The politics of maximum confrontation

How Trump ended the Republican civil war

The history of the Republican Party in the last two decades is not one of the rise and fall of ideologies but of a quenching of the Right’s thirst for all-out confrontation with the Left. This is a story that doesn’t require you to believe that the Republican voter has done an 180-degree turn on free trade or internationalism, as so many of the rise-of-Trump theories would have you believe. Rather, there’s a clear through-line from Reagan to Trump, despite the recent rehabilitation of the Gipper’s image with Democrats. Both were popular revolts against a worn-out party establishment, largely supported by their party’s ideologues. But while Reaganism truly was an ideological revolution, Trumpism should be understood as a rhetorical and cultural one of unrestricted partisan warfare against the Left.

The central psychodrama of the Republican Party over the last two decades has been the civil war between the base and what it saw as a weak-kneed establishment that eschewed maximalism at every turn. The maximalism the base sought was not just in policy — at various turns on spending, Obamacare, and immigration — but also on aggressively pushing back against the Left’s takeover of the culture, especially after 2020.

The original sin of the establishment — the match that lit the fuse of Trumpism — was the push for comprehensive immigration reform during the second George W. Bush presidency. Here were Republicans who had secured a governing trifecta — and were using it against the wishes of their base on a cornerstone issue. Conservative doubts had been held at bay in the wake of 9/11 and the initial success of the War on Terror, but the once the Iraq War went sideways in 2005-06 pent-up frustration burst into the open. This was most palpable on immigration, and also the fact that the Republican majority seemed to have little interest in reining in spending, with Tom DeLay having held a vote open for three hours to drag a massive new Medicare prescription drug entitlement over the finish line in 2003.

The final straw was the September 2008 bank bailout, which provided the perfect setup for the rise of the Tea Party and the GOP’s ritual rebirth as a libertarian, small-government party. With Republicans stripped of power with the Obama election, this was a time to start fresh, and to do so in the opposite direction of Bush-era “compassionate conservatism” and the ethically-compromised Congressional Republican leadership of the time. In the end, the Tea Party rebellion was as much or more about working out the GOP’s anxieties about itself as it was proximately about Barack Obama.

The 2010 midterms were a smashing success for the Republicans, heralding the return of a party re-founded on first principles. But the party’s leaders still could not shake a reputation of weakness. To show that they were keeping their promises, House leadership held dozens of Obamacare repeal votes — to no effect, since the Democrats controlled the White House and the Senate for most of this period. To reassure the base that they were in fact “fighting” tooth and nail, they’d have to resort to ever-escalating political stuntwork — like the performative October 2013 government shutdown.

During this time, the GOP nominated relative moderates — John McCain and Mitt Romney — both defeated handily by Obama. But the blame for Romney’s loss was placed on his being too far-right on immigration, alienating Latinos. The establishment saw an opening for a comeback, making the return of Bush-era comprehensive immigration reform a major tenet of the party’s post-2012 autopsy. In the Senate, the Gang of Eight negotiated a deal that got 68 votes. But it crashed and burned in the House, and it soon became obvious that Republican voters were no more interested in what they derisively termed “amnesty” than they were at the end in Bush’s second term.

The ten years between 2006 and 2016 were a period of continuous warfare between the Republican base and the party’s leadership. To some extent, that war still continues in the House today, with the party continuing to cycle through Speakers holding the most thankless job in America. I’ve seen this through the arc of my own career. Early on, the principled conservative reformers trying fighting hardest against reckless spending were members like Arizona’s Jeff Flake and Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn. Eric Cantor of Virginia was seen as a promising, take-no-prisoners future leader. This was also the era of Paul Ryan, who was putting policy meat on the bones of the Tea Party’s rebellion against Big Government, authoring a sweeping entitlement reform plan. In Congress, a brash young group of leaders who’d leave behind the corrupt dealmaking of the past seemed to be in the ascendancy.

None of this would end well. Jeff Flake moderated in the Senate, became a leading anti-Trump Republican, didn’t bother running for re-election, and endorsed and was appointed an ambassador by Joe Biden. Eric Cantor lost his 2014 primary after internal polling showed him 30 points ahead. Paul Ryan, whose 2015 election as Speaker marked a hoped-for truce in the Republican civil war, left in frustration in 2018. Kevin McCarthy lasted the longest of them, but was run out of the speakership in 2023.

