'Never has a president done a worse job of staffing his administration than he did in 2016.' Joe Raedle / Getty Images
The Donald Trump who will begin his second term today is a bigger political bruiser than the neophyte who arrived in Washington after his shocking 2016 upset of Hillary Clinton. The White House he has assembled is a more formidable political machine than the one that was so easily checkmated by clever Democrats last time around. But this extraordinary reinvigoration is less a sign that Trump has grown more professional than that the country has grown more Trumpian.
Trump has never been known for learning on the job. That’s actually what people like about him. Learning on the job suggests adaptability, a character flaw for a public that believes Washington corrupts politicians. His gifts and drawbacks are those he had in 2016 and in 1983. His attorney-general nomination of Matt Gaetz, a man who would never have been confirmed by the Senate, was a classic Trump move. It was reminiscent of eight years ago.
American history has produced presidents less capable than Donald Trump — two this century — but never has one done a worse job of staffing his administration than he did in 2016. It was perhaps understandable that a civil service he had accused of corruption was not enthusiastic about his arrival. With some exceptions in the world of trade and finance, top-level bureaucrats carried out a leadership strike of the sort Ayn Rand envisioned in Atlas Shrugged. It was an impasse unprecedented in American history; perhaps the closest analogy was Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s sudden 2003 appointment as prime minister in Turkey — when he was forced to call on unaffiliated Muslim movements to fill technical positions that his pious provincials could not.
Trump found himself with the wrong Republican Party. A man committed to cleaning up government was at the head of a machine that was good for nothing except cutting government, which is a different thing. The only “Trump Republican” was Trump. Since then though, something powerful has got underway in his party — and out of his view. For all Trump’s hesitations, those who believed in the simple idea of disrupting American power relations have begun to network and organise spontaneously. The Trumpians have overrun the Republican Party, turning their conservative establishment adversaries of 2016 (Liz Cheney, for example) into Biden Democrats, and consolidating the remainder around Trump. They have also been whipped into ideological discipline by what they see as the persecution their candidate underwent — at the hands of not just the Biden Administration but also the rebellious civil service. This Trump White House will be run by the hard-driving Floridian Susie Wiles, who believes in his mission so much that she ditched Florida governor Ron DeSantis when he was riding highest in order to join it.
The Democrats’ power to resist Trumpism, meanwhile, has evaporated. The process might be familiar to those who paid attention to the stymying of Brexit in the UK between 2016 and 2019. Brexit opponents declared in newspapers and before cameras that the British public were having second thoughts, that the execution of Brexit was a shambles, that it had been an impossible project to start with. But it didn’t look that way to the Brexiteers. It appeared the project was being sabotaged from within by a few actors who stood at chokepoints and pulled tricks: Theresa May’s negotiators, Commons speaker, John Bercow, legal activist Gina Miller and the Supreme Court. After more than three years of obstruction, Brexit passed only because of a magnificently synthesised repertoire of counter-strategies devised by Dominic Cummings.
At the same time, the United States was undergoing something analogous. The day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, an open public resistance started with the so-called Women’s March. Twitter, at the time owned by Jack Dorsey, was aggressively policing Trump supporters’ tweets. There was also a coordinated sabotaging of the Trump Administration from inside. In September 2018 an anonymous top-ranking administration official wrote an astonishing op-ed in The New York Times titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, detailing techniques of obfuscation, non-cooperation and leaking within the administration. Things continued like this until Trump’s impeachment in 2019, which was the last thing that happened in the United States before Covid, just as Brexit was the last thing that happened in Britain. Trump failed where Boris Johnson succeeded.
Trumpism never found its Dominic Cummings — someone capable of purging the old party and designing a strategy for the new. In fact, it still has not. Such people are rare because they are temperamentally implausible: they must be both intensely attracted and intensely repelled by government chicanery. The closest Trump came was his aide Steven Miller, then as now described most often as his consigliere — which is a different thing.
Somehow, the tide has turned nonetheless, leaving Democrats in Washington in a mood of utter demoralisation. Why, they ask, did the American public, knowing Trump better than it did in previous elections, return him to power? What they cannot see is that the public has come to see wokeness not as a progressive values system but as simply the most important of the Resistance’s bag of tricks.
Trump was indeed discredited by all the new revelations after he left office. But the Resistance discredited itself faster than it discredited him — partly through the various kangaroo-court “trials” to which Democratic Party-connected prosecutors subjected Trump, and partly through campaigns against “disinformation”, which voters rightly came to view as campaigns for censorship. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, in October 2022, dramatically changed the ground rules of this conflict — there was no longer a reliable way for the Biden Administration to steer news coverage on social media and to bottle up coverage of its own scandals.
