Defeat end Trumpism?

Would another Trump defeat end Trumpism?

A second Trump loss would change the GOP, but probably not in the ways conservative purists hope.

by Eric Levitz

Most conservatives are as interested in voting for Kamala Harris as they are in eating a bowl of tofu marinated in motor oil.

After all, the Democratic nominee has vowed to legalize abortion nationwide, ban assault weapons, regulate prices, and increase federal spending. As Donald Trump — in his own wildly exaggerated fashion — would put it, she wants “this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner.”

And yet, some on the right are quietly rooting for Trump’s defeat. To this contingent, preventing Trump and JD Vance from remaking conservatism in their image takes precedence over keeping Harris out of the White House.

Their reasoning is simple: Trump has revised GOP orthodoxy, to the detriment of core conservative interest groups. His contempt for NATO and affinity for Vladimir Putin have incensed national security hawks. His enthusiasm for tariffs has dismayed economic libertarians. His gestures of moderation on abortion have dispirited the religious right. And his affection for mobs that threaten to kill Mike Pence has alienated Mike Pence.

All this might not amount to a case for Harris were it not for Trump’s running mate. With the notable exception of abortion rights, JD Vance is even more ideologically hostile to traditional conservatism than the GOP nominee is. The Ohio senator has advocated for (some) labor unions, expansions in social welfare benefits, industrial policy, steep tariffs, stricter antitrust enforcement, and choking off aid to Ukraine. A Trump victory would make Vance the GOP’s heir apparent, thereby rendering traditional conservatives politically homeless for a decade or more.

A Harris presidency, by contrast, might be a fleeting irritation. Even if the Democratic nominee wins, Republicans are likely to take the Senate. In that scenario, conservatives could block all of her judicial nominees and partisan legislation, build large congressional majorities in the 2026 midterms, and claw back the presidency two years later.

Summarizing the perspective of unnamed anti-Trump conservatives in his orbit, the right-wing commentator Erick Erickson posted on X, “We can hold off Harris for two years and get more reinforcements then fight in 2028 for the White House. If Trump gets in, we set back the pro-life cause and free markets by a generation at least.” Various anonymous Republicans have expressed similar sentiments to Politico.

Such conservatives, though, are at once too optimistic about their ideology’s outlook should Trump lose and too pessimistic about its prospects should he win.

On the first count, right-wing purists rooting for Trump’s defeat overrate the contingency of his heresies. Many of Trump’s deviations from conservative orthodoxy derive not from personal whims but rather from political realities that any future GOP nominee would also confront.

On the second count, Trump’s hostility to traditional conservative policy goals is often exaggerated. For better or worse, the differences between Trumpism and traditional conservatism are largely ones of degree rather than kind.

A Trump defeat could change the ideological trajectory of American conservatism, but any shift would happen at the margins of Republican thinking. The GOP is all but certain to remain a party of, by, and for reactionary business interests and social conservatives.

Many of Trump’s deviations from conservative orthodoxy are politically motivated

Much of what conservative purists disdain about Trump’s ideological positioning has less to do with his personal impulses than the electorate’s preferences. For this reason, it’s plausible that some distinctive aspects of Trumpism will outlive his political career.

This dynamic is clearest on the issues of reproductive rights and entitlement spending. Trump has insisted that questions of abortion policy should be left to the states, while in-vitro fertilization (IVF) should be accessible and publicly subsidized nationwide. The religious right opposes both these stances, as it considers fertilized eggs to be persons entitled to full constitutional rights, and IVF sometimes involves discarding such eggs.

Trump is therefore less aligned with the anti-abortion movement than any Republican nominee in recent memory. In theory, his willingness to defy the Christian right might stem from his personal irreligiosity and less-than-traditional sexual morality. But then, Trump has run for president twice before and in neither instance did he put so much distance between himself and abortion prohibitionists.

The more likely explanation for Trump’s current posture is that the right’s position on abortion has become much more politically toxic since he last ran for president. The overturning of Roe v. Wade dramatically increased the salience of abortion policy while triggering a leftward lurch in public opinion on the issue. Following the Supreme Court’s decision, both Gallup and Pew polling found support for abortion rights jumping to its highest point on record. Meanwhile, voters in red states like Kansas and Ohio have backed referendums ensuring abortion’s legality. Many political operatives have argued that the GOP’s vulnerability on reproductive rights drove its mediocre showing in the 2022 midterms.

In this context, any Republican nominee would recognize a tension between honoring the Christian right’s demands and maximizing their own odds of victory.

It is possible that future GOP nominees may champion federal abortion bans anyway. Some Republican politicians are true believers in fetal personhood and others may see indulging the religious right as indispensable to their primary campaigns. Liam Donovan, a former Republican consultant, told Vox that he believes future GOP candidates would have a harder time defying anti-abortion activists, as Trump’s cult of personality renders him uniquely capable of defying core Republican interest groups. “He singularly has the ability to basically tell the base to pound sand and do whatever he wants,” Donovan said. “Yeah, there might be a marginal penalty, but he has the standing to do that in a way no one else does.”

