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President Donald Trump during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 30, 2025. (Ken Cedeno / UPI / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Donald Trump Rules Over A Gop In Disarray
The electoral victories of Donald Trump and remaking of the Republican Party in his image can’t hide a basic fact: his party is fractured and weak.
President Donald Trump during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 30, 2025. (Ken Cedeno / UPI / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
For most of the twentieth century, the Republican Party was the preferred party of the American capitalist class. While the Democrats were never totally bereft of support from American business, retaining the allegiance of various sectors even at their lowest moments, most business owners supported the GOP most of the time. This support, in turn, formed the foundation of Republican administrations from William McKinley to Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush. Though the House of Morgan and the House of Enron, to take two concerns linked particularly closely to the administrations that bookend this period, may both have fallen, the creative destruction of capitalist accumulation did not fundamentally disturb the alliance between business and the Republican Party.
Given the adamance of this alliance over the course of a century, its dissolution since the rise of Donald Trump is all the more striking. Trump ran for president in 2016 assuring voters, “You know the nice part about me? I don’t need anybody’s money. . . . I will tell you this: Nobody’s putting up millions of dollars for me. I’m putting up my own money.” American capitalists were only too happy to oblige him, and they largely closed their wallets to Trump or donated to Hillary Clinton. Just four years earlier, they had happily coalesced around Mitt Romney. In 2020, capital once again shunned Trump as Joe Biden raked in massive hauls from Wall Street. One survey of a hundred CEOs found that seventy-seven planned to vote for Biden. Trump’s third run, in 2024, saw the same dynamic. Among CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, only one — Elon Musk — donated to Trump. There has been, in short, an epochal realignment of business away from the Republican Party, particularly at the top of the ticket.
The novelty of the GOP’s alienation from the American capitalist class has served to reinforce the widespread impression that Trump has dramatically altered the trajectory of the party. This narrative, however, is deeply misleading. The estrangement between capital and the Republican Party did not begin with Trump’s rise. Rather, conflict among an increasingly politically fractured capitalist class came to dominate the party’s internal life in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, radicalizing elements of the party while producing a stalemate between factions that Trump was able to exploit. By the time Trump took over, conflict between the party and key employers’ institutions like the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce was a familiar element of American politics. It may have gone further under Trump than ever before, but it did not begin with him.
Trump’s rise was itself a product of intraparty conflict stemming from the weakening of party institutions and the fracturing of the capitalist class.
Trump is thus best viewed as an accelerant of processes already at work in the GOP before his “hostile takeover” of the party. While there is much that is new, of course, in Trump’s leadership of the party, his reign has been more a continuation of previous dynamics than a break with them in two key respects. First, Trump’s rise was itself a product of intraparty conflict stemming from the weakening of party institutions and the fracturing of the capitalist class. The conflict these forces unleashed in the Republican Party was what enabled Trump to seize control of it. Second, Trump’s leadership of the party since 2016, both in the White House and in opposition, has only exacerbated the main tendencies marking the party before his reign: the increasing scope of intraparty conflict and the weakening of the party institution itself.
The Ancien Régime
The Republican Party was a loyal steward of business interests for almost the entirety of the twentieth century. The relationship was not without its rough patches. In 1964, for example, the nomination of Barry Goldwater, accomplished via skulduggery and outright fraud by the party’s right-wing activists, led much of business to flee the party for the comparatively safer arms of Lyndon Johnson. But the general pattern over this period was clear: most business owners and senior managers preferred the Republican Party, and the Republican Party in turn could be relied upon to faithfully execute the desires of the employer class.
Yet even as this relationship appeared healthy at the dawn of the twenty-first century, institutional changes were underway that would soon undermine it. The two key dynamics were the weakening of political parties and the fracturing of the capitalist class. Both reflected long-standing features of the American political economy; however, in the last decades of the twentieth century, they became more intense, ultimately unleashing levels of conflict and radicalization in the Republican Party that would drive much of business away from it.