The new media environment has given Trump a bit of ideological breathing room. He now aims to staff his administration with activists, as he could not the last time around. There is Kash Patel, the House Intelligence Committee investigator, tapped to become director of the FBI. It was Patel who traced 2017 allegations of Russian interference to a report paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. There is Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s proposed head of the Federal Trade Commission, who sees political boycotts as “concerted refusals to deal”, and thus as anti-trust violations. There is Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and Trump nominee for Director of Central Intelligence, deplored by Democrats for her coolness to Biden’s Ukraine war efforts. Not all of his nominees will be confirmed — but there are at least places on the internet where a robust argument over them can take place. In the surveilled social-media environment that prevailed during his last term, they would have been caricatured and drubbed.
Enhanced access to a public megaphone has made Trump stronger against his own party too. Though he sings the praises of meritocracy, his focus is on loyalty. Pete Hegseth, nominee for defence secretary, has the right orientation for a Trumpian reform of the military: he believes it should be a place for developing “war-fighters”, and wants to purge it of woke training exercises. But his threadbare resumé (army major, TV pundit) and volatile character arose as issues in last week’s hearings. Historically, senators, with their six-year terms, have been sufficiently buffered against bullying to defy presidents on confirmation votes. Trump’s domination of Right-leaning social media, however, seems to be providing him with the information-age equivalent of parliamentary whipping. It has already worked on Iowa senator Joni Ernst, previously a sceptic towards Hegseth, who now says she will vote for him.
Trumpism held together in the face of relentless resistance because it actually turned out to be about something real, even if Trump never fully understood the varied discontents for whom he had somehow became a tribune. Time has revealed his movement as not only more anti-woke but also more multi-racial and more high-tech than it first appeared. And some Trump cadres have a more sophisticated understanding now of why and how the government is failing.
With no stake in the old Beltway elite, they speak of power being disaggregated — radically disaggregated. It is not just that they seek innovative ways of delivering government services, like the people who urged privatisation in the Eighties and public-private partnerships in the Nineties. The information-age understanding, right or wrong, is that there are certain cutting-edge things that the government shouldn’t be doing at all. Why are there two private individuals — Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos — with more ambitious space programmes than Nasa? What is a treasury in an age of cryptocurrencies? Might Syria’s acquisition of a neutral security force, a few trade relationships, a couple of infrastructure projects, be as good for the country as any “peace plan”? We begin to understand the wild speculation that Trump has indulged in discussing, for instance, acquiring Greenland. These could all be crazy ideas. But unlike earlier critiques of bureaucracy, they appear set to revolutionise government itself, not just the way it buys things.
Such ideas could also be the greatest source of tension in the Trump Administration. To run the world’s largest country — to say nothing of the empire connected to it — is a task of consummate intellectual complexity. Trumpism needs a lot of brain fuel, and the establishment still has a grip on most credentialed intellects. The constitutional understanding that cabinet advisers be hired with the “advice and consent” of the Senate is at odds with the role that will be played at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) by Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. (Assuming the latter is not appointed to fill the Ohio Senate seat being vacated by incoming vice president J.D. Vance, as has been rumoured in recent days.) But more importantly, the agenda of such informal “kitchen cabinet” appointees risks violating the basic populist economic bargain of Trumpism.
This bargain, as practiced in Trump’s first term, was to sacrifice some of GDP in order to assure its better distribution. The public seems to like it. Trump backed a strike by the International Longshoreman’s Association aimed at blocking the automation of three dozen American seaports, winning him applause from trade unions when the strike was settled in early January. But it will be costly for shippers and consumers, and the world economy is not traveling in that direction.
When Trump left office in 2021, artificial intelligence was no more than a twinkle in Silicon Valley’s eye. But the current understanding of AI complicates things terribly. As the entrepreneur Dario Amodei put it in an influential recent paper, once AI kicks in — and that could be before the end of the decade — it will allow us to compress a century’s worth of science into five or ten years. So the country that locks in a two-year advantage could dominate the world for the foreseeable world. It could be Trump’s America, but it could also be China.
An administration that looks at things this way will be desperately activist and prone to take positions that had not been thinkable just a few months before. Dark visions of technological acceleration appear likely to pit the most energetic (capitalistic) parts of the Trump base against the most loyal (populist) part. The spat between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon over visas for engineers could be only the beginning of a wider conflict. The Trump coalition, as mighty as it is, may soon face a choice between tempering the populism that is its raison d’être or incurring the wrath of the tech bosses who have rallied to its side. That is the challenge that will determine whether Trumpism outlives Trump.
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SubscribeThis seems to be an incredibly intelligent analysis. It’s not about whether people will agree or not with how things might work out, more about how and why the possibilities have opened up in the US alongside Trump; part catalyst, part benefactor.
The early part of the essay compares the development of the Brexit debate and ultimate conclusion with the determination of the US left to stymy Trump’s first administration. The US has found a way through which leaves the UK standing, or rather, falling behind. Whilst the essay goes on to say much more about how the US might just have turned the political and cultural tide in time to maintain its standing in the world against the massing forces in the East, the UK finds itself lumbered with an ‘administration’ which tried to do to the Trump campaign what it did to Brexit – failing on both counts, and leaving us with a bunch of total losers in charge.
