Over the last decade, it’s become commonplace to describe President Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party as hostile – as if the one-time New York real estate mogul was the political version of a corporate raider. That’s a gross mischaracterization.
Trump managed to upend the party because, long before he announced his first bid for president in June 2015, there was a robust faction of conservative populists inside the GOP yearning for a figure just like him. Populists who preferred a street fighter to a statesman; a domestic industrialist to a free trader; a quasi-isolationist to an internationalist. All they needed was a champion who could also appeal to enough Republican voters to win a presidential primary.
Trump’s takeover rebalanced power within the Republican governing coalition. The populists, long the junior partner, rose to take command, and the Ronald Reagan Republicans, for years the controlling bloc, found themselves demoted.
“I feel a bit politically homeless at times,” Republican operative Mike DuHaime told me. DuHaime runs a public relations firm in New Jersey and is a longtime adviser to Chris Christie, the Republican former Garden State governor who challenged Trump for the 2024 nomination. His biggest gripe with the GOP’s new (populist) establishment?
“I never agreed with the party on everything, but there was some tolerance of differences of opinion from leaders in the party. Not so much anymore,” DuHaime said. “I find myself agreeing with Trump on some stuff and disagreeing on others.”