Why MAGA is the future, not just present, of the GOP
WHAT A DIFFERENCE eight years make. When Donald Trump mounted his hostile takeover of the Republican Party in 2016, the mood at the Republicans’ convention that year in Cleveland was poisonous. In 2024, at their convention in Milwaukee, Mr Trump became the first person to secure three consecutive major-party nominations for the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt. Republicanism has become synonymous with Trumpism now.
Eight years ago Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, gave a convention speech that failed to endorse Mr Trump. This year Mr Cruz opened his remarks with the words “God bless Donald J. Trump” as the former president looked down from his imperial box. Ex-challengers like Nikki Haley, until recently a slashing critic of Mr Trump’s isolationist foreign policy, went supine. The Republican platform has been cast in Mr Trump’s image, right down to his esoteric style of capitalisation. Mr Trump’s daughter-in-law is the new co-chair of the Republican Party. His son was instrumental in the selection of his running-mate, J.D. Vance, a recently elected senator from Ohio.
The party had united behind Mr Trump even before his near-assassination at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13th. Now it is in awe of him. And the elevation of Mr Vance, a 39-year-old acolyte of Mr Trump’s pugnacious populism, suggests that Trumpism may live on for years to come.
This would be worth paying attention to if America were facing a typical knife-edge election. But it is especially so given the state of the race. Our election model now gives him a three-in-four chance of victory in November (see chart). His party is united, whereas Democrats are divided on whether President Joe Biden ought to abandon his bid altogether.
The past three weeks—a woeful debate performance by a sitting president, an effort by his party to dethrone him, a failed assassination—rank among the most turbulent in modern American politics. But they leave the Republicans in fine shape. The race has shifted from a referendum on Mr Trump’s fitness to return to office, given his supporters’ attack on the Capitol and his felony convictions, to one on Mr Biden’s ability to do the job. The Democratic fundraising advantage looks likely to evaporate as Democratic donors hesitate and Republican ones splurge. The NATO summit held last week in Washington celebrating the alliance’s 75th anniversary was supposed to be triumphal; instead it was a dour exercise in Trump-proofing.
Compared with all that, a vice-presidential pick could seem inconsequential. But Mr Trump’s advanced age (and recent brush with mortality) have turned attention to the succession plan for the MAGA movement. The selection of a relative moderate like Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota, would have been a consolation prize for the emaciated Reaganite wing of the party. No such compromise is necessary now. Trumpists like to divide their party, country and world along Manichean lines, as a grand contest between globalists (who like wokeness, migration, free trade and foreign wars) and God-fearing nationalists. The selection of Mr Vance shows that Mr Trump is supremely confident of winning in November.
Mr Vance was not picked because he is from a swing state or appeals to a wavering demographic group. Famous for his book “Hillbilly Elegy”, about his upward mobility from a broken family in Ohio to Yale Law School, Mr Vance offers Trumpism in slick millennial, meritocratic packaging. And whereas Mr Trump has never worried much about policy details, Mr Vance’s version is more seriously intellectualised and detail-oriented.
Trumpism beyond Trump
On economics, Mr Vance is one of the new breed of Republicans who have appropriated Democratic contempt for Wall Street and professed admiration for the working class. He is solicitous of labour unions, but dislikes “Big Labour” (along with “Big Tech” and big business). He has more in common with Elizabeth Warren, a progressive Democratic senator from Massachusetts, than you might expect. Last year he introduced a bill with her that aimed to claw back compensation from bank executives. He once endorsed a German-style proposal for giving workers seats on company boards. He has praised Lina Khan, Mr Biden’s antitrust enforcer and a pariah to Silicon Valley, as “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job”.
He has made positive sounds about industrial policy, tariffs and expanded tax credits for families. He justifies immigration restrictions by claiming they raise the wages of the native-born. “At the basic conceptual level, he’s in favour of worker power,” says Oren Cass, the founder of American Compass, an outfit that is taking conservative economics in a more populist direction. “Vance is the most distinctive possible choice [for Mr Trump], which shows that the centre of gravity for the Republican Party has permanently shifted.”
On foreign policy, Mr Vance has managed to outdo even Mr Trump in his scepticism towards NATO and opposition to American aid for Ukraine. Mr Trump is often elliptical on Ukraine, claiming that he would somehow settle the conflict in one day. When Volodymyr Zelensky visited Capitol Hill to beg for more military aid and urge Republicans against linking it to extra border funding, Mr Vance criticised the Ukrainian president’s actions as “disgraceful”. “There are a lot of bad guys all over the world, and I’m much more interested in some of the problems in East Asia right now than I am in Europe,” Mr Vance told the Munich Security Conference.
Still, Mr Vance maintains that it is important for America to continue giving military aid to Israel because that, in contrast to Ukraine’s case, has “clear end goals”, including weakening Iran. Like Mr Trump, he is sceptical of America’s capacity to shape the world. At a recent confab of anti-globalists he even fired some shots at America’s closest ally. “I was in London last year, and it’s not doing so good,” he said, before musing that Britain might be the first Islamist country to have nuclear weapons, given Labour’s election victory.
The vice-presidency can be a tragicomic position. And those who drift too close to Mr Trump can find themselves excommunicated or in serious legal trouble. Might Mr Vance wind up similarly sidelined? Two reasons suggest he might not.
First, he has already proved adept at managing up, successfully moving beyond his past publicised worries about Mr Trump as “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler”. Such canniness does not just disappear. Second, when Mr Trump became president he was content to delegate policymaking to congressional figures like Paul Ryan, then the speaker of the House, and Mitch McConnell, then the Senate majority leader. His vice-president, Mike Pence, was not a policy maestro. All three were from the old guard. This time he would have not just a sharp vice-president interested in policy, but a Trumpified Congress as well. The speaker of the House if Republicans kept their majority would be deferential to the president. Mr McConnell will be leaving his leadership post.
What began as an insurgent movement within the Republican Party, organised around a cult of personality, has become steadily more mainstream and professionalised. There are now parallel institutions including think-tanks armed with detailed plans for power. Mr Trump and his allies have fostered their own international alliance of like-minded anti-globalists. The next presidential term would be the last for Mr Trump; but it may well not be the last for Trumpism. ■
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