Written by Noah Rothman

As Joe Biden’s presidency drew to an abrupt close, something unanticipated happened in the electorate: Voters were overcome with nostalgia for Donald Trump.

As one indicative New York Times/Siena College survey discovered in April of last year, a plurality of voters came to remember the Trump era as “mostly good” for the country.

More polls from that period found that the voting public longed for the relative prosperity at home and peace abroad over which Trump presided during his first term.

Voters appreciated the sound deregulatory policies Trump coupled with pro-growth initiatives in the federal tax code.

They backed his border enforcement politics: “zero tolerance” for illegal migrants, including those with children.

They shared his disgust for street crime, a disposition that contrasted favorably against the disorder in America’s major metros during the summer of 2020.

In hindsight, the public saw a lot to like in the way Trump imposed “maximum pressure” on Iran.                                                After all, no October 7 massacre occurred on his watch — nor was there a mechanized conventional war on the European continent.

For all the president’s obsequious gestures toward Vladimir Putin, Trump 1.0’s new sanctions on Russia, seizure of its diplomatic property, expulsion of its diplomats, and armed interventions    its proxy forces in places like Syria seemed to have held Moscow in check.

Joe Biden didn’t just lose voters’ trust; Trump earned it.                                                                                                                                    Voters’ Trump-era nostalgia was not irrational, but their expectation that restoring Trump to the White House would reproduce the status quo ante was misplaced.                                                                                                                                                        The policies for which the public pined were largely a result of Trump’s decision to outsource his administration to conventional conservative Republicans.

By 2024, Trump made no secret of his contempt for the architects of the generic conservative policies his administration pursued, and that disdain was mutual.

During his years in the wilderness, Trump’s grievances with his disloyal subordinates led him down a different path. The former president surrounded himself with sycophants who flattered his pretensions and encouraged him to indulge his instincts — instincts honed over decades spent criticizing conservative policy prescriptions and a GOP that was beholden to them.

Trump took many of those figures with him when he returned to the Oval Office, along with a serious axe to grind. In fact, the second Trump administration seems to have set out with the goal of repudiating the first. It is, therefore, not surprising that many of the policies Trump has pursued in his second term have an unmistakable leftwing flavor.

De-Growth Republicanism 

The president entered office in January resolved to implement the onerous tariff schedule his advisors had dissuaded him from pursuing in his first term.                                                                                                                                                                                          

He raised trade barriers gradually at first, then recklessly and with utter disregard for the downward pressure they put on domestic growth and productivity.

Trump’s tariff regime represented an attack on the fundamental conservative notions that economic planning does not work, and that government should not be in the business of “nudging” the public to behave in ways preferred by social engineers in Washington. It makes sense, then, that the tariffs eventually led Trump’s supporters to mouth the de-growth shibboleths that were once exclusive to the progressive left.

“Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” the president told reporters as the markets melted down in early April. That was a logical extension of the president’s February promise that his policies would induce “pain” before they deliver America to the sunlit uplands of autarkic autonomy.

Trump’s subordinates followed suit. “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insisted. Rather, according to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the American dream consists of consignment to menial, labor-intensive factory work. “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America,” he declared.

However virtuous the return of menial labor might be, it must be balanced against how the president’s tariff policies would reduce Americans’ purchasing power, truncating the amount of free time and capital they could devote to their preferred priorities. But if you buy the common leftist fear of the disaggregating and disruptive power of the capitalist enterprise, then maybe that’s a virtue, too.

Amy Chen, the chief sustainability officer at the University of California, Berkeley, cheered the limitations Trump’s tariffs would impose on “emissions, overconsumption, and waste.” Indeed, their effects “won’t be limited to cheap goods,” she wrote. For example, the rising cost of high-end goods would ensure that consumers wouldn’t be able to replace “electronics, appliances, and vehicles.” You will have less and be able to afford less, and you’ll have to find solace in the salutary environmental effects that follow.

