DONALD TRUMP is enjoying a honeymoon. As he wryly observed in December, “[In] the first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.” The president-elect was referring to the ever-growing list of technology CEOs who had made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home. But he could just as easily have had in mind the #Resistance media luminaries now seeking to mend fences, the swing-state Democratic senators backing immigration-enforcement measures they once deemed anathema, or the anxious foreign emissaries hoping that he can be talked out of walloping their economies with tariffs.
Why do so many of the great and good now want to be Mr Trump’s friend? One explanation is that his victory in 2024 was broader and more convincing than the one in 2016. This time, he won the popular vote by drawing in more working Americans of all racial groups, Hispanics in particular. Moreover, urban areas that were once Democratic strongholds gave him significant support.
This broadened coalition, though, represents a change not just to Trump voters, but to Trumpism. To win in 2024, Mr Trump adapted his ideological formula just enough to capture a vitally important segment of the American elite.
Thanks to surging inflation and illegal immigration, and with Mr Trump growing more moderate on key social issues, many socially liberal voters found themselves “mugged by reality”, as the conservative intellectual Irving Kristol once put it. Business leaders, investors, Silicon Valley moguls and academics who once considered Mr Trump beyond the pale began to reconsider his virtues. The result is a new Trumpian synthesis—call it Neo-Trumpism.
This is a stark departure from Mr Trump’s first bid for the Republican nomination. Then, he made restricting immigration the centerpiece of his domestic agenda. He jettisoned the free-trade internationalism of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan in favour of frank protectionism and a more overtly transactional approach to America’s global leadership. Whereas prominent Republicans such as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan had pledged to reform old-age entitlements, Mr Trump promised to leave them untouched. To win over religious conservatives, he promised to advance the pro-life cause.
Call this Paleo-Trumpism, both because 2016 is now ancient history and because this ideological synthesis bore a strong resemblance to the paleoconservatism of Pat Buchanan, the Republican rebel who campaigned on protectionism and isolationism in the 1990s, when neoliberal globalism was ascendant on both right and left.
This first iteration of Trumpism fused together the GOP’s evangelical base with the disaffected, secular working-class voters who swung Mr Trump’s way. His ideas were also almost perfectly designed to alienate the educated upper-middle class, including Country Club Republicans. Perhaps inevitably, Paleo-Trumpism sparked a backlash from the progressive left, which consumed elite institutions and transformed the political landscape in sapphire-blue districts. At the height of the covid-19 crisis, censorious wokeism seemed to become America’s new civil religion, and Democratic presidential contenders raced to the left on policing, immigration, taxes, health care and the environment. Although the comparatively moderate Joe Biden ultimately won the nomination, he made common cause with socialists, Green New Dealers, anti-monopolists and racial-justice activists to form the most left-wing presidential administration in decades.
The progressive overreach of the Biden years created an opening for Mr Trump, but an opening that was markedly different from what came before. He could shift his focus from appealing to the traditional Republican base—with whom his alliance was always uneasy—to affirming the centre’s anger over Mr Biden’s overreach.
Take Mr Trump’s efforts to moderate the Republican stance on abortion, a blow to the pro-life coalition. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, which let states set their own abortion laws, buoyed Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections. As many had predicted, the end of Roe v Wade meant that pro-lifers now found themselves on the defensive, even in the reddest states. Increasingly, pro-life social conservatism has been giving way to a softer cultural conservatism that focuses on, for example, the excesses of gender ideology or the perils of social-media addiction.
Then there was the Biden-era surge in illegal border-crossers and dubious asylum claims, which moved a large majority of Americans in a restrictionist direction. Though you might think this would be a boon for Paleo-Trumpism, what incensed most Americans was lawlessness at the border and the strain on social services from unvetted migrants, not the ethnic character of the newcomers per se. Indeed, much of the backlash against irregular migration came from first- and second-generation Americans living in overburdened urban neighbourhoods.
The spike in inflation that followed the budget-busting American Rescue Plan revealed the limits of fiscal expansion and reminded American voters of the downsides of unlimited welfarism. Swing voters weren’t suddenly clamouring for entitlement reform, but they were more worried about the rising cost of groceries than the need for more transfers.
Finally, Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel served as a vivid reminder of the threat of terrorist barbarism abroad and, closer to home, the extent of anti-Israel, anti-Western sentiment among American leftists and in many immigrant communities.
Paleo-Trumpism has thus had to make room for Neo-Trumpism: a more pragmatic, less ideological tendency that emphasises law and order, pro-growth economic policies, an assertive foreign policy, a more selective approach to immigration and vigorous opposition to the entrenchment of intersectional leftism in schools, workplaces and cultural institutions.
On the campaign trail, these tendencies can coexist. When it comes to governing, however, there will be hard choices ahead, as evidenced by the ferocious row over H-1B visas that recently pitted Elon Musk and his Silicon Valley allies, who embrace skilled immigration, against MAGA social-media influencers, who vehemently disagree.
There will, then, be pressure to abandon Neo-Trumpism, but Mr Trump would be unwise to yield to it. Not only is it what put him back in the White House. By expanding his coalition, and increasing its respectability, Neo-Trumpism gives its namesake an opportunity to forge a lasting ideological legacy. ■
Reihan Salam is president of the Manhattan Institute.