Nevertheless, it is far from certain that Republican triangulation on abortion would end with Trump’s defeat. The incentives for moderation on the issue are only liable to grow stronger, as the less-religious millennial and zoomer generations continue displacing their more socially conservative forebears.

Trump’s position on entitlement spending is also dictated by political expediency. An overwhelming majority of Americans oppose reducing Medicare or Social Security benefits. Trump is scarcely the first Republican nominee to bend to the popular will on this subject. In 2012, Mitt Romney (misleadingly) criticized Barack Obama for cutting Medicare.

Forthrightly championing entitlement cuts isn’t going to get politically easier. As the nation ages, those with a direct stake in sustaining Medicare and Social Security benefits will increase. In the past, Republicans have sought to mitigate blowback to entitlement cuts by maintaining existing benefit levels for current recipients. Yet the modern Republican coalition is disproportionately composed of Americans between the ages of 45 and 64 – a group that tends to be highly conscious of entitlement policy and would stand to lose out from any Medicare or Social Security cut that began with the next generation of seniors. Trump losing in November would do nothing to eliminate these political realities. It is therefore unlikely that the GOP’s next nominee would be an unabashed proponent of entitlement reform.

Trump’s old-school conservative skeptics have raised few complaints with his militantly nativist positions on immigration. That aspect of Trumpism, though, is likely to endure due to popular demand. Republican primary voters were mobilizing for a more restrictionist party long before Trump launched his first campaign. They are all but certain to reject any future Republican candidate who attempts to revive comprehensive immigration reform.

It’s unclear whether the GOP’s protectionism, hostility to NATO, and authoritarianism will end with Trump’s political career

Other aspects of Trumpism owe less to political expediency than personal instinct. For this reason, a second Trump loss would give conservative purists a fighting chance to restore their movement’s orthodoxy on certain fronts. Even in such areas, their victory would be far from assured.

Trump did not become a nationalist skeptic of free trade merely because he wanted to win an election and saw protectionism as politically expedient in 2016. Rather, he has argued since the late 1980s that America’s trade partners were taking advantage of the United States. Likewise, Trump did not embrace a 10 percent tariff on all foreign imports this year because doing so was necessary to win the Republican primary or general election. The GOP nominee could have appealed to protectionist sentiment in the Midwest through myriad less-extreme policies. The extremity of his avowed hostility to trade is more ideological than pragmatic.

For this reason, a Trump loss in 2024 could clear the way for a less protectionist Republican Party. In any scenario, the GOP is liable to remain more trade-skeptical than it was under Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. So long as Rust Belt states crown the Electoral College’s winner — and Democrats continue their Biden-era turn toward economic nationalism — Republicans will find it difficult to fully repudiate Trumpian sentiments on trade.

The prospects for a full reset on foreign policy are more favorable. The American public remains too intolerant of US casualties to countenance a return to the imperial misadventures of the Bush era (at least, barring another foreign attack on US soil). But no mass constituency has ever demanded Trump’s idiosyncratic skepticism of NATO or sympathy for various authoritarian strongmen. “Find me a voter that is voting specifically on Trump’s foreign policy,” Patrick Ruffini, a pollster with the Republican firm Echelon Insights, told Vox. “The fact is that voters like Trump’s style, his demeanor, his aggression toward what they perceived as encroaching liberal elites,” as opposed to his perspective on US-Russia relations, Ruffini argues

Thus, were voters to repudiate a Trump-Vance ticket, Republicans could plausibly return to conventionally conservative positioning on foreign affairs. This is not guaranteed. If GOP primary voters aren’t passionately opposed to aiding Ukraine, they also aren’t passionately supportive of Ukrainian democracy, either. After a second Trump loss, the Republican nominee in 2028 would likely have leeway to chart their own course on foreign affairs, though of course, that nominee might well be Donald Trump. (Officially, Trump has no intention of running in 2028 should he lose in 2024, but the Republican nominee is not exactly a man of his word.)

Perhaps Trumpism’s most alarming innovation is the extremity of its contempt for liberal democratic norms. The GOP standard-bearer has cultivated distrust in the democratic process, attempted to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power by fomenting an insurrection, declared that the Justice Department’s first loyalty should be to the president, encouraged his supporters to beat up protesters, and committed myriad other affronts to (small-l) liberal values.

Republican primary voters in some areas eventually came to demand complicity in Trump’s election denialism. Trump, though, did not dispute the legitimacy of the 2020 election because Republican voters agitated for such authoritarian conspiracy theorizing; rather, Republican voters agitated for authoritarian conspiracy theorizing because Trump denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Some partisans have always responded to electoral defeat by grumbling about alleged cheating by the other side, but it took presidential leadership to put such paranoia at the very heart of Republican politics.

Meanwhile, Trump has further fueled right-wing contempt for democratic institutions by amplifying the “great replacement” conspiracy theory: the idea that Democrats are in the process of permanently disenfranchising “real” Americans by creating an artificial majority through unfettered immigration.

