Once the Party of Business, Republicans Have Gone Rogue

Review of Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos by Paul Heideman (Verso, 2025)

In the days after January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an abortive attempt to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election, a number of corporate leaders stepped forward to announce that they were temporarily suspending their financial support for the Republican Party. Four years later, an A-list of America’s business elites crowded into the same building to take their front-row seats for Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

Such a portrait in contrasts poses some puzzling questions about Trump’s Republican Party and its relationship to America’s corporate elite. If America’s capitalist class tried to discipline the GOP in the aftermath of January 6, why did it fail? What does such an attempt imply about the nature of the GOP? And what does such a failure imply about the political capacities of US capital?

These questions are at the core of Paul Heideman’s new book, Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos. The book provides readers with an accessible account of Republican radicalization and the party’s increasingly strained relationship with America’s bourgeoisie.

Decades before Trump arrived on the political scene, Republican insurgents began displaying an increasing proclivity to pursue aggressive partisan tactics in defiance of the wishes of business as expressed in its own organizations, corporate boardrooms, or editorial boards. This is not to suggest that Republicans have become an anti-business party. On the contrary, as the front row of Trump’s second inauguration displayed, corporate leaders continue to court the party, and the party continues to return the favor. What has changed, Heideman argues, is business’s capacity to cohere its general interests and mobilize as a class to impose those interests on rogue…