Nobody serious thinks we’re all going to wake up after Donald Trump and have things go back to the way they were before he descended that escalator. To paraphrase Rick Pitino, Ronald Reagan ain’t walking through that door.
Jack Kemp isn’t either. Or Paul Ryan, for that matter.
One question lingers: Can Trumpism survive without Trump? (Assuming he ever leaves or doesn’t install Ivanka as a puppet leader.)
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Trump is, after all, a cult of personality. Aside from the economic protectionism and racially inflammatory rhetoric, his agenda tends to be capricious, ad hoc, and often incoherent. Moreover, his bellicose style isn’t transferable to others. Just ask Roy Moore and Virginia’s Corey Stewart, who got crushed in his 2018 Senate race against Tim Kaine.
So how might this play out? One scenario ends with a party that is led by someone like Mike Pence or Nikki Haley. Although both have, to some degree or another, bowed to Trumpism (Pence much more so than Haley), both had successful political careers and fairly coherent conservative worldviews that long preceded Donald Trump. It stands to reason that, given the autonomy granted to the party’s top of the ticket, they might revert back to some of their pre-Trump beliefs.
That’s not to say they would (or could) utterly reject Trumpism. If Trump were to lose his bid for re-election in 2020, it might be possible for Pence or Haley to (re)emerge as a sort of hybrid standard-bearer―one who blends the Reagan philosophy they once embraced, adds a calmer temperamental demeanor, and retains just a dash of Trumpian populism. This reimagined party wouldn’t completely reject Trumpism, but would instead introduce a kinder, gentler version that could be tolerable and (possibly) even salutary.
Unfortunately, the window for returning to a pre-Trump conservatism is dwindling. That’s because of the other, increasingly likely, scenarios.
A second (and very real) scenario has Trump winning reelection. If you don’t think this is likely, consider that his approval rating just reached a record high, and that the Democrats and the media seem to keep taking his bait. Trump wants to make the election about the Squad, a maneuver that could make it harder for Nancy Pelosi to govern, and for Joe Biden (Trump’s most difficult potential foe) to win the Democratic nomination.
It’s hard to imagine the GOP reverting to its pre-Trump platform after two winning elections on Trumpism. At some point, you’ll have an entire generation of Republican politicians, commentators, thinkers, activists, and voters who came of age in the Trump era. They will be committed to sustaining the current paradigm. If we are not there already, we are on the verge of Trumpism being fully ensconced as the GOP’s new normal.
That’s because, whether he wins or loses, Trump has already hung around long enough now for an intellectual movement—the product of nationalistic ideologues and ambitious entrepreneurs—to have grown up underneath him.
A third scenario is that Trump will be succeeded by someone who is actually committed to a coherent form of Trumpism—that there will, in fact, be Trumpism after Trump.
The reason for this is that there is demand for it. There is a very large base of Republican voters who simply prefer Trumpism. As I wrote in an otherwise forgettable 2015 column, “there is a huge underserved constituency in the GOP—and that constituency is what might best be termed populist conservatives. These folks tend to be white and working-class and who feel they’ve been left behind in America.”
Sensing the popular demand amongst grassroots conservatives, conservative intellectuals have responded. Trumpism initially lacked the infrastructure, institutions, and acolytes to sustain a committed successor or an enduring movement. But since 2016, there has been a concerted effort to graft an intellectual framework onto Trumpism, post-hoc. I first caught wind of this back in January, but last week’s National Conservative Conference demonstrates that this effort is serious and mainstream.
The people who spoke at the National Conservatism Conference—Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Sen. Josh Hawley, as well as policy wonk Yuval Levin, bestselling author J.D. Vance, political philosopher Yoram Hazony, ex-AEI president Christopher DeMuth, and National Review editor Rich Lowry—are serious people.
It is clear that they do not all even yet agree on exactly what nationalism means (aside from being against the libertarianism and neoconservatism that defined conservatism during most of my lifetime), but the fact that they held this conference—where prominent conservatives at least, in name, signed onto a nationalist conservative brand—demonstrates that they are making strides.
What is more, whoever is funding this effort (the event was convened by the Edmund Burke Foundation) is not a spendthrift. As Emma Green put it, this “might have been the first-ever nationalist revolt launched from a Ritz-Carlton ballroom.”
There is no doubt that Donald Trump has transformed American politics and the Republican Party.
I would prefer to extirpate every last vestige of Donald Trump, but that is not possible. This is his party now. The GOP will surely remain more populist and more nationalistic than suits my taste.
The question is not whether Trump’s legacy will endure, but… how much.
