Donald Trump’s second coming Can he keep his coalition together?

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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