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.
—Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent
