Trumpism Isn’t Dead

As long as Trump is president and adored by the Republican base, his movement will continue

A prominent defender of Trumpism declared the movement dead last week. Christopher Caldwell, the acclaimed author of The Age of Entitlement, argued MAGA can no longer be kept alive in the wake of the Iran strikes. “The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project,” Caldwell wrote in a Spectator essay.

In the essay, he defines Trumpism as “a movement of democratic restoration.”

At its center was the idea of the deep state. In recent decades, selective universities created a credentialocracy, civil-rights law endowed it with a system of ideological enforcement, the tax code entrenched a class of would-be philosopher-kings in the nonprofit sector, and civil-service protections armed government bureaucrats to fight back against any effort at democratic reform.

The Trump movement is what happened when Americans discovered the system could not be reformed democratically, only dismantled. It was not a move against democracy, or even liberalism. In fact it was a return to the original constitutional understanding that Alexander Hamilton laid out in Federalist No. 70: Americans are led not by a class-based bureaucracy but by an executive they choose.

Caldwell claims this “dangerous idea” was hemmed in by the progressive-built deep state. While Trump apparently embraced this project, the Iran strikes demonstrate his incapacity to deliver due to his lack of character and commitment to the Constitution.

“Trumpism is about democracy or it’s about nothing,” he says, explaining why the MAGA base feels betrayed.

Caldwell makes reasonable points about the potential costs of the Iran war and other radical Trump actions. But he’s off the mark on Trumpism and what constitutes the president’s base. He imagines it as an ideology independent of its namesake and dedicated to wresting power away from the deep state. That’s not the case. Trumpism is primarily centered around the president’s personality and driven by culture war issues.

For better or for worse, Trump is right when he declares that he decides what’s MAGA. That presents problems for the durability of the movement he created, as well as the intellectuals who wish to transform Trumpism into something more their taste. One can’t easily separate Trumpism from Trump. As long as he’s president and adored by the Republican base, his movement will continue.

Ever since Trump entered the political arena a decade ago, there have been attempts to paint his movement as more than the man himself. Many imagined Trumpism as the product of “economic anxiety” and that the base wanted a mix of left-wing economic policies with cultural conservatism. Polling showed this wasn’t true, but a number of figures were able to build careers off this fantasy. It gave them a way to be “respectable” Trumpists.

Other intellectuals imagined that Trumpism was centered around a foreign policy that sought to bring America home and repudiate neoconservatism. Trump did offer an alternative to his more neoconish rivals in his presidential campaigns. But he wasn’t quite a traditional non-interventionist, as he threatened to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS and be much tougher on Iran than Obama. In any case, it doesn’t appear foreign policy mattered deeply to MAGA. MAGA Republicans have strongly supported Trump’s interventions, to the chagrin of commentators who claim to speak for them.

Caldwell avoids these two common misperceptions by imagining Trumpism as a movement of democratic restoration. There is something to this as Trump did assail the corruption of the federal government and pledged to drain the swamp. Anti-establishment sentiment was certainly part of the Trumpist mix. But this is far too coherent and quaint of an explanation for Trumpism. Caldwell’s framework is not at the heart of MAGA. There was a vague sense of taking back the government, but the “deep state” was a late addition to the Trumpist lexicon. It only came to the forefront in the president’s battles with government officials in his first term. After he left office, it was largely discarded as a favored term. Trump still had his beef with the federal government, but it was concerned with its prosecution of himself and his allies, not so much with how it ruled the country unconstitutionally.

Trump became president on the pledge that he would serve as Middle America’s champion against the woke Left. Cultural anxiety, as polls routinely show, offers the greatest predictor of fervent Trump support. This cultural anxiety was largely inchoate, but it was felt nevertheless. Republican voters desired a strongman to challenge the political correctness of the Obama era. They thought their regular Republicans were powerless to stop the cultural changes that occurred under the first black president. Islamic terror, mass immigration, gay marriage, heavy-handed censorship, threats to the national heritage, and other changes disturbed Middle Americans. Trump became their unlikely champion through his bombastic personality. The man embodied the movement.

Anti-leftism and immigration skepticism are the clearest and most consistent ideological tenets of Trumpism. Everything else is secondary.

Republicans not named Trump can’t out-Trump the movement’s namesake. Ron DeSantis largely understood the ideological tenets of Trumpism better than its intellectual explainers. He felt he could outdo Trump by being more hawkish on immigration and a more effective fighter against the Left. He was proven wrong in the 2024 primary.

Trumpism without Trump has proven to be an illusion. Yet, the Iran war has once again renewed demands for this dream to be made real.

The new dream of Trumpism without Trump is more incoherent than MAGA. The only shared commonalities are hostility to Trump and Israel, as well as an appreciation for conspiracy theories. Besides Iran, the other big issue for anti-Trump Trumpists seems to be exonerating Charlie Kirk’s assassin. There’s no clear-eyed demand for democratic restoration among these critics either.

The Right faces an uncertain future once Trump exits politics. He will remain a beloved figure among the base and his endorsements will still carry a lot of weight. Ordinary Republicans aren’t going to share the resentment towards Trump that is common among the Online Right, regardless of how his second term goes down. Long term, the GOP can’t survive as a personality cult. Trump won’t be around forever and there needs to be something more to bind the right-wing coalition together.

There are two factions that already look beyond Trump at the moment. One is the old guard that wishes to restore the pre-Trump GOP. A few of these types are openly anti-Trump, but most wish to imagine Trump as an embodiment of their conservatism. They are eager to see Trump leave office as they will be allowed to control the GOP once more. They are smart enough to act pro-Trump. The second faction is largely online and its hostility towards Trump almost rivals that of the resistance Left. This faction, which one could call the Insane Clown Party, doesn’t have a coherent ideological platform. As mentioned above, it’s anti-establishment and loves conspiracy theories. That’s about it in terms of a shared agenda. It wants to get rid of Trump to make the GOP more devoted to conspiratorial populism. It’s very popular on podcasts, but it has limited cachet with actual voters.

Neither option is ideal for building a party platform for the 21st century. The Right will need to figure out a sustainable model once Trump’s term ends.

Whatever it is, it will have elements of Trumpism. It will respect the 47th president in the same way pre-Trump conservatism admired Ronald Reagan. Anti-leftism and culture war matters will still animate it, even if they are brought together under a more cohesive rubric than Trump’s stump speeches.

For now, Trumpism is alive and well. The Iran war could ruin Republicans in the upcoming midterms, but MAGA will still be the dominant force on the American Right until Trump leaves office. The end of his movement has been declared many times before. Those predictions will continue to be proven wrong.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.