Promoting the idea that Republicans’ votes might not count — as the election could be stolen — is not a political imperative for the GOP. If anything, it is counterproductive to the project of winning elections. Thus, should Trump lose in November and retire from politics thereafter, Republicans may nominate someone with an iota of civic responsibility.

It is worth noting that Trump’s authoritarianism is not a chief concern for the conservative purists who are secretly rooting for his defeat. There is a small but substantial cohort of Republicans who’ve publicly endorsed Harris, on small-d democratic grounds. Among conservative purists who remain actively involved in Republican politics — and are thus only willing to root for Harris in secret — Trump’s appetite for autocracy is not especially disconcerting; neither Erickson nor Politico mentioned Trump’s authoritarianism as a source of concern for this contingent.

That reality, combined with the pre-Trump Republican Party’s forays into blocking vote counting and targeted disenfranchisement — and the fact that much of the conservative media is now invested in election denialist narratives — should temper optimism about its post-Trump posture toward the republic’s bedrock norms.

Trumpism is largely American conservatism with an inhuman face

There is no question that Trump’s ideological positioning is distinct from that of previous GOP standard-bearers. He is more demagogically anti-immigrant, protectionist, putatively moderate on abortion, supportive of entitlement spending, anti-democratic, and hostile toward America’s European allies.

Yet even on many of these fronts, the practical distinctions between Trumpism and conventional conservatism are often exaggerated.

During his first term in office, Trump did impose a variety of tariffs on America’s geopolitical allies and adversaries alike. He also made marginal changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), renamed it, and then gave largely open trade with Canada and Mexico his stamp of approval.

In a second term, Trump would surely pursue more restrictive trade policies than free-market economists would recommend. Whether he’d actually follow through on imposing a de facto 10 percent sales tax on all imported goods, however, is far from clear. After all, Trump failed to act on a great many of his more radical campaign pledges during his first stint in the White House.

On reproductive rights, meanwhile, there is little doubt that Trump will continue to appoint anti-abortion judges, perhaps even forging a Supreme Court majority that deems the procedure unconstitutional. During his debate with Harris, Trump pointedly refused to say that he would veto a national abortion ban were one to reach his desk.

As Trump’s noncommittal remarks on that subject indicate, the real obstacle to national abortion restrictions is not Trumpism so much as Congress. To get a ban ready for a Republican president’s signature, the GOP would need to find either 60 votes in the Senate or 51 votes for abolishing the legislative filibuster and restricting abortion nationwide. The party is unlikely to find either in the near term. As Ohio’s and Kansas’s recent abortion referendums made clear, the religious right’s views are unpopular even in solidly red states. Plenty of Republican senators would prefer to dodge a vote on an issue that cleaves their base from the median voter; the filibuster gives them cover to avoid such a vote. Abortion prohibitionists who believe Trump is the one thing standing between them and total victory have fallen prey to wishful thinking.

Likewise, the obstacle to entitlement cuts is that idea’s political toxicity, not Donald Trump’s unshakeable commitment to seniors’ welfare. What Republicans need to cut Medicare and Social Security is not a more conventionally conservative standard-bearer but a forcing mechanism. Trump’s fiscal priorities would help provide them with precisely this. The Republican nominee is committed to slashing federal revenue across the board and has repeatedly flirted with payroll tax cuts that would gut funding for Social Security and Medicare. These measures would expedite the programs’ insolvency.

If Republicans control Congress when the conflict between avoiding all tax increases and sustaining entitlement benefits becomes irreconcilable, they will be liable to cut the latter, no matter how “Trumpist” the party remains.

Finally, during his first term, Trump’s rhetoric about foreign affairs was decidedly more heterodox than his policies. This gap was especially pronounced on matters concerning Russia. For all Trump’s expressions of affection for Putin, during his tenure, the United States assented to NATO enlargement, armed the Ukrainian military, and bombed Syria, a Russian client state. His administration still made some deferential gestures toward Moscow, and it’s plausible that a second Trump administration would chart a more unconventional course on foreign affairs. But whether Trumpism constitutes a drastic break from traditional conservative foreign policy in practice (rather than rhetoric) remains unclear.

It is true that JD Vance’s policy positions diverge from conservative orthodoxy much more significantly than Trump’s. Were Vance to inherit leadership of the party following a second Trump administration, that could plausibly change the Republican Party’s economic and foreign policy positioning, at least marginally. And yet, given how radically (and, arguably, opportunistically) Vance has revised his views since 2017, it’s far from clear that he would stick by more heretical populist ideas if they became an impediment to his political ambitions.

Ultimately, American conservatism’s precise trajectory in the event of a Trump defeat or victory cannot be known. In any event, its core commitments are likely to remain the same. It is, and (almost certainly) will be, an ideology dedicated to maximizing the after-tax income of the wealthy, restricting immigration, and advancing as much social conservatism as an increasingly secular electorate will allow (in part, by outsourcing social policy to a democratically unaccountable judiciary). Whatever else Trumpism does and does not entail, these objectives give doctrinaire conservatives cause for supporting the Republican nominee — and everyone else reason to hope for his defeat.