This has got to change. We can’t “labour” under a full Starmer term. The world is moving on at such a pace and there’s just not the intellectual heft in government to comprehend what’s happening. Unfortunately, the UK electorate simply didn’t understand this last summer, but then again, there wasn’t much of an alternative than to oust the Tories.
Unherd is one of the very few places where the debate is worthy of the challenges ahead. Those who’re short-sighted enough to decry this platform need to really think about what that means, rather than trying to run it down. One can only suspect an ulterior motive.
It is fairly clear to me Unherd protects and supports Labour and all the Far Left dogma, Gender, Race, etc.
If you support this feeble rag, you increase the likelihood of Starmer staying in power for not just the next four years, but even a second term.
There is no debate in Unherd. They only give one side of the argument. Where are the right wing writers? Not a single one.
I do not decry the platform, and I enjoy reading the articles and (most of) the comments. But apart from allowing us to spend our time having a good moan, what is UnHerd but a talking shop for old men? Is it useful in any way?
I have a particular reason for asking this. I am officially old and most people in my family are younger. When we get together and discuss things I find myself using the phrase ‘common sense’ more and more. Common sense is accumulated wisdom and old people tend to use the term more than the young, probably because they have more accumulated wisdom. Sometimes I doubt if this is relevant to life today.
Those who write for Unherd, or are interviewed by the Unherd team, are from across the spectrum. If you’re referring to Comments, that’s perhaps a different matter and partially to do with having the time to absorb and respond in detail to articles.
But the breadth and depth of articles continues to be excellent, and that’s the main purpose of the platform: to engage, challenge and inform. I know of no other online platform that achieves this in quite the same way.
If you have a reductive view, that’s hardly the fault of Unherd.
Trump’s job is to make the country stronger, safer, less expensive and more free than it is now. If he achieves those goals than he’s doing “Populism” by making the majority of citizen’s lives better.
I feel like I have to constantly repeat this but America is not driven by class conflict. Whether the “rich get richer” isn’t a problem for the average apolitical person so long as their lives are more comfortable. Economics aren’t zero sum. You can raise the quality of living for almost everybody. There’s not always a contradiction between the elite and laboring class so long as the elite are talented enough to be worthy of their spot in the hierarchy. A worthy elite will make lives better.
America is not driven by class conflict
Forget who said it (was it Upton Sinclair?), but the best summation is: ‘American politics are the endless war between Wall Street and Main Street’. In the current context this is best exemplified by the animus between Elon Musk, a man who makes money by making things, and the main financier of the Democratic Party George Soros, a man who makes money by paying politicians to create chaos.
That is as ridiculous as description of Macro Trading (which is how George Soros made his money) as I have ever heard. FWIW, his role in the defenestration of the UK from the ERM was one of the most Trumpian acts ever. Its perfectly possible to understand and appreciate some aspects of Trumpism without turning GS into some sort of Left-wing Macchiavelli, which he just isn’t.
Agree with your sentiment, to a point. Class is the ghost in the room of US economy, therefore politics.
True the poor are quite comfortable by historical standards.
However, upward mobility has been greatly obstructed by increasingly unaffordable real estate, made so by the affluent and wealthy accumulation of so much of it.
Obstructed by a deliberately dumbed down public education system, while better off are in private schools, yet dictate support for absurd curricula.
Obstructed by top heavy tax code that makes trust funds and foundations tax free transfer of wealth to undeserving progeny a great weight on upward mobility. (Not to mention ever increasing 401k limits and generational transfer of these funds, while low wage workers are not helped by these rules.)
So, while we don’t call it class in US, if it quacks like a duck….
I guess it depends on how we’re categorizing class. While I do agree that there are an excessive number of loopholes in the tax code, I’m skeptical of dichotomies that speak of struggle between the “ownership class” and the “working class.” Its too simplified and focused on punishment.
I don’t think “Experts” can socially engineer a well functioning hierarchy and I don’t think it serves the population to have bureacrats tinkering with class or identity quotas. The DEI framework is rooted in extinguishing wealth inequality by redistributing social position according to identity classification. DEI is not an illogical step once you realize the owner/worker class categories are insufficient to redistribute wealth.
I think its time to realize that the best we can do is an imperfect system of trying to uphold merit.
Of course, always first acknowledge our imperfect nature. Next agree merit will always be a better system than DEI/Marxism. Then re-jigger the tax code to let the cream rise, but pass much less of the excess of it to usually less productive progeny. Let them earn their own. Those that can work always have a leg up with best schools and family connection. Reads like class to me.
How does one tell working class there is a high price of entry through rules, regs, and unavailable loans for business startup, no home ownership, no higher ed., no SS until 70, while many trustifarians do nothing but enrich the cartels?