While the United States boasted the first mass political parties in the world during the Second Party System, by the early twentieth century, the parties had weakened significantly. Civil service reform deprived the parties of patronage resources, and the introduction of primaries increasingly deprived political parties of control over their ballot line. The party boss, a ubiquitous archetype of US politics at the turn of the century, had by the 1950s become an endangered species. V. O. Key Jr, a leading scholar of American parties in the mid-twentieth century, would write in 1956 of “the old-time politician” who “speaks with tears in his eyes about the destruction of party organization.”
In the second half of the twentieth century, US political parties were weakened even further. The rise of television led to more candidate-centered politics, as politicians’ personal image became more important to elections than the labor supplied by political parties. Television also brought with it a staggering rise in the cost of campaigning. The production function for campaign victories was changing. Where labor had once been the more important input, it now became cash. The new legal foundation for political donations, established by legislation and the Supreme Court over the course of the 1970s, also demoted parties, enshrining candidate committees as the privileged fiscal entity of any campaign.
In Congress, raising money became the sine qua non of political advancement. In the Democratic Party, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Tony Coelho restructured the party’s fundraising in the 1980s to compete in this new environment, creating a new dependency on donations from business. In the Republican Party, Newt Gingrich established an even more brazen pay-to-play regime in the 1990s, in which all House Republicans were required to fundraise for the national committee — and to donate extra if they wanted choice committee assignments.
The result of all this was to enable the rapid development of new centers of power in the party and new challenges to the party leadership. Gingrich, drawing on his own fundraising network to build alliances, challenged the more conciliatory House Republican leadership in the 1980s and took over as Speaker of the House after the party’s 1994 victory, instituting a far more combative GOP politics. Yet no sooner had Gingrich consolidated his position than rivals, such as Texas’s Tom DeLay, built their own fundraising machines and used them to challenge him. The power of money over the party apparatus invited challenges from anyone who could raise enough money.
Money for challengers became plentiful as the American capitalist class fractured politically after the 1970s. Long more disorganized than their counterparts in Europe, whose confrontations with powerful union movements had forged disciplined and encompassing employers’ organizations, American capitalists nevertheless embarked on an impressive campaign of mobilization in the 1970s. Confronted by a new economic crisis, capitalists mobilized to reshape state policy and strike a decisive blow against organized labor. However, in the aftermath of their victory, employers’ hard-won coalition quickly disintegrated. Without a powerful external enemy compelling unity, capitalists reverted to their default status as what Karl Marx called a “band of warring brothers.” The political interventions of American business became less class-wide and more sectional, aimed at advancing the short-term interests of individual firms.
This more fractured capitalist class produced plenty of money for right-wing Republican challengers looking to take the party in a more combative and conservative direction. The main organizations of big business remained largely transactional in their approach to politics, open to compromise with Democrats, unions, and the welfare state if business could get some sort of win out of the negotiations. But as business splintered, more firms became willing to take a chance on far more maximalist politics, reasoning that such stances would produce better policy outcomes than going along to get along. These firms became key funders of the Republican right.
Stress cracks appeared in the party’s facade during the 1990s. Gingrich’s politics of partisan warfare unleashed a dynamic whereby Republicans were constantly attempting to outdo one another with their dedication to slashing the welfare state and exposing the Democrats as corrupt. There was a failed coup against Gingrich by more junior representatives in 1997, and the Republican conference split over globalization around the same time, with a large group of legislators embracing the minority of American firms that were skeptical of free trade. George W. Bush, however, managed to hold things together by combining policies broadly supported across corporate boardrooms with evangelical fervor and imperial belligerence. In the aftermath of his victory in 2004, it looked as if the Republicans were on the verge of a new period of partisan dominance.
Despite the pleas of virtually every major business organization, a majority of Republican representatives instead went with the demands of conservative political groups.
In Bush’s second term, however, things fell apart, and the Republican Party revealed itself to be both more internally divided and less responsive to corporate preferences than it had appeared. Bush’s attempt to push through an employer-friendly version of immigration reform — a key priority of his business backers — failed miserably, igniting massive conflict within the party as xenophobic nationalism surged through the House. Then the financial crisis hit, and Bush’s plan (or, more accurately, Treasury secretary Henry Paulson’s plan) for a financial sector bailout encountered massive resistance from Republican representatives. Despite the pleas of virtually every major business organization, a majority of Republican representatives instead went with the demands of conservative political groups like FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth (themselves funded, of course, by other business owners and managers), who denounced the bailout as socialism. Though the bailout would eventually pass, limping through with Democratic votes, the crisis exposed the growing distance between much of the Republican Party and the mainstream of corporate boardrooms.
