By Noah Rothman
Monday, November 17, 2025
Elections are clarifying things. Before Election Day, the
actors on the American national stage might have had some vague sense that the
president’s unrivaled political potency was waning, but they had no concrete
evidence of it. Before November 4, Donald Trump was still a colossus. He
remained the architect of a tectonic political realignment, and he was still
the unchallenged avatar of the only movement in America capable of cobbling
together a majority coalition. After November 4, the president’s stature has
appreciably diminished. Those who seem to appreciate it most are those on the
right who are scratching out for themselves a political identity that will help
them navigate the post-Trump environment.
Those who have been the most entrepreneurial in their
attempts to emphasize their independence from the president were those who most
obsequiously glommed onto the MAGA movement. Representative Marjorie Taylor
Greene is perhaps the most cloying of this cohort. Her strange-new-respect tour of left-wing
media venues, culminating this weekend in an apology for her erstwhile “toxic politics,” is designed to secure for herself a safe
seat when the music stops.
Some within this tribe have refashioned their
MAGA-flavored conspiracism into a weapon to be wielded against Trump. The
so-called “Epstein Files,” which the White House insists do not exist, have
provided lawmakers like Representatives Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace the
opportunity to burnish their independent bona fides.
There is a compelling argument that the fracas
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts ignited with his steadfast support
for Tucker Carlson amid the broadcaster’s descent into monomaniacal antisemitism was only
ever a proxy battle over the evolution of the Republican Party.
Carlson’s personal support for Vice President JD Vance as
the MAGA movement’s successor is reflected in that fight, knowledgeable
observers contend. That version of the party looks different from the one we
have today — a party that is more overtly pro-Israel than any previous American
presidency, and one that went to war against antisemitism on college campuses
at the outset of Trump’s second term. It’s a project that will require
audacious stewardship.
Those who would refute the notion that the scandal
surrounding Heritage’s conduct has nothing to do with the GOP’s trajectory must
contend with the response to it from prominent Republicans like Senator Ted
Cruz.
The Texas senator has not minced words in his vociferous
denunciations of Carlson and his philosophy, casting a pall on the individuals
and institutions that would shield the podcaster and his ilk from deserved
criticism. That is as much a righteous moral posture as it is, according to Axios, an effort to lay “the groundwork for a 2028
presidential bid.” Cruz’s position will invite a conflict with a president who
has pointedly
refused to distance himself from Carlson or his
efforts to sow disunion within the GOP over the influence of the rootless
cosmopolitans in its ranks.
The issue set around which those who seek to influence
the Republican Party’s evolutionary trajectory after Trump will undergo many
shifts in the months and years to come. Although it will take many forms, the
fight to define MAGA Republicanism when Trump cedes political power will only
intensify. So far, though, the Republicans who have shown the most stomach for
that fight aren’t those who have the most bones to pick with Trump or his
political movement.
From the outset of Trump’s long political career, those
Republicans with the most principled and consistent objections to his ascension
were conservatives.
It was the conservatives who objected to Trump’s
big-spending populism — his insistence that America’s unfunded entitlement liabilities could
expand indefinitely, his comfort with America’s unsustainable debt burden, and his desire to
substitute market dynamics with a centrally planned vision of what the
American economy should look like. It was conservatives who chaffed at
Trump’s biblical ignorance, his apathy for the transcendent, and his habit of treating people like instruments to be
used and discarded as needed. It was
conservatives who rightly saw in Trump a tendency that would
manifest in contempt for a constrained, republican executive branch.
Prudential as they are and possessed of the requisite
historical perspective, conservatives are constrained by principle in ways
their detractors on the right are not. They are compelled by honor and good
faith to note the many conservative achievements Trump has secured over the
years he has spent behind the Resolute Desk. They are bound by gratitude in
ways that do not encumber Trump’s more opportunistic detractors. But that
circumspection will leave them late to the fight.
A contest to determine the Republican Party’s future is
on, and Donald Trump has so far been content to allow that fight to play out.
He will intervene soon enough. In the meantime, though, the president is
allowing the terms of that internal debate to be set by the factions that hope
to succeed the MAGA movement. It would be a profound dereliction if
conservatism properly understood was not represented in that fight.
No comments:
Post a Comment