Interesting essay, but in what sense is the US the “world’s largest country”? Certainly not population or land area. GDP? Yes, still well ahead of China.
Disgusted by this awful prospect of inhuman technological acceleration led by the most repulsive people in this world.
One one hand, I hope building an AI is more difficult than what those Silicon Valley techlizards can ever grasp, with their little LLM’s. I do long for a Butlerian jihad, but it would take some serious chaos if we ever get there.
I like the term “techlizards”. I was contemplating the “shapeshifting lizard” conspiracy theory the other day. You know, the one that says the world is secretly ruled by shapeshifting lizards from another planet (or another dimension – I’m not across the finer details of it). I wondered what one of these shapeshifting lizards would look like if it took a crude human form, and tried to talk and act like a human would, despite having no frame of reference for what humans say and do. I came to the conclusion that it would look a lot like Elon Musk.
“Why are there two private individuals — Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos — with more ambitious space programmes than Nasa?” Here is the answer to this question. In early 2009, I attended a dinner in Washington DC, and the guest speaker was Dr Michael Griffin who was the previous NASA Director. That evening Griffin ranted about how misguided the incoming Obama administration was with their new policies for the Space Program. In a major shift in NASA’s role for human flight, the Obama administration proposed that the US would rely solely on private aerospace companies to design, launch, and operate future manned space vehicles. NASA would pay the private companies for government space services. Consequently, the NASA budget was slashed and several space programs cancelled. The result is what we have today with commercial companies leading the way. In truth, NASA was not an Obama priority, and this shift from government to commercial space investment was a way to free up funding for other Obama programs, but in retrospect it succeeded and was an unintended Obama legacy.
Someone once joked that the most unrealistic part of the movie Star Wars was the Death Star – a government project that came in on budget and ahead of time. IIRC many in NASA saw the use of the private sector as a way to sidestep pork barrel politics that ballooned the cost of the space program, stifled innovation and neutered its effectiveness.
Yeah, and what did that get them? Elon Musk (our very own Darth Vader).
The problem with this analysis is that neglected the pitfalls presented by the incoming President’s character flaws, chief among his dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. It also underestimated the possibility that the Administration might be dominated by institutional conflict. There are 33 U.S. Senators who do not face reelection until 2030, two years after the President elect leaves office. Of these are 20 Republicans and 13 Democrats. In the current divided situation, if as few as five of these Republicans got together and held their ranks, they could dominate the agenda, demanding concessions for their support, without which nothing pases. Earnst caved because she was alone. Opponents will not remain solitary in the future.
To David Morrison:
By contempt for the rule of law, do you mean using law fare against one’s political opponents, or censoring comments that point to corruption and censoring of all oppositional views by our government and mass media, or establishment attempts to assassinate a presidential candidate? Attempting to shift our focus to orange man bad seems to me to reveal a blind spot as to why Trump has such hostility to the Democrats who have no problem using formal government power to incarcerate anyone critical of them, to practically order the media gate keepers to distort and suppress the views of political opponents. In a sense, Trump and the voters who support him have no trouble with his alleged “contemp for — what the Democrats are pleased to refer to as the rule of law”. It has well earned that contempt.
At this point in the cycle, Inauguration Day, much hope and desire will be tipped into the receptacle that is Trump. And he in turn will chuck copious red meat to his supporters. The ‘con-job’ at its zenith. But don’t be fooled.
And in just a few weeks time he and his closest have to decide whether tax cuts for Billionaires, costing trillions, a bigger priority than some of the things that could be done for the ‘little guy’. Watch closely what he chooses. You know already which way he’ll lean don’t you.
As in the UK it’s the millions of freeloading and unproductive suburban millionaires who are the problem, not so much the small number of billionaires.
From the title I expected more detail about the various factions within the coalition and their ideological differences. At any rate, I think we know what to expect. Lots of the inner circle getting fired.
/OT/
Has the reply button vanished, or is it just me?
Ah, it is back 😉
What they cannot see is that the public has come to see wokeness not as a progressive values system but as simply the most important of the Resistance’s bag of tricks.
No, the public saw wokeness as a malign and destructive force that had gone far too far and was threatening the very bedrock of our societies. By limiting speech, by dividing us all up into smaller and smaller identity categories encouraged to fight each other rather than unite, by being so endlessly negative about the USA/Britain/the West as to make us weak and susceptible to outside threats just when the world is becoming a more dangerous place and we need to know exactly who we are as societies, cultures and as a civilisation.
Thank God the tide seems to be turning.
Well said. I’m glad you wrote ‘seems to be turning’ because I’m not so sure it’s over. For all of the public pushback we’re seeing, the control of so many institutions still remains in the hands of the true believers, especially in the education and NGO systems. I worry that people are celebrating the one step back while blissfully ignoring the five steps forward that were taken. The true believers have no interest in giving up control of the institutions they spent so many years and decades seizing. I think most of the public sees this, at least here in the US. At least I hope so.