Over the next few years, the party’s divisions would only crystallize, and by 2013 it was common for journalists to refer to a Republican “civil war.” During this period, the capitalists who wanted to see a more combative and uncompromising conservatism from the Republican Party organized themselves, rivaling in scale venerable business institutions like the US Chamber of Commerce. The key institution for this new pole of corporate politics was the Koch network. Created by the libertarian brothers Charles and David Koch, the network brought together business owners in seminars where they were schooled in free-market economics, and donated money to the nonprofits and PACs that the Kochs ran.
This network grew rapidly after its establishment in the early 2000s. In 2007 and 2008, Koch seminars raised under $100 million in pledges. By 2011–12, that number was over $400 million, equaling what the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee combined raised. By 2015–16, the Kochs’ fundraising hit nearly $800 billion, triple what the three GOP national committees were raising. By this time, the various Koch organizations funded by this deluge of cash employed more than 1,200 people, 3.5 times more than the three national Republican committees did.
All of this money funded challenges to the GOP leadership. The 2010 midterms saw a huge spike in primary challenges, with the number of funded challengers to incumbents doubling. The influence of this new, more conservative and combative group of Republican legislators quickly made itself felt, most centrally in the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, in which GOP legislators, to the exasperation of their new Speaker of the House, John Boehner, refused to accede to any increase in the federal debt ceiling without deep budget cuts. This intransigence also brought them into conflict with some of the largest business organizations in the country, who saw no point in gambling with a partial default on national debt.
The Koch network, meanwhile, supported the insurgents, pushing them to take a hard line, no matter the consequences. The consequence, it turned out, was a debt ceiling deal that the Democrats had more influence over than the divided GOP, resulting in fewer cuts than even the establishment Republicans had hoped for. As a result, establishment Republicans began organizing against the insurgents, working to support incumbents who had been targeted for primaries.
This civil war in the Republican Party developed concurrently with the growth of a new political ecosystem rooted in changes to campaign finance law. In two 2010 decisions, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and Speechnow.org v. FEC, the Supreme Court allowed for the creation of super PACs — entities that could solicit and spend unlimited money on elections, so long as they did not directly coordinate their spending with the candidate committee or party. The super PACs that both sides in the GOP civil war soon established began to compete with the party and with candidate committees for donations. Ironically, it was an establishment figure, Karl Rove, who first took advantage of the new legal framework to establish a super PAC, American Crossroads. Though the goal of the new group was to provide additional support to the Republican Party, it could not help but compete for donors, diminishing the role of the party itself even further.
By 2015, when the 2016 primary contest got underway, the Republican Party was divided between two factions: a deeply conservative establishment and an ultrareactionary insurgent wing. Factions were nothing new in American party politics, of course. But the ability of the party institution to mediate conflict between these factions had been much diminished since the 1970s. Lavishly funded by the wing of American capital that wanted nothing short of all-out war against the welfare state, the insurgents were more than capable of sustaining themselves in long-term trench warfare against the establishment.
This was the context in which Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015. The factionalism aided him in several respects. The insurgents had encouraged a particularly vituperative style of politics, of which Trump quickly established himself as the undisputed master. A large block of GOP voters had grown accustomed to voting for whomever anathematized liberals most stridently. As one Tea Party politician reflected, “All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching, I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class.”
Additionally, both factions thought Trump’s candidacy would redound to their advantage and thus held off from attacking him. Jeb Bush, the establishment’s anointed candidate, thought Trump would split the insurgent vote with Ted Cruz. Cruz, meanwhile, thought Trump would inflame insurgent passions in the primary electorate that he would ultimately corral. Finally, the battle between the establishment and the insurgents was largely over how dogmatic the party should be in attacking the welfare state. Both sides were blind to the opening this created for a candidate who would run on protecting it instead, which is exactly what Trump did. The factional warfare that consumed the GOP after 2008 was a crucial factor enabling his victory eight years later.