Some Democrats with aspirations for higher office did not seem particularly appalled by Trump’s tariff policies. “I understand the motivation behind the tariffs,” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer conceded before praising the “new economic consensus that a lot of Democrats and Republicans now share.”                                                                                                When Trump floated tariffs on film and television products shot abroad, he found surprising allies in California Governor Gavin Newsom and Senator Adam Schiff. “Now it’s time for a real federal partnership to Make America Film Again,” Newsom cheered. Schiff agreed, welcoming efforts to “to bring back run-away production.”

Within a month of Trump’s experiment with tariffs, the politics of avarice had become the last intellectual safe harbor for Republicans.  

“Why should a multi-billion-dollar company pass off costs to consumers?” one unnamed White House official complained to CNN’s reporters. Like Democrats under Biden’s policies, Republicans had been told that producers would absorb the inflationary effects of Trump’s tariffs.

When they didn’t, Republicans promulgated the theory that rapacity alone was responsible for consumers’ woes — a GOP version of the “greedflation” argument retailed by cynics and economic illiterates in the Biden years.

Trump seemed partial to that logic and the retributive policies that flow from it. As the president later confessed, a “tiny tax increase for the rich” might not be such a bad idea.

Political necessity, not philosophy, compelled the American right to endorse confiscatory policies and stultifying trade barriers. In the end, and in the absence of a more convincing rationale, the president’s backers settled on the message that privation and hardship will give way to a more spiritually fulfilling social compact.

“You can lose points in your portfolio,” the podcaster Benny Johnson informed his audience.

“You won’t miss them when you’re dead.” The “working-class masses suffered” for too long, insisted GOP campaign operative Steve Cortes. “We must reorder the American economy to work for the masses of working-class citizens.”

Free Press contributor Batya Ungar-Sargontook the mock Bolshevism to a new level. “Screw you,” she barked in the general direction of “elites” on Wall Street. “I am waging class warfare on behalf of the American working class!”

This is hardly the only realm in which Trump has acclimated the right to the nostrums that were once the exclusive province of the American left.

Revolutionary Reversals

Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama took an approach to American foreign policy that regarded America’s allies as problems to be solved.

Conversely, he saw the enemies of the United States as potential assets that could be unlocked through conciliatory measures and supplication.

For his efforts, Obama earned himself the dubious moniker (courtesy of Nigel Farage) of “the most anti-British American president there has ever been.”

He was pathologically hostiletoward Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government and deeply mistrustful of the Saudis.              He briefly welcomed a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt as though it were preferable to the military government that preceded and succeeded it.                                                                                                                                                                                                     He denounced America’s European and Middle Eastern allies as “free riders” who were “using our military power to settle scores.”

At the same time, Obama engineered a “reset” with Russia — a diplomatic offensive that compelled his administration to compromise American interests.

Obama abandoned George W. Bush-era plans to send radar and interceptor missiles to NATO members on the alliance’s frontier. He withdrew U.S. combat teams and tanks from Europe. He mocked critics of this approach for failing to recognize that “the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” leaving voters with the notion that advocates of a robust U.S. military deterrent were as fanatical and hidebound as enthusiasts for “horses and bayonettes.” Government by zinger won Obama reelection, but it didn’t make us any safer. The folly of that seduction was clear to all but Obama by the time Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.

Likewise, the 44th president leaned on Iran’s untrustworthy Shiite militias to help him fulfill his campaign promise to get U.S. troops out of Iraq. That, in concert with his pursuit of a nuclear deal with Tehran that legitimized Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities, missile program and support for terrorism, would finalize America’s divorce from the region. All this was designed to facilitate America’s “pivot to Asia,” but the pivot never happened. Obama counted on the world to cooperate, but it did not.

Sound familiar? It should. Obama’s vision was for a smaller America — one that could no longer muster the wherewithal to fight a two-front war, preserve free maritime navigation rights, or prevent the return of 20th-century-style spheres of influence. Indeed, Obama declared the era of “great power conflict” to be a thing of the past — and he did so in Russia, of all places.

Donald Trump seems to have a similarly faithless outlook toward the country he leads.

The president is possessed of an ideologically comparable notion that America’s allies are taking advantage of his country.  