You are 100% correct. Every day I hear the same woke discussions, I read the same woke articles. The coming of Trump is giving us all a bout of wishful thinking. Nice while it lasts but our kids still believe that Britain has been evil and must be brought down.
I don’t get the reference to Cummings who apparently purged the Conservative Party. He along with Gove and others destroyed the Conservative Party over 25 years.
This was a disaster for the UK.
Why isn’t Cummings in prison for sabotaging the Johnson government?
Another puff piece for Cummings. What exactly does he have on Gove?
Read Nadine Dorries if you don’t understand the context of what I am saying.
I still cannot reply to comments for many days. Has Unherd been hacked? Timing is disturbing.
I don’t think it’s been hacked. It’ s just that the moderation system is absolutely dysfunctional. I have written many times to UnHerd support about it and I know that other subscribers have complained, too. To no avail. This is extremely disappointing and demotivating, especially when you think how UnHerd positions itself and how , despite their positioning, they continue using a Temu-like moderation system.
I actually cancelled my subscription because of the terrible malfunctioning of the UnHerd website. I used to press the top button multiple times to change from the French version (?) to the English one. The comment sections is/was a nightmare. Comments disappeared for 24 hours and then reappeared again etc. I might rejoin at a future date. UnHerd should get proper web designers.
I agree. It’s so disrespectful towards people who are loyal to UnHerd, pay their subscription and observe all the rules when commenting. I, too, am not going my annual subscription when it expires and I have informed the UnHerd staff about this.
There’s another consideration, too: our comments are beneficial for UnHerd, because they improve engagement statistics.
I really can’t understand why they are so attracted to this faulty moderation system. I am subscribed to many other electronic publications and nowhere is it as bad as on UnHerd…
Sad… And disappointing…
I can only assume you aren’t subscribed to the Guardian.
No, am not subscribed to the Guardian. Am subscribed, though, to a daily newsletter of El Mundo with a review of the world MSM. Sometimes, they summarise articles in the Guardian, thus giving me a broad idea of what the Grauniad is up to.
Otherwise, have no nerves to read that pitiful publication.
Hope I have answered your question or, rather, assumption.
My point was that the Guardian treats its subscribers WAY worse than UnHerd treats its subscribers.
Oh, I am sorry, MM, I didn’t understand you.
As for the way the Guardian treats its subscribers, one of my objections to UnHerd is that it positions itself as a high-quality publication, while their moderation system is way below this positioning.
I wouldn’t expect anything good from the Guardian, while with UnHerd I feel extremely disappointed, because I have (had?) high expectations for their treatment of the commenters.
My apologies once again for misconstruing your comment.
The whole comments section does not function tbh. So if I have liked something previously it does not reflect. Hacked.
Cummings was one of the players who purged the Conservative Party of right wingers.
This article suggests this was a good thing.
It was a disaster. It meant there was no centre right party to vote for at the 2024 election.
That is why UK is now out on its own. A Far Left outlier.
Cummings went from living in Russia to being parachuted into Head of Strategy of the Conservative Party under Ian Duncan Smith, who was immediately ousted in a media invented scandal.
Why does no one talk about this? Why does everyone ignore what Ian Duncan Smith has alleged against Cummings and Gove in his interview in The Plot?
It might be there are so few subscribers they can’t afford the IT bill to fix the comments.
That seems to be precisely your intention, and what i was alluding to in my earlier comment about those with “ulterior motives”.
I don’t think you’re even “right-wing”, but some caricature of someone who you think might be. You’ve been rumbled, and it’s only happened because you’ve gone completely over the top with your ‘pretend’ right-wing comments.
Where’s “Champagne Socialist”, they’ve been missing for quite a while?
Careful! Saying the name might summon the incubus forth.
Yikes!
.
Found him! I replied to a comment he made on another thread 10 minutes ago!
I dislike Unherd because
Its name is a lie. Its mission statement is a lie.
It is seriously compromised by Gove and Cummings.
It is typical mainstream media ie Progressive Liberal bilge.
It gives Starmer a free pass. No criticism ever.
It avoids all the important stories, all the important issues.
It is full of Feminist contributors so giving women writers a bad name.
It is in effect a Labour poodle.
These are my motives for calling it out for the sad media outlet it is. I have no further, ulterior motive.
Why don’t you cancel your subscription? Just a suggestion….
This is a pivotal moment in World politics, if Trump and his team can pull it off a return to small government is still possible.
The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
Arkadian Arkadian: it’s not just you ! I can’t reply any more since early last week. I’m allowed to comment still, but now see a “Subrscribe to comment” button above the comments. Of course, I am subscribed and alreayd logged in … . Informed support several days ago, but no response yet.
I’m guessing this stuff must be outsourced and someone’s messed up.
The thing with Trump is that he is now quite an old man, and he probably fits the medical definition of “obese”. He will die at some point in the not too distant future, maybe part way through his term. What happens then? He has no heir. Although there are plenty of “wannabees”, nobody has the skill-set to keep Trumpism going.