The rise of a new ultraconservative network, centered around the Kochs, stoked conflict in the party, and massive amounts of money from the corporate rich were soon flowing to rival super PACs.
Prior to Trump’s rise, two dynamics dominated the Republican Party. First, there was a stark increase in intraparty conflict. This conflict first surfaced in the 1990s, then exploded during George W. Bush’s second term, defining the party from that moment up to Trump’s election. Second, there was a gradual weakening of party apparatus. Changes in campaign finance in the 1970s led to a new dominance of political money within the parties, which diminished the power that party leaders were able to mobilize by virtue of their institutional position. In the 2010s, Supreme Court decisions expanded the role of money in politics even further by allowing it to take organizational form in competition with the parties themselves. The fracturing of the corporate elite interacted with both these dynamics. The rise of a new ultraconservative network, centered around the Kochs, stoked conflict in the party, and massive amounts of money from the corporate rich were soon flowing to rival super PACs.
Donald Trump’s reign over the Republican Party would not fundamentally alter either of these patterns. In fact, it would only intensify both of them.
The End of Ideology
It is often assumed that Trump’s remarkable dominance over the Republican Party has put an end to the conflict that raged in the party in the early 2010s. Observers point to the unprecedented control he has maintained over the party, even after his defeat in 2020, and the humiliating obeisance virtually everyone in Republican politics is willing to offer him. Indeed, the manifestations of Trump’s supremacy are striking, from his packing of the party apparatus with members of his family (in 2020, seven speakers at the Republican National Convention had the last name Trump) to his dominance in the 2024 primaries.
Yet Trump’s personalist rule over the party has hardly produced unanimity within it. Indeed, it has expanded the scope of conflict for two reasons. First, Trump’s 2016 primary campaign was largely about defining himself as a different kind of Republican. On key questions such as international trade, defense, and social policy, Trump differentiated himself from existing Republican Party dogma. In doing so, he expanded the breadth of disagreement within the party. Previous conflict had been over the magnitude of policy change in a given direction. The insurgents and the Republican establishment differed not over whether there ought to be cuts to entitlement programs but over how deep the cuts needed to be and how intransigent the party should be in seeking them. Trump, however, introduced discord over the very direction of policy change into the party. The party began seeing persistent conflict over questions that had previously unified it.
Second, Trump’s essentially nonideological character combined with his particular style of executive leadership to further encourage friction in the party. In office, Trump displayed a deep aversion to any kind of policy leadership. He preferred people to bring ideas to him, which he would then approve or disapprove, without any coordination with other figures in the administration. His mode of operation bears a striking resemblance to Ian Kershaw’s famous description of “working towards the führer” in the Third Reich, where
in the Darwinist jungle [of the regime], the way to power and advancement was through anticipating the ‘führer will’, and without waiting for directives, taking initiatives to promote what were presumed to be Hitler’s aims and wishes.
Trump prefers not to involve himself in the formulation of policy but rather to approve or disapprove of plans brought to him by subordinates, with little overall coordination. In the Nazi state, such an approach frequently resulted in conflict between different regime factions that immobilized or hamstrung various state institutions. The same was true of the Trump White House. One faction of the administration would push for dropping everything to focus on tax reform, while another would push for dropping everything to focus on immigration policy. Trump’s mode of operation encouraged an atmosphere of persistent intrigue, with various officials always fighting to be the last person in the room with him. Because Trump was so averse to building coordination in his administration, it encouraged conflict among the various policy entrepreneurs in the party, as each fought to get their pet projects endorsed by the president.
Because Trump was so averse to building coordination in his administration, it encouraged conflict among the various policy entrepreneurs in the party.
As a result, after eight years of Trump’s dominance over the party, the ideological divisions within it have only deepened. To be sure, the form the conflict takes has changed. Because the bulk of the party has effectively pledged their loyalty to Trump, the discord is in some ways less intense than it was in the previous period, when the party had no consensus leader. Where once Tea Party representatives would launch intensely personal attacks on leaders like Boehner, now politicians maneuver to attract Trump’s favor. But if the temperature of the strife has been turned down, the span of positions within the party, and hence the potential for future conflict, has grown considerably.