The Democratic machine in the Senate and House was a well-oiled machine by comparison. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi were effective and had the support of the rank-and-file, both members and voters. Republican dysfunction was such that even at the peak of his powers, Mitch McConnell would be vilified by Republican-voters, through his legislative skills matched or exceeded those of Pelosi, securing a generational majority on the Supreme Court.

Enter the peacemaker, Donald Trump

Against this backdrop, it seems completely intuitive in retrospect how a candidate like Trump could rise quickly in a Republican primary. But it wasn’t at the time. Populist rebels could win a primary here and there and make life hell for Hill leadership. But never a presidential primary. Republicans, it was thought, weren’t that suicidal. This mindset was summed up by a popular meme at the time: (the) Establishment Always Wins.

Instead, Trump caught fire, and he did so by speaking to the concern that Republican elected officials had tried hardest to repress: immigration. This was also a time when the Right seemed to be in full retreat in the culture wars, from the Obergefell decision to the rise of Black Lives Matter to the need to be open and welcoming to Syrian refugees and do immigration reform to appease Latino voters (spoiler alert: this would prove unnecessary).

Going hand in hand with this was the sense that the newly ascendant cultural Left was lording its status over the rest of the country, imposing politically correct speech codes and deeming anyone who objected racist, bigoted, homophobic, or misogynistic.

Political correctness, reborn as woke-ism, had not been a rallying point for the Right since Rush Limbaugh railed against it on the airwaves in the 1990s. But Trump was prescient enough to understand that both immigration and political correctness were a volcano about to explode on the Right. Agenda items like tax cuts, American global leadership, and free trade were just along for the ride. And what D.C.’s conservatives did not understand at the time — and this includes me — is that these policies were always just along for the ride. Winning the battle for the culture against the Left — or at least stopping the Left from winning it — was always what would get conservatives’ heart racing more than any other issue.

Trump’s novice view of politics and instinctual understanding of the median Fox News viewer allowed him to see this when few others did. It didn’t hurt that he was the human embodiment of the backlash to political correctness. And if that resulted in some bad tweets, so what? Better to have someone speaking the truth and taking the fight directly to the Left, saying out loud the things Republicans thought privately but couldn’t say publicly. Very quickly, Trump became the Right’s tribal warlord-chieftain.

By fully waging the culture war, Trump effectively ended a destructive Republican civil war. As part of the peace deal, he extended amnesty to members of the establishment who pledged personal fealty to him. And even some who didn’t: Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse got presidential endorsements in their Senate races. The axis of confrontation in Republican primaries shifted from Conservative/Tea Party vs. RINO to Trump vs. anti-Trump and eventually MAGA vs. non-MAGA. But there was a dirty little secret in all of this: anyone could become MAGA by declaring loyalty to Trump. That included moderates like Lindsey Graham who had long been in the conservative crosshairs. Simply by refraining from overt Trump criticism, the establishment was now safer than ever, backstopped by the all-powerful Trump endorsement. For most elected officials, Trump loyalty was a small price to pay for continuing in public office.

In important ways, MAGA has benefited establishment lawmakers the most by giving them the cover of Trump’s protection. The remnants of the old Tea Party movement, the House Freedom Caucus, now only hold sway because of the narrowness of the margin in the House. But their public influence has largely collapsed thanks to how often they find themselves on the wrong side of Trump. Imagine for a moment if an establishment Republican president like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio had endorsed against a Freedom Caucus leader like Virginia’s Bob Good. The howls of protest from conservatives would have been deafening. But Trump actually did this and won without anyone batting an eye.

Because Trump was exactly where the Republican base was, because he was willing to condemn Democratic leaders using the same harsh verbiage that Republican rank-and-file voters would themselves use, the base came to trust him implicitly. “But he fights” is a term of derision used whenever Trump seems to be on the verge of crashing the plane. But for the Republican voter, facing what it deems to be the Left’s cultural onslaught, But He Fights is the whole point.

By pursuing a politics of maximum confrontation, by holding back absolutely nothing in his denunciations of Democrats and the Left, Trump has satiated the Republican voter’s desire for someone who would do what they would do from behind the Resolute Desk. From immigration to TARP to tiptoeing around the Left’s advance in the culture wars, Republican presidents and Congresses often did the opposite of what their voters wanted. Imagine if Kamala Harris came into office with a sweeping capital gains tax cut as one of her main legislative priorities, because her advisers told her she needed to shore up business and the tech bros. That’s exactly how rank-and-file Republicans felt about immigration. By earning the trust of his voters on the issues that mattered most to them, Trump untied the Gordian Knot of Republican division. And his rhetorical and stylistic boldness made Republican voters more forgiving when he didn’t get everything he wanted.

