The conventional explanation for President Donald Trump’s command of the Republican Party is fear.
Certainly, Trump has a strong enough connection to Republican primary voters to make dissent politically costly. This year, Trump-backed challengers defeated Sens. Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn and Rep. Thomas Massie, while Sen. Thom Tillis chose not to seek re-election.
That explanation is invoked whenever Trump appears to violate what once passed for Republican orthodoxy: imposing tariffs, taking government stakes in private companies, using federal power against perceived cultural enemies and adding trillions to the debt.
Surely, the thinking goes, Republican officials secretly hate this agenda but are too cowed to stand up to him.
But there’s a much simpler explanation: They agree with him.
Trump is not forcing a resistant party to accept a new politics. Instead he is giving a blunter, more explicit voice to priorities that Republican voters and officeholders have rewarded for years. His political talent has been less about inventing those priorities than recognizing that the old language of free markets, small government and fiscal restraint no longer constrains the party when it conflicts with the exercise of power.
The intimidation theory rests on the premise that Trump betrayed a principled conservatism grounded in free enterprise, small government, fiscal restraint and personal morality, forcing lawmakers to abandon their beliefs at gunpoint.
The history of the American right proves the opposite. Trump and today’s GOP majorities are not a betrayal of that tradition. They are its culmination. Those familiar declarations were never governing principles; they were public-facing doctrines, invoked to slash social programs, then to be discarded whenever power proved useful.
For more than a century, the American right has defended private enterprise, but not free enterprise. From Harding and Hoover to Reagan and Bush, conservative presidents leaned on protectionist tariffs, carved out regulatory favors and showered corporate welfare on industry allies. Republicans in Congress often supplied the necessary support.
Today’s Republicans have expanded that playbook.
They cut corporate taxes, then stood by as the White House built tariff walls, seized an equity stake in Intel, secured a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, claimed a cut of semiconductor sales to China and handed foreign oil concessions and tariff waivers to preferred players. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., decried the Intel stake as “a step toward socialism,” but congressional Republicans didn’t mount any kind of sustained challenge.
Conservatives never actually dismantled the state.
Limited government met the same fate. Conservatives who routinely criticized liberal proposals as “big government” never actually dismantled the state. They just built their own Leviathan to wage war on immigrants, police private medical decisions and fund an unchecked national security apparatus. The very party that spent decades demonizing a weaponized IRS stood by as the Trump administration proposed regulations that could deny tax-exempt status to private educational institutions that use race in admissions, scholarships or other programs.
The movement’s moral posturing is equally cynical. Conservatives impeached Bill Clinton over marital infidelity, then shrugged off Newt Gingrich’s affairs, Dennis Hastert’s serial abuse of teenage wrestlers and, finally, Trump’s serial divorces, hush-money payments to a pporn star and a civil court verdict that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll.
Where Republicans have broken ranks, they have only underscored the point. The House voted twice to restrain the president’s war powers in Iran. The Senate defied him directly, passing a war powers resolution 50-48 when Paul and Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Bill Cassidy crossed the aisle. Senators forced the administration to kill a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund meant to reward his allies. And they joined Democrats to vote for the release of the Epstein files.
Those episodes showed that congressional Republicans can defy the White House when they decide the issue is important enough. The question is why they have done this so rarely across Trump’s domestic agenda.
In a more ideologically varied Republican Party, you would expect more small moments of defiance, as lawmakers who were safely insulated, sufficiently outraged or simply trying to stop a direct harm to their constituents stood up. Instead, party discipline has held with striking consistency across Trump’s domestic agenda, breaking only intermittently. That’s the signature of consensus.
Trump will be out of office soon. The corollary to the fear theory is that Republicans will snap back to their old ways. But the reality is that Trumpism is here to stay — not because of Trump’s unique political talents, but because it was conservative ideology all along.
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