Throughout the entire Republican National Convention, I struggled with one big question: What is the Republican Party for?
That it was for former President Donald Trump went almost without saying. Look at the way that solidarity ear bandages became the RNC’s must-have fashion accessory, or how long the audience managed to put up big cheers during his historically long and rambling acceptance speech on Thursday night.
Beyond Trump worship, the RNC has been billed as proof that the populist takeover of the Republican Party is complete. On issues like trade, immigration, and foreign alliances, this analysis is surely correct; the Trumpian insurgency has gone head-to-head with the party old guard and defeated them.
Yet elements of the old Republican Party remain thoroughly in place.
Unlike Europe’s far-right populist parties, the GOP remains unyieldingly opposed to the welfare state and progressive taxation. It remains committed to banning abortion, an issue where its actions at the state level speak for themselves. It remains deeply hostile to unions; vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance, allegedly the avatar of the party’s pro-worker populism, has a 0 percent score from the AFL-CIO. On foreign policy, it is by no means strictly isolationist: it seeks to ramp up military spending and aggressively confront China even as it tears down both military alliances and the American-led global trade regime.
Ideologically, the GOP is a mess, a political party constructed less out of one cogent worldview than an assemblage of different parts, a zombie given life by the lightning of Donald John Trump. It is Frankenstein’s party. And while Trump and his loyalists are clearly our Shelleyian monster’s head, they do not (yet) have full control over all its limbs.
The Trump coalition is so new that it has yet to produce an equilibrium, a stable set of policy commitments that will endure as long as it aligns. It basically works by Trump getting his way on issues he really cares about — like democracy, trade, and immigration — while others claim what they can when they can claim it. The monied class is still calling the shots on taxes and regulation; the social conservatives are still in the driver’s seat when it comes to issues like abortion and LGBT rights.
You can see this at work in documents like the RNC platform and Project 2025, which together help us understand the GOP’s ambitions going forward.
Some of the most notable policies in them, like Project 2025’s proposal to end the Justice Department’s independence or the platform’s call for “the largest Deportation Program in history,” is pure Trump (right down to the random capitalization).
But in issue areas where other elements of the right prevail, things sound a bit more old Republican. Project 2025’s chapter on the EPA is about as old-school business friendly as it gets; the GOP platform promises to “slash Regulations” and “pursue additional Tax Cuts.” Project 2025 calls on the next president to “rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”
When there’s tension between Trump’s instincts and the old Republican agenda, the result is not always clear.
On trade, Trump has simply won; the issue is central enough to his political identity that his protectionism has become party orthodoxy. But on abortion, where Trump wants the party to moderate, signals are more mixed. He succeeded in, for example, taking a call for a national abortion ban out of the GOP platform — but banning abortion remains central to the party identity. Both Vance and Project 2025 support using an obscure 1873 law to ban the distribution of mifepristone, the abortion pill, by mail.
Partly, this confused state of affairs is a product of Trump’s own personality. The conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru argues, correctly, that he simply doesn’t have the character necessary to run a strict and doctrinal ideological movement.
“It’s not just that he lacks the discipline and focus to carry out an objective, although he does lack both, or that flatterers easily manipulate him, although they do. It’s also that his objectives are malleable to start with,” Ponnuru argues.
But partly, it’s a result of coalitional politics — how the American right has always worked.
Post-World War II American conservatism was a “three-legged stool” formed of three groups: free market libertarians, social conservatives, and foreign policy hawks. These groups often disagreed with each other on matters of both principle and policy. Hence an ideology contradiction: a “small government” conservatism that aimed to build the world’s largest army and police consenting adults in their homes.
There was nothing natural about this alliance, no reflecting of an enduring and transhistorical American tradition. “Movement conservatism,” as it was called, was a movement — one built, like any other political faction, by people molded by a specific time and place (Cold War America) in response to its particular challenges.
Moreover, movement conservatism was not the entirety of the American right. In his recent book Taking America Back, historian David Austin Walsh argues that respectable conservatives actually depended on the radical fringe for their success. Extremist groups like the John Birch Society, which saw a communist plot behind every bush, worked in tandem with the mainstream conservatives to fight the liberals — what Walsh calls a right-wing “popular front.”
The American right was thus an alliance on top of an alliance: the three-legged stool, itself already unwieldy, acting in concert with a fringe right willing to go to dark places where mainstream conservatism dared not tread.
Today, the power relationship has flipped: the far right is now the senior partner setting the tone in Washington, with the fusionists following its lead. But the coalition remains a coalition, and it will act accordingly.
