How Trump’s Republican Takeover Changed The Shape Of Politics

Like many others, I have been reading Regime Change, the engrossing account of the first months of the second Trump presidency. While anybody who follows U.S. politics will be familiar with the general direction of travel, it is still fascinating to see the details and the discussions behind the decisions laid out as if in real time.

Just as intriguing, though, is another book that is unlikely to receive the attention being accorded the best-seller by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. The Trump Realignment by political scientists Spencer and Kirby Goidel deserves to be read for its explanation of how we got here.

The authors briefly remind us that — after a few hints about standing and the odd serious bid — Trump finally triumphed in 2016 after seeing off a crowded field fighting for the Republican nomination. (As the book points out, he was helped by the the sheer number of “acceptable” candidates meaning that the establishment vote was split.) But even then he was the underdog, with the media, academics and the political pundits all predicting that Hillary Clinton would prevail. That Trump overcame a series of gaffes and scandals that would have ended most other political campaigns is in itself an indication that it is not business as usual when he is around and helps to explain why he is back for a second term. As the Goidels point out, Trump did not succeed by advancing a coherent set of principles. Indeed, as they say, he “was not wed to the Republican Party.” Before 2010, he contributed more to Democrats than to Republicans. Instead, he adapted his message to his audience with the result that what he said not only resonated with his supporters but also gave them a deeper connection. “Equally important,” they write, his rhetoric captured the audience’s emotional state — “deeply-seated seething anger and widespread discontent with American political institutions.” As has been seen in the U.K. and elsewhere, political campaigners who draw on such feelings are a tough match for conventional politicians and their reliance on statistics and established theories.

But if Trump’s ability to win the presidency of the United States not once but twice was surprising, it was surely not as remarkable as the way in which he has succeeded not by creating his own party — as has been the case with Nigel Farage in the U.K., for instance — but by completely transforming an established political party and apparently bending it to his will.

Nor does the Trump effect stop there. The Goidels argue that conventional explanations for Trump’s success — that he is “simply a racist, a xenophobe or an authoritarian” — amount to “a gross oversimplification of a persistent political movement that has broadened the Republican Party’s electoral appeal.” Moreover, in transforming the Republicans in this way he has also forced a readjustment among the Democrats. “In short, he realigned the American political system by altering the makeup of the Republican and Democratic parties and shifting the issue cleavages that divided the parties,” they write while stressing that Trump did not create the divisions. But he recognized them and exploited them and in doing so rebuilt the Republican Party so that its supporters looked very different from how they had just a few years before. Similarly, the Democratic Party is much more likely to be made up of college-educated, metropolitan “elites” with progressive views on social matters than it used to be. Again, echoes of this change in the political landscape can be see elsewhere, with the U.K.’s Labour Party, for example, despite its roots in the working class, now increasingly supported by well-educated urban professionals and being forced to take a harder line on immigration in order to try to see off the threat from Reform in its former strongholds.

While people are right to be concerned by some of the wilder excesses emanating from the White House as detailed in Regime Change, the real issue is where the U.S. and, to a certain extent, the rest of the world goes from here. As any business leader will tell you, it is all very well being popular and telling people what they want to hear. But that does not tend to be successful over a significant period. Indeed, Trump’s approval ratings are already falling as Americans count the cost of higher gas prices and other costs in addition to changing perceptions of their country. Leadership of any kind requires making tough decisions that may not be welcomed by everybody in the short term. It also requires at least some people to stand up for the principles upon which a country is supposedly based.

While Trump himself believes that he won the 2020 election as well, it is not disputed that he won fair and square in 2016 and in 2024 and so did not achieve power through some sort of unconstitutional coup. As the Goidels write, his “abuse of norms and institutions has largely been enabled by the fervent consent of the governed (or at least a large chunk of them).” It is the job of political institutions to counter the passions that can lead to insurgency and so far they have proven to be “more fragile than our democratic impulses.”

Given what has happened in the U.S and elsewhere in recent years, it would be foolish to make any predictions for the future. But the challenge for those aspiring to lead in countries like the U.S and the U.K. is to ensure that institutions are seen to be acting in the best interests of the public as a whole and to — in the words of the Goidels — engage with the forces that have been unleashed rather than just deplore them.