In the realm of economic policy, Trump’s rise has seen an expansion of dissent from free-market economics in the Republican Party greater than any since Richard Nixon’s experiments with price controls. Most centrally, Trump has opened a massive breach within the party on the question of free trade. Trade had been a fault line in the GOP before, particularly in the late 1990s, as mentioned above, when the congressional party rebelled against the leadership’s support for Bill Clinton’s free trade agenda. But the George W. Bush presidency consolidated Republican support for free trade as party orthodoxy. Even as the “China shock” of import competition began to hit Republican districts, GOP representatives responded by embracing anti-China rhetoric rather than turning on free trade itself. While polling found that Tea Party supporters voiced significant skepticism of free trade, politicians linked to the Tea Party, like Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan, were vocal supporters.
Trump’s rise exposed the significant anti-trade constituency within the party, leading other Republicans to shift rapidly toward more protectionist views. Figures like Cruz, who once declared himself “a full-throated advocate of free trade,” moved during his 2016 presidential campaign against Trump to a far more trade-skeptical position, running ads that promised “fair trade.” Other leading GOP figures, like Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn, have retained the traditional free trader position, voicing opposition to Trump’s push for tariffs. More systematic analysis has confirmed the development of significant intraparty division over trade policy.
There is also conflict over domestic economic policy. From the 1980s to 2016, entitlement reform was one of the Republican Party’s holy causes. Means-tested programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) had been the central targets of this crusade, but Medicare and Social Security, which were far larger programs, were also in the crosshairs. In the 2010s, Ryan’s budget proposal, which became the framework for GOP economic policy, promised deep cuts to all of these programs. Trump, however, broke with these politics and campaign in 2016 on protecting both Social Security and Medicare. He blasted Republican opponents for wanting to “cut the hell out of” Social Security. Other Republicans soon followed his lead.
J. D. Vance, for example, when running for the Senate in 2022, told the Cincinnati Enquirer that “when you see people aggressively leaning into, we need to cut Medicare, we need to cut Social Security . . . I don’t think that we should be throwing people out on the streets and saying, well, you’re on your own now.” Other GOP senators have endorsed everything from increases in the minimum wage to more aggressive antitrust policy, both of which would have been anathema in the Republican Party of George W. Bush. While these policy positions may be more rhetorical than actual, insofar as partisan polarization prevents these figures from working with Democrats to enact them, the very fact that Republicans are rhetorically dissenting from the consensus that defined the party for decades is an indication of its increasing cleavages.
On foreign policy as well, Republicans now see considerably more disagreement than they did previously. In the late 1990s, many Republicans opposed Clinton’s operation in Kosovo, though the evidence suggests this was driven more by partisan hatred of him than by any kind of resurgence of isolationism. After all, when Bush launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq just a few years later, congressional Republicans backed him fervently. Even as the war in Iraq revealed itself to be a catastrophe, congressional Republicans stuck with Bush, and in 2008, the party nominated John McCain, a candidate whose most distinguishing feature was his advocacy of staying the course in Iraq. Trump, however, ran a campaign that savaged the decision to invade Iraq (even though he had supported it at the time) and attacked the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as an institution that exploited the United States.
Trump’s position on NATO, and on foreign policy in Europe more generally, has been the place where his policies have introduced the largest fissures in the GOP. While criticizing NATO members for not spending enough on defense had been pro forma for Republican politicians, the party was staunchly “Natopolitan.” Trump took this line of criticism further by suggesting that the United States would not fulfill its Article 5 obligations of mutual defense to countries that it judged delinquent in their military expenditures.
Relatedly, Trump has also indicated his willingness for closer relations with Russia, NATO’s number one enemy. Prior to Trump, the GOP was intensely Russophobic. In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, Republican politicians outdid one another in their calls for more aggressive US intervention against Russia. During Trump’s presidency, the party displayed a kind of schizophrenia on the Russian question. Rhetorically, Trump went out of his way to shower affection on Vladimir Putin. In terms of actual policy, however, he escalated the Obama administration’s hostility toward Russia, imposing new sanctions and expelling Russian diplomats.
