Paul Heideman
What Trump has done with the Republican Party is totally unprecedented in American history. There’s never been a president — not Abraham Lincoln, not [Franklin D. Roosevelt] — who controlled his party the way Trump controls the Republican Party. The level of obedience and loyalty that he commands is unprecedented. It’s a level of personalist rule that we have not seen in American politics previously.
That said, I don’t think it’s true that Trump has articulated a hegemonic vision for the party going forward in the way that Ronald Reagan did. Reagan’s vision shaped the Republican Party for the next twenty, twenty-five years after his presidency, and I don’t think Trump has articulated anything similar.
If you look at something like trade, where Trump has been extremely successful in getting a party that ten years ago was more or less monolithically free trade behind his various protectionist measures — it’s hard for me to see that kind of unanimity surviving Trump’s term because there’s a ton of Republican legislators, people like Rand Paul, who continue to be free traders, but who know that the cost of opposing Trump is too high to make it worth it on this issue.
The Republicans have been MIA in providing anything like a longer-term vision for American capitalism.
So whoever Trump’s successor is, whether it’s J. D. Vance or Don Jr, I think there’s little chance of them being able to maintain that kind of unanimity. Trump does have some unique political gifts, but they are allowing him to paper over the conflicts in the party rather than truly subsuming them into a new political vision.
Auteur: Paul Heideman
