The biggest question in politics right now is what the second Trump administration will actually look like. The most honest answer is that nobody knows for sure: Its leader is so chaotic, and his followers so divided against themselves, that predicting anything with full confidence is a fool’s errand.
With that in mind, I still want to engage in a bit of an exercise: to try to lay out what I think is true about the American right today, and then make some tentative predictions about the upcoming Trump administration based on those premises.
The idea isn’t just to make guesses for the sake of guessing. Rather, it’s to generate some testable predictions for my view of Trump and the right — to see whether my ideas are pointing me in the right direction, and to adjust them if they prove wrong. I’ll be doing that retrospection in my newsletter On the Right; if you’re interested and/or want the chance to tell me I’m wrong, please subscribe!
Let’s start with the premises: The things I think are true about the right today.
Talking about “the right” today is mostly talking about the Trump coalition. Obviously, ownership of being “on the right” is contested — with many Never Trumpers claiming to be the true conservatives and calling Trump’s followers apostate sellouts. But at this point, with Trump and his allies in firm control of both the GOP and its aligned external institutions, the right as an actually existing political force is mostly just the Trump coalition. This coalition includes people with varying degrees of ideological fervor, ranging from Stephen Miller-style true believers to more reluctant knee-benders, but it is still a coalition aligned behind a particular leader.
The right’s first uniting principle is anti-liberalism. The various factions of the Trump coalition share a core belief that American liberalism is something worse than merely wrong: that it is an actively malign force in American public life. Liberals, in their eyes, are not mere political opponents but enemies — threats to the essence of America itself. This justifies extreme measures against them.
The right’s second uniting principle is the person of Donald Trump. Trump is not merely the leader of the Republican Party: He is a charismatic figure who wields a uniquely personal type of power, an uncanny ability to get a majority of Republican voters to follow wherever he seems to lead. That’s why no one on the right can get on Trump’s bad side for long and remain in good standing; they’re all following where he leads.
The right’s wholesale turn against democracy is a byproduct of those two principles, and it’ll define much of Trump’s agenda. Trump’s personal obsession with denying his defeat in 2020, and justifying his coup attempt, set the tone for much of Republican politics today — including plans to purge the federal government during the next administration. Some more traditional Republicans may make noises of concern about Trump going too far, but they will ultimately go along with it because they’re either afraid of Trump or hate liberals more than they care about norms. For these reasons, a willingness to subvert democracy has become a rare point of consensus on the modern right.
Beyond these areas of agreement, the right is profoundly divided. There are many different factions inside the Trump coalition — with examples including MAGA ideologues like Miller and Steve Bannon, traditional pre-Trump Republicans like Marco Rubio, “postliberal” authoritarians like JD Vance, and techno-rightists like Elon Musk. These different factions disagree even on core Trump issues like immigration and tariffs, with much wider divergences on issues he cares less about like government spending.
These, at any rate, are my starting points. Preceding from there, I want to make nine specific predictions that (mostly) follow directly.
1) Trump will attempt a purge of the federal civil service. If Trump really is serious about his anti-democratic desires for revenge and personal control over the federal government, this is the obvious place to start. I would expect efforts along these lines — most notably a revival of the Schedule F executive order — to begin relatively swiftly after he takes power.
2) Internal conflict will be a major problem for the Trump administration on most policy issues. Trump’s first administration was largely riven by divides between Trumpists and the “adults in the room.” With the latter largely purged, the divides between the Trumpists themselves will take center stage in a second Trump term. And the baseline condition that created an opportunity for the “adult” faction in 2016 — Trump’s chaotic management style and disinterest in policy details — will create plenty of opportunities for the different factions to work at cross purposes with each other.
3) The fate of the tariffs will be a bellwether for these fights — but I’d expect the pro-tariff side to win. Tariffs are one of Trump’s signature policy ideas, but they’re deeply opposed by the faction of the business community that has aligned with him. There’s already been a Washington Post piece reporting some deputies trying to limit the scope of tariffs behind the scenes, a trial balloon Trump has loudly shut down. Given Trump’s unusual level of personal investment in the policy here, I’d expect him to (mostly) get his way.
4) So too will Trump’s approach to China — and I’d expect hawkishness. There’s a lot of noise about Trump’s alleged dovishness, and there certainly is a more isolationist strain in the MAGA movement. But in the past, the more aggressive impulses in MAGA have won out — impulses that happen to align with the more traditional Republican foreign movement. China policy is a key test here, and I would expect the administration to take a generally confrontational stance.
5) Elon Musk will prove less important than he seems. Musk talks a big game, but his “Department of Government Efficiency” isn’t a real department and wields no formal authority. There’s little evidence that Musk understands how Washington works or even has a coherent and stable set of political ideas aside from pursuing his own financial interests. There’s also a very real chance that his huge ego bumps up against Trump’s, leading to a messy fight that Trump will almost certainly win.
6) But the superrich as a class will prove more important than they seem. All the focus on Musk personally has distracted from the more mundane influence of his class on the GOP: the way in which they set the tone for the policy on a host of issues ranging from environmental regulation to taxation to anti-trust enforcement. The rich will set the terms for Trump 2’s economic policy, with tariffs the exception rather than the rule.
7) The GOP anti-corporate turn is likely to peter out. During the first Trump and Biden administrations, there was a lot of right-wing talk about the dangers of “woke capital” and an attendant Republican turn against corporations. I was always somewhat skeptical that this would persist, and with the business community increasingly bending the knee to Trump, I expect this kind of talk to quietly disappear.
8) But the war on “wokeness” will persist. The culture war is the lowest common denominator expression of the right’s binding anti-liberalism. It is the heart of the GOP’s current appeal to its base, and will remain a central element of its message in perpetuity. Perhaps the term “wokeness” will fall out of use, feeling tired in a new era, but the obsessive focus on race, sexuality, gender, and immigration will remain.
9) So will support for Israel. While it’s true that antisemitic bigots like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes have recently become more prominent in the GOP, support for Israel remains an extremely popular cause among most mainstream Republicans. And far-right movements around the world have developed a model of being pro-Israel while simultaneously threatening Jews at home, a model that Trump himself followed in his first term. If Israel takes even more aggressive steps in the coming years — like resettling Gaza or annexing parts of the West Bank — I’d expect the Trump administration largely to get on board.