There’s no heir and there doesn’t need to be one because we don’t have a monarchy. Instead, there are these things called primaries where people choose which candidates will get to run for which office and the choice of presidential candidates is always the unofficial party leader. I don’t know what country you were thinking of but the lack of an heir shouldn’t pose much of a problem. The movement will continue so long as one of perhaps a dozen or so candidates are at least as competent as Donald Trump. Let that sentence sink in. Your argument is based on the premise that Donald Trump is the best the populist movement can do, and I’m not sure that you really mean what you have implied. I don’t know about you but I rather think if I’m given twelve tries I stand a decent chance of finding someone with that level of competence throwing darts randomly at a phone book.
I used the term “heir” to mean “the Leader of the MAGA cult post-Trump”. I wasn’t intending to imply that it had to be a blood relative of Trump. I do actually think that Trump is the best the populist movement can do, inasmuch as if there is somebody better in the US, they are not yet on the public stage. The current contenders (De Santis, Vance etc) are VERY pale imitations (although obviously Vance becomes President if Trump dies during his term).
Well, I was speaking tongue in cheek myself. My main point is that it’s pointless to speculate now. The time for speculation will come in a couple years when the candidates for 2028 start declaring themselves. I assume Vance and Haley will be among them. I would say Vance is a different kind of populist, quieter, less confrontational, more intellectual. I couldn’t say whether he was better or worse than Trump until he ran a campaign and/or ran the government. Haley is an establishment stooge and I doubt she’ll be any more successful four years from now after even more of the old Republican party has jumped ship. DeSantis can try but his moment was 2024, and he dithered and debated about whether to run for too long then ran a half-baked campaign. Either he was never a serious populist, or he was more like Vivek and never all that serious about beating Trump, or maybe he was always a mediocre politician and a halfway populist who we overestimated because of COVID. I don’t know which but to my mind his star has already fallen. To my mind, Josh Hawley is still the most truly populist politician we have. Rand Paul is a libertarian who would also bring great change of a much different kind. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are traditional finger in the wind politicians who can be relied upon to take the temperature of the room and the country in much the way Trump did. Trump showed them a new way to power and popularity and they reoriented themselves pretty quickly into Trump supporters and populists on most issues. Rubio managed to get nominated to the cabinet. Either might prove competent in running an election campaign given an unambiguously populist base to pander to and might through their experience prove more effective at governance. I would say Trump has served his purpose already by defeating the establishment and remaking the Republican party and it will be up to another leader who has a better grasp of the actual workings of government to get Trump’s agenda passed. The people will get to choose who his “heir” will be, and odds are as good as not it will be somebody I haven’t even considered.
I have three comments: Ron De Santis – He is hampered by having a) zero charisma, and b) lifts in his boots (the second of those, once seen, cannot be unseen). Ted Cruz – I am mystified as to how he ever got elected to any public office. His antics in fleeing to Cancun during the “big freeze” should have been the end of him. Marco Rubio – I wish he was as hawkish on Russia as he is on China, but he is in my view shaping up well.
I did not know about the boot lifts. I assume he’s trying to make himself look taller, which is, dare I say it, a Trumpian level of vanity. I did know about the lack of charisma. A bigger problem to me is that his populism is more show than substance. He had a big public fight with Disney that didn’t accomplish much besides boosting his reputation. He bussed migrants to Martha’s Vineyard once as a publicity stunt while Greg Abbott made it a policy to bus migrants to America’s major immigration supporting liberal stronghold cities with serious political results. When he had a chance to impose limits on working in high heat conditions to protect workers from heat exhaustion,, he came down on the side of big business. He’s not a real populist. In short, I agree with what you say and I have further complaints about DeSantis. He’s only marginally better than a stooge like Haley.
I don’t understand Cruz’s appeal myself. I do know the establishment hated him almost as much as they hated Trump in 2016. Had they put all their weight behind Cruz at the start rather than Bush and then Rubio, he might have defeated Trump in the primaries, but they didn’t like Cruz much better so they refused to support him until it was clear that it was going to be Cruz or Trump, and by that point it was too late. He’s always struck me as a pretty uninteresting vanilla politician, but the disapproval of the old guard Republicans and the donor class counts for something anyway. If they hate him, that suggests he at least wouldn’t be their puppet.
Rubio is an interesting case. He was pegged by the establishment as an up and coming party leader back in 2016, but since 2016, he has basically abandoned the old guard and become one of the louder voices in Congress advocating for truly populist causes. We could do a lot worse than him. I am also fond of Tulsi Gabbard.