Maximum confrontation meets governance

Though the base now had someone they trusted in the Oval Office, the old problems were not magically solved overnight. With a trifecta, Trump was now in a position to deliver on a root-and-branch repeal of Obamacare, a priority of the Hill’s conservatives, but the effort crashed and burned, with the individual mandate only later eliminated without fanfare in the tax reform law.

Likewise, progress on building a border wall was slow, with majority Republicans shutting down the government for border funding, in an echo of the 2013 shutdown.

Though he struggled politically through the midterms and beyond, Trump didn’t receive meaningful blowback from the Right for these failures. His persona was the ultimate shield against any accusation that he wasn’t fighting hard enough. And besides, the blame for these defeats could always be placed at the feet of Never Trump Republicans or the Deep State.

Despite that, Trump rarely backed primary challenges against the party’s traditional incumbents — doing so only in egregious cases of outright opposition to him. That was a marked difference from the Tea Party era when the threat of such primaries was all-consuming. Most of the pre-Trump Republicans just retired or left in frustration and were replaced by newcomers supportive of the president — as no other kind could have won an open-seat primary. This process has been spoken of as a hostile takeover by alien forces, a critique I find puzzling. A party’s support for a president of their own is the most natural thing in politics, particularly for one as popular with the grassroots as Trump. This was true of Obama, it was true of George W. Bush in his heyday, it was true of Clinton, it was true of Reagan.

The disconnect only grew during 2020, when Trump would become guilty of the same sins that caused conservatives to break from the Bush presidency. He approved $3 trillion in pandemic spending, setting the stage for inflation, spending that Joe Biden would double and triple down on. Once again, there wasn’t a peep of dissent from the Right, who granted him leeway to act in an emergency, which could argue was his due. But had a “normal” Republican done this, the treatment they received would have been very different.

Republican challengers to Trump tried to use all the first term apostasies against him in the 2024 campaign. None of it worked. If there was anything Trump was to them, it wasn’t a sellout. Highly symbolic moves to threaten shooting rioters during the 2020 protests overshadowed his signing of a criminal justice reform bill. Speed-running an end to pandemic lockdowns was more important to the base than wonky debates about over-spending. Trump’s sense of what was actually important to his voters allowed him to dodge revolts that would have left any other Republican bloodied on the side of the road.

So far, Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 without the compromises and accommodations. There was no longer a need to tend to the concerns of the pre-Trump Republicans in Congress. They figured out that it was a president’s prerogative to just ban things like DEI in the federal bureaucracy that were allowed the first time around. In this, he owes much to his vanquished primary challenger Ron DeSantis, who pioneered the model for relentless executive action to root out any trace of taxpayer funding at cross purposes with the popular mandate at the last election. Standing up against the cultural Left used to be seen as the job of the Entertainment Wing, not of serious policymaking. Now, with shocking speed, it was being translated into executive orders and law.

For all the ways it didn’t seem like it, Trump 1.0 meant a healthier internal dynamic in the GOP, a truce in the long war that threatened to destroy the party from within. Fealty to Trump actually protected longtime incumbents from the threat of primary challenges, meaning less need to cater to an unpopular and extreme ideological fringe. Trump’s sharp rhetoric should confuse no one that he is a doctrinaire conservative: after the turbulence of the Dobbs decision, he de-emphasized unpopular right-wing cultural positions like opposition to abortion and distanced himself from old-age entitlement cuts and green-eyeshades economics.

Trump 2.0 now has a different risk-reward calculus. It was more intentional about what it wanted to do on Day One and is bringing spending cuts back into vogue and engineering a reverse march through the institutions. During the first term, the results may not have matched the rhetoric, but with the sunny upshot being that the rhetoric was usually enough to keep querulous Republicans in line. That left room for policy moderation that belied Trump’s combative image.

In the second term, the reality will more often match the rhetoric. Voters often give a president credit for doing what he said he would do, even if they don’t agree with art all. In the end, that should help Trump sidestep the specter of “chaos” that haunted his first term, presuming he can find some way to manage Elon Musk. But the question will remain of whether the policy fruits of Trump’s Pax Republicana are ones that the voters will like.