Republican policy on Eastern Europe only really shifted during Trump’s impeachment for threatening to withhold military aid from Ukraine. Trump had attempted to coerce the Ukrainian government into helping him in his reelection campaign. The plan was to get Ukraine to aide him in his endeavor to argue that Joe Biden had intervened in Ukrainian politics to the benefit of his son Hunter, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. When Trump’s actions became public as a result of whistleblowing, the party moved quickly to defend him by embracing the theory that he was attempting to combat rampant corruption in Ukraine.
This marked the first development of widespread GOP hostility toward Ukraine, which continued to build over subsequent years. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, much of the Republican Party rejected the Biden administration’s intervention to supply Ukraine with weapons. The party is now deeply divided on the question, and while Trump has browbeaten most Republicans into accepting his anti-NATO stance, traditional Atlanticist militarism still runs deep. Where foreign policy was once seen as an issue where Republicans could exert what political scientists call “issue ownership,” it has now become one of the key divisions in the party.
Finally, the party has splintered as a result of its absorption of what might be called the conspiracist vote. Over the last eight years, there has been a realignment into the Republican Party of the voters who express the least trust in American institutions. There are multiple causes of this realignment, of course, from general class dealignment to Trump’s particular affinity for conspiracy theories. But the impact has been to introduce more chaos and conflict into Republican ideology. To take one example, the GOP was for a long time the preferred party of the pharmaceutical industry. The industry has contributed generously to right-wing think tanks, which have dutifully waged war on policy proposals like Medicare drug price negotiation. Yet Trump has embraced figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr, whose own conspiratorial worldview centers around the malignant effects of the pharmaceutical industry’s products.
Whereas previously the Republican Party’s chief complaint about pharmaceutical regulation was that institutions like the Food and Drug Administration held up innovation with their regulations, now the party contains a significant contingent that believes too many drugs have been approved and that even long-standing products like the polio vaccine should be revoked. Other Republicans, of course, retain the party’s traditional affection for the pharmaceutical lobby. The absorption of low-trust voters — and politicians who respond to them — has expanded the field of issues over which there is conflict in the party.
The divide between the ‘Eastern Establishment’ and the conservatives of the of the Midwest and the Sun Belt defined the party from the New Deal to the 1970s.
The Republican Party has seen divisions in the past, of course. The divide between the “Eastern Establishment” and the conservatives of the of the Midwest and the Sun Belt defined the party from the New Deal to the 1970s. Even under Ronald Reagan, there was considerable conflict between him and congressional conservatives. However, in the post–civil rights party system, this conflict has tended to concern the magnitude of policy change, not its direction. The question was how conservative to be in a given moment — not the meaning of conservatism. Reagan’s famous three-legged stool of social conservatism, free-market economics, and hawkish foreign policy defined the party. Now, however, conservatism’s very meaning is increasingly in question in the Republican Party. Whether conservatism entails free trade or protectionism, a “national conservative” welfare state or entitlement reform, a hawkish position on Russia or a dovish one, is now uncertain. The conflict that raged in the party before Trump’s rise has not been solved. It has metastasized.
Death of the Party
Just as Trump has not ended the conflict within the Republican Party but rather expanded it, so has he also accelerated the party’s organizational diminishment. Before Trump, this took the form of the increasing importance of money in the party and the rise of extra-party vehicles like super PACs. The former process was largely unaltered by Trump’s presidency, while the latter was accelerated, with extra-party institutions acquiring a new centrality in GOP electoral strategy. To this, Trump added his particular brand of personalist rule, which has also worked to hollow out the party as an autonomous institutional force. All of this has rendered the party less able to solve the conflicting ideological pressures described above and left it totally dependent on Trump’s status as a kind of totem substituting for organizational resources.