The reason for being hawkish on China rather than Russia is that quite frankly the countries threatened by China in Asia have far more strategic value as allies than Europe does. It also reflects the reality of domestic politics that many US voters see the Ukraine conflict as another ‘forever war’ that can’t be ‘won’ in any real sense but still has to be paid for. That said, there’s enough evidence at this point we probably should be viewing Russia/China/North Korea as a military alliance. They aren’t officially allied, but it would be prudent to consider them as such in terms of geopolitical interest and planning for potential conflict. Given that China is far stronger than Russia at this point and given that North Korea has long been China’s closest client state, I can’t believe Kim Jong Un sent troops to aid Russia’s war in Ukraine without getting at least implicit consent from Chairman Xi,. That implies to me a high level of collaboration between the three and a level of mutual understanding that implies the informal alliance is stronger than it appears. I suspect that if we ever get into a direct conflict with any of them, we’ll have to contend with all three, and that’s something that I hope Rubio understands beneath all the political posturing.
Fair points. I agree that Russia is probably somewhat more Europe’s problem that the US’s problem, but it is definitely a problem which needs to be dealt with. What is more, Russia has been a problem pretty much continuously since Ivan the Terrible was the Czar, and that isn’t going to change soon. For all Rubio’s plus points, he couldn’t “Shoot someone in Fifth Avenue and get away with it”. He’d be handcuffed in the squad car in five minutes.
Perhaps UnHerd is experiencing the “Normalisation of Deviance” and has joined the whole of the western world along for the journey.
It seems that we are undergoing a political and economic revolution that will only seem natural in hindsight, marking the end of an era that began in 1945. Given the accelerating pace of change, we might even look back and opine that it was overdue, and that it was meant to start in 2016, various factors hindering its full realization. But this change was inevitable and ultimately unstoppable, and as the author points out, and I believe, Trump is finding himself at the head of a movement that is greater and more complex than he may realize, and certainly one that is beyond his complete control. His challenge is to ride this tide and not get swept up underneath it. A very thought provoking essay on the eve of his inauguration.
Cummings is just one more to add to the list of goings on that everyone is too frightened to talk about.
Along with the Pakistani rape gangs, the Stockport killer.
Look the other way.
The NYT writer wrote anonymously so could not be sacked or imprisoned for subverting legal government.
Here in UK Cummings has admitted in a television interview to plotting to oust a sitting Prime Minister while ostensibly working for him as a special adviser.
Why is Cummings given a free pass?
This article is full of pro-Cummings spin. And none of it makes sense in the context of the article.
Unherd is badly compromised.
You are Jess Philips and I claim my £5.
So the trolls are coming out for Cummings?
But Trump’s personal failings are so egregious what does his election say about America, its electorate, and the nature of US democracy. Perhaps it reflects a corrupt state and society.
Or more likely that people were so sick of the status quo they were willing to take a punt on an incredibly flawed individual
It’s definitely, definitely that. Thing have to be really far gone in people’s minds for them to consider electing Trump. It’s basically a vote of no confidence in the entire political establishment. The sad thing is its taken nearly a decade for said political establishment to figure that out, and some still haven’t. Then again, if they were competent to handle someone like Trump, he wouldn’t be there in the first place. It’s a perfectly vicious circle that both starts and ends with the failures of the political establishment.
If only UK had a leader to ban diversity training, and re-education, and non-crime and hate-crime and white privilege courses.
Is UK the most pathetic nation in the world now? It used to be said Canada was worse. Now it seems we are at the bottom of that ranking as well.
Richard Littlewood has much to say today. Typical of the self-admitted phallically challenged. Sorry all, couldn’t let this acknowledgement of the mans handle go uncommented.
Have I hit a nerve somewhere? What don’t you like of what I am saying?
Nope. Read very little of it. We may actually agree on a lot. The handle just kept jumping off the screen, screaming for acknowledgement. You’re welcome.
Mr. Caldwell, I have read your most recent book and all your recent articles because I consider you one of our country’s leading intellectual lights. But I was very disappointed by this article. Especially by your sneering at President Trump and his supporters. It reminds me of Dominic Cummings’ sarcastic crack: “Haha moron. Look at the moron and his moron supporters.” A man who never learned on the job, like your caricature of President Trump, would not have been able to defeat a decade of all-out war from the establishment as he has. Your characterization of his base as only wanting to tear down, not to rebuild, is also false.
I have always said that the populist movement was about the people’s disapproval of the ruling class more than it was about Trump. Electing Donald Trump amounts to a vote of ‘no confidence’ in the government as it exists and has existed. The Democrats did not understand this message until it was finally beaten into their heads this past November. Knowing that, they perhaps begin to realize that they chose the worst possible strategy to deal with Trump. By aiming all their guns in the media and the bureaucracy and even corporate boardrooms squarely at Donald J. Trump, they confirmed the narrative that Trump successfully conveyed and that the people already largely agreed with before he even showed up. Trump didn’t invent any of it. He just said what others wouldn’t, and the establishment was so hated, so reviled, so despised, that this was enough. The people would have their reckoning with the elites that they blame for ruining the country even if it came in the form of a hilariously out of his depth orange skinned celebrity whose only real skill is to read the room and stir whatever proverbial pot the people in the room thinks needs stirring. In point of fact, I even underestimated Trump’s appeal. I believed he would lose this election and that the populist movement needed further time and greater crises to achieve a decisive turning point. I expected populism to win. I didn’t expect the victory to come this soon. With the winds blowing the way they are, I anticipate it will be difficult if not impossible to reverse the progress of populism/Trumpism. If any great crisis comes, it will now likely only make the wind blow all the harder in a populist/nationalist direction. It won’t bring back the globalist era or make woke into a viable political philosophy. It will only catalyze even more radical versions of populist reform that are perhaps even more inward looking and more radical.
