneider: Unlike Trump, JD and Marco are charisma black holes—they lack the humor and political skill that has allowed Trump to get away with disappointing his base. You could say they broadly represent the isolationist wing and the neocon wing of the party, but they depend on Trump as the ultimate daddy figure to bind their coalition together and smooth over its contradictions through force of personality. They’re also both sycophants whose convictions appear pretty flimsy; their turnabouts on Trump specifically indicate that the most useful talent they possess is for seeing which way the wind is blowing. Vance’s attempts to hedge in the press, to leak here and there that he thinks war with Iran might not be the best idea, or that we should get it over with quickly, could be a way of circumscribing the damage that it does to the MAGA brand going forward.
But I don’t think either of these men can really hold it together in the way that Trump has—which is not to say the MAGA project crumbles once its figurehead is gone. A lot of my work has looked at the ideological and institutional infrastructure that the right has been building since 2016, which will certainly outlast Trump and potentially, in time, produce a leader who is even more dangerous.
Nwanevu: The other question is, which MAGA will they inherit? Because I think as you demonstrate in your review of Hayek’s Bastards, Suzanne, there’s this bifurcation between Trumpists. There’s the camp of “We believe in free markets, we just think you have to be racist to make them work” on the one hand and of “We’re racist and don’t believe in markets in the first place” on the other. Which of those visions wins out?
As I was suggesting before, I think that there’s a whole host of possibilities about where the Republican Party ends up after this. I suspect Trump is going to be a very damaged figure by 2028, not just as a consequence of whatever is going to happen in Iran but on the economic front as well. He’s already deeply unpopular. The extent to which MAGA will even be a thing you’d want to inherit is, I think, an open question.
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Wow! I am an elderly Brit ( same age as Trump but with fewer weapons of mass distraction at my disposal.) I consider myself reasonably well informed. I have a daughter in Canada which is currently in a tie with Greenland to be the next US state and in-laws in the USA. However, this post I have just read, a dialogue between 2 intelligent and articulate commentators makes me realise how incomplete my understanding of US politics is. We political centrists in Europe are appalled by what the US administration is doing now and terrified of what it/ he might do next.
Superb writing! Thank you. more please.