Trump’s personalist rule over the GOP is without precedent in American political history. Richard Nixon attempted something comparable with his various maneuvers but succeeded only in permanently disgracing his name. The political scientist Daniel Galvin has developed a typology of modern presidents, dividing them into party builders and party predators. Trump is a party predator without equal, subordinating all aspects of the party to his personal success. Examples abound. In 2016, Trump attempted for some time to secure the vice presidential nomination for his daughter Ivanka rather than using it to deepen his links with other wings of the Republican Party. In 2020, the party did not even put forward a platform, refusing to define itself as anything except Trump’s party. In 2024, Trump actually began charging other Republican candidates a fee for using his image in their political advertising, requiring that a percentage of any donations received via that ad go to his campaign. For Trump, the party has primarily served as a resource to be plundered or ignored as the situation requires, rather than an institution to be strengthened.
Trump’s self-presentation as a new kind of politician has also worked to build his brand at the expense of the party’s. In 2015 and 2016, Trump ran quite self-consciously against the mainstream of the Republican Party, proclaiming himself a different kind of conservative. His success in this endeavor has led to an extraordinary personal loyalty to Trump as opposed to the party. Shortly after his election, one speaker at CPAC captured the mood of attendees, declaring, “In many ways, Donald Trump is the conservative movement right now. And the conservative movement is Donald Trump.” In 2018, a poll of Republican voters revealed that nearly 60 percent of registered Republicans said they identify more as supporters of Donald Trump than as supporters of the Republican Party. This kind of personalism has made it difficult for Trump to build up the rest of the party, leaving him after the 2024 election with an extraordinarily thin congressional majority constraining his initiatives.
The figures most loyal to Trump are seldom the figures best equipped to lead state organizations.
Trump’s personalism has also undermined the party through his cronyism. In Donald Trump’s Republican Party, personal loyalty is by far the most important quality for advancement (though it has been by no means a guarantee of longevity, as figures from H. R. McMaster to Ronna McDaniel have found out). At the state level in particular, this has meant that utterly unqualified office seekers have risen to top positions through proclaiming their fealty to Trump more fervently than their competitors. In Michigan, for example, Kristina Karamo, whose previous political experience consisted of losing a primary contest for a county commissioner nomination, elevated herself after the 2020 election through relentless promotion of stolen election conspiracy theories. In 2023, she won election to chair of the state party and promptly ran it into the ground through mismanagement, alienating donors, and demoralizing activists. The disorganization Karamo wrought likely cost the GOP Michigan’s Senate seat in the 2024 election. Similar stories played out in other states. The figures most loyal to Trump are seldom the figures best equipped to lead state organizations.
Trump has also weakened the party with his effect on fundraising. To be sure, he has demonstrated some unusual strengths in this area. In 2016, he was far more successful with small donors than any previous GOP candidate. The emergence of small-dollar fundraising in GOP politics, however, has increased centrifugal pressures in the party, as it has tended to empower figures who can dominate media coverage, even if they do little to advance the party as a whole.
Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, has an ability to generate huge amounts of media attention with empty-headed conspiracism, and through this, she has become one of the most successful Republican fundraisers, despite her inability to affect policy. Even worse, she has learned that conflicts within the GOP can be as good for generating attention as conflicts with Democrats, leading her to recklessly attack the Speaker of the House whom she had helped install only a few months earlier.
Finally, Trump has alienated many of the small-dollar donors he mobilized in 2016 with a combination of ceaseless appeals and outright scams. In October 2024, the Associated Press reported that Trump’s small-dollar fundraising was 40 percent lower in 2024 than in 2020. As one donor told the AP, “I am sick of them asking for money. . . . I am disabled, you are sending me text, after text, after text.” On top of this, Trump’s Republican Party has been plagued by scams, harvesting millions in donations from elderly supporters who were unaware they had signed up for monthly donations.
Along with his small-dollar donors, Trump has alienated many of the GOP’s traditional business donors. As discussed above, there has been an epochal realignment of business money away from the Republican Party. This realignment has been far from total, of course. Many of the GOP’s biggest donors over the past decade have stuck by Trump. Moreover, there is considerable evidence that a subset of firms in Silicon Valley and in finance have shifted toward the Republican Party, defying the longer-term movement of those industries. Many of the figures from these sectors turning to Trump are intensely ideological, donating less for quotidian reasons of access for their firms than out of intense conviction about Trump’s mission. As a result, Trump’s support from business is far narrower than a president like George W. Bush’s, but in some respects it is deeper.