This time, everybody knows it. There’s no more denial, no more question, about which direction history is heading. They aimed all their guns at Trump for eight years, put everything they had into stopping him. They failed, and indeed probably made him even stronger and advanced his movement even faster. The margin may have been small, but due to that context, the result was decisive nonetheless. A critical mass of opposition to the old status quo has been established and there is little prospect of reversing the trends. There comes a point when even the most patriotic know when a war is lost. It’s a humbling moment, a time for reorienting oneself to the world as it is, for reassessing one’s ideas, for considering one’s mistakes, for thinking of what comes next. The wokesters and the globalists are grieving for their loss, not of a loved one, but rather for an ideal, an ideal of a world with a rules based order and people working together to prevent climate change, end warfare, prevent genocide, and right historical injustices. As the ideal breaths its last this is not a time for true believers to rail against the inevitable, but rather to quietly grieve and come to terms with their loss. It needed to happen. As much as they mock Trump for his slogan, Make America Great Again, they are the ones clinging to the past opposing the changes. The Biden administration has been an exercise in clinging to the past, both in his policies and in the man himself, who hails from a previous era. Now, however, the time has come to let go of the past and look to the future, which is filled with challenges to answer. There is surely room for disagreement about how to handle these new challenges and what remedies to pursue for new problems. The Democrats need new policies, new arguments, new leaders. The extent to which they are able to find such things and successfully oust those who cling to an unsustainable past will likely determine their success in the near to medium term future.
You are overlooking the fact that Trump won’t live forever. He is already an old man. He is older that Biden was at his inauguration, and we all saw how quickly he diminished due to old age. Who will be the custodian of Trumpism after Trump?
JD is the one to watch and listen. Very capable. Bright. Atypical. Good person, no idea, good leader, even less.
With regards to Biden, he was already in decline at his nomination, and the gaslighting started very early. Not referring to falling down stairs, but this : “I think what you’re going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do.”
I have an open mind on Vance, but he doesn’t have a teflon coating like Trump. He may well get to be President due to Trump dying or becoming incapacitated, and if he does, he might turn out to be his own man.
With regards to the rejection of the establishment, of note, among the many very interesting articles and comments, there is very little on what the Americans calls dynasties. Clinton. Bush. Obama. Biden.
Families who have amassed fabulous wealth, power and prestige exclusively through public engagement, ie, paid by taxes, and generally failed when they seldomly ventured into our world, the real world.
I see Trump, an entrepreneur, as a direct consequence of tired taxpayers, eager to get rid of the latest Don. The stench following H Clinton her entire career made many of my democrat friends vote for him. As for the Bidden disaster, no amount of censorship was ever going to hide the spectacular combination of ego, mediocrity and greed. Did I forget dementia?
Despite being a wee kid in the Reagan years, the ressemblances between the two, in particular in the near universal sneering from the media in the first term, to the grudgingly and painfully slow realisation in the second that sneering at a man admired by millions is quite difficult when you are yourself despised by millions. The ratings and readership of the legacy media are eloquent enough
Even at this point almost no one understands the Trump thing.
He has charisma, spooky and magical, far beyond any politician we’ve seen in my lifetime. When he said that he could pull out a gun on Fifth Ave., shoot some one and get away with it, he was right. We would all stand around gawking like farm animals. This aspect of human society is not understood by anyone’s science. No one’s mother has any good advice to give; she’s as addled as the rest of us.
In the hands of a truly evil person this could be horrible. (Google ‘Jonestown Massacre’) But he’s not that. He’s a New York businessman; sharp, a little dishonest but a mensch in his own way. I’ve known dozens of them. The job he’s faced with is probably doable for him because it’s about refocusing on spending (or not spending) the taxpayers’ money intelligently. No more DEI because it’s a money pit. No more trans nonsense cause it’s just making people mad; it doesn’t produce anything. Hopefully, no more military/industrial complex spending our wealth on last years weapons systems.
My fingers are firmly crossed.
I agree with most of what you say, but I think that the US (and the rest of the Free World) needs weapons systems for the inevitable war with Russia.
It’s true the Republican Party has been hollowed out by the Trumpians, so that this time round there will be no scapegoats for failure.