This has created a paradoxical situation for the Republican Party. While the party is winning more working-class votes than it has in decades, its funding is coming from an ever-narrower stratum of the population. Though political donations have always been strikingly unequal, with huge amounts coming from a small set of donors, this inequality reached new heights in 2024 in the Republican Party. According to Adam Bonica, over 60 percent of total GOP donations (to both party committees and super PACs) in 2024 came from the top four hundred donors, a share that was double its level in 2020. One study of donations by billionaires in 2024 found that 72 percent of their donations went to Republicans, with Trump’s super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., the top recipient of money from billionaires. For all the hype about Republicans being the party of the working class now, their actual funding has never been more dependent on a small core of hyper-ideological billionaires.
This dependence has imposed constraints on the party’s campaign strategy. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) imposes limits on the donations individuals may make to candidate campaign committees and parties. However, super PACs are free of donation limits. Anyone can donate as much as they like to them. As a result, when it comes to fundraising for the official candidate committee or the official party committees, a billionaire is not worth much more than a measly millionaire, since the total amount they can give is limited. But billionaires can donate truly stunning amounts of money to super PACs. The narrow base of GOP support has thus empowered super PACs at the expense of the party.
In 2024, this resulted in Trump’s campaign spending more through super PACs than its official campaign committee for the first time in history. While about 40 percent of Kamala Harris’s money came via super PACs, for the Trump campaign it was closer to 70 percent. Activities traditionally carried out by party committees, such as get-out-the-vote canvassing, were in 2024 outsourced to super PACs, with the assistance of an FEC ruling weakening the already tenuous prohibitions on coordination between the party and super PACs.
Trump’s campaign carried out little canvassing itself, instead relying on a few super PACs, including Elon Musk’s America PAC. Unsurprisingly, these operations were often quite shady. Musk’s group was exposed for transporting canvassers in the back of U-Hauls and illegally promising to pay people for voting for Trump. In the months prior to the election, many Republican officials raised concerns about Trump’s strategy, noting that the amateurism of the super PACs threatened the campaign’s turnout efforts. Of course, in the end, Trump won. But the contribution of the super PACs to this victory remains unclear and needs further research.
Whatever the performance of Trump’s super PACs in 2024, it is clear that the future of the GOP (and likely the Democratic Party as well) will depend on more of this kind of outsourcing. This weakens political parties even further. From the 1970s to 2010, escalating campaign costs rendered the parties more dependent on money. But the money still needed to flow through the party itself. The Supreme Court’s decisions in Citizens United, Speechnow, and McCutcheon v. FEC relieved donors of that obligation. Their money could now flow through institutions that lacked even the tenuous and indirect popular control voters had been able to exercise over political parties. Trump’s 2024 campaign took this process to a new level, rendering the party itself for the first time a second-rate player in the presidential election.
Trump’s reign over the Republican Party has left the institution weaker than when he took it over.
Trump’s reign over the Republican Party has left the institution weaker than when he took it over. His personalist style of rule has hollowed out the party, while the alignment of donors he has produced has forced the party to excuse itself from the duties of actually running a campaign. Though its victory in 2024 has obscured many of these weaknesses, the party will continue to be shaped by them in the years to come.
Donald Trump’s second term is likely to be at least as chaotic as his first. Many of his appointments, like Kash Patel as FBI director, Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, and Elon Musk as an apparent minister without portfolio, suggest an even more volatile presidency this time around. With such an administration, prediction is an especially hazardous endeavor.
However, the history of the Republican Party under Trump suggests that its fundamental trajectory is likely to be unaltered. A weakened party apparatus is less capable than ever of integrating the various party factions to produce some sort of consensus. If the influx of money into the party after the 1970s produced splintering tendencies, the unshackling of political money in the contemporary environment will probably exacerbate factionalism even more. So far, Trump’s extraordinary ability to command the loyalty of GOP voters has covered up these weaknesses. Now, however, for the first time since 2015, it can be said with certainty that Trump will no longer be the party’s central figure in four years. Après Trump, le déluge.