He is contemptuous toward the Canadians, the Danes, the Panamanians, and anyone else who maintains sovereignty over the North American territories he openly covets.                                                                                                                                                                

He has made the gratuitous hectoring of America’s allies — from Western Europe to the Pacific Rim — a feature of his presidency. He has encouraged Europe to take a leading role in its security, but absent the conservative conviction that a robust European security force should be an active steward of American interests as defined by the American president. Rather, it seems Trump would be content to see America’s European allies go their own way.

All the while, Trump has bent over backward in an effort to appease Moscow — so far, without result.                                               In addition, he has embarked on an attempt to exhume the Iran nuclear deal from the grave to which he himself consigned it. At a time when Iran is at possibly its weakest point since the 1979 revolution, the president is offering the Islamic Republic a lifeline — one that may preserve its right to enrich uranium (as his all-purpose conflict negotiator, Steve Witkoff, admitted), its ballistic missile program, and the integrity of its terrorist proxies.

This approach is consistent with an outlook that views America as a spent force. As J.D. Vance wrote during the 2024 campaign, the enemy America cannot overcome is “math.” We simply lack the resources to prevent our adversaries from realizing gains at our expense. Better to roll up those obligations on our terms rather than theirs.

“Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war,” Vance wrote in a 2024 New York Times op-ed advocating America’s abandonment of Kyiv’s cause.                                                      But when Congress sought to address the shortfalls that Vance highlighted in legislation in early 2024 that would reinvest in the defense industrial base as well as provide support for America’s embattled allies, Vance objected. “Though few have noticed, buried in the bill’s text is a kill switch for the next Trump presidency,”he wrote. “The legislation explicitly requires funding for Ukraine well into the next presidential term.” Perhaps the vice president prefers the problem.

When the Trump administration wasn’t borrowing Obama’s geopolitical strategy, it was appropriating Biden-era progressives’ attacks on the courts.

In the years leading up to the 2020 election, Democrats talked themselves into the idea that the GOP has surreptitiously “packed” the federal judiciary in a way that required equal and opposite Democratic “court-packing.”                                          

The Democrats’ “judicial reform” crusade served a dual purpose. Even if Democrats failed to expand the judiciary, including the Supreme Court (as Franklin Roosevelt had in 1937), their maximum pressure campaign would undermine public confidence in the courts and denude the power of their judgements.                                                                                                            

Biden himself spent his term in office undermining the Supreme Court’s reputation and attempting to intimidate its members out of ruling against his administration.

When Trump took office, the temptation to contribute to the Democrats’ attacks on the reputation of the courts that opposed his more legally dubious initiatives, including those stocked with conservativejustices, proved irresistible.

“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Vice President Vance declared.                                                  

The MAGA faithful — figures ranging from the conspiracist Laura Loomer to the mogul Elon Musk — advocated political and even criminal penalties for the judges whose reading of the law put them at odds with the White House.                                    Some judges have reported being harassed by the president’s aggrieved fans. That is a frightening prospect given the 400% increase in threats against federal judges in the Biden years, culminating in the thwarted attempt on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s life.

Vance now insists that future Trump administration judicial appointees will have “real courage.” But when asked for models of such courage, he does not cite the first Trump administration’s Supreme Court picks. Those were Federalist Society-approved candidates, all of whom thwarted Trump’s most ambitious usurpations over the years.                                              

Perhaps the character Vance is searching for would embrace the administration’s call to activism  — to re-interpret a “living constitution” that must accommodate the fierce urgency of now.

That’s a troubling development, but the second Trump administration’s embrace of the logic of leftism doesn’t always manifest in threatening ways. Sometimes it’s just manic.

The Paranoid Style

The MAGA movement is distinctive within the right for its general mistrust of authority and expertise.                                        Some of that mistrust is well earned; much of it reflexive and cultural. That wariness manifests in prescriptions for more state control over private affairs — just so long as they’re doing the controlling. Among the recent converts to this outlook is lifelong Democrat and Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

If RFK had his way, Americans would be constrained for their own good. Americans should be made to encounter less artificial food coloring in foods.                                                                                                                                                                                    

There, the secretary is following the example set by the European Union and California, where access to chemical compounds that could be harmful if consumed in unrealistically large doses is curtailed by undemocratic institutions.                      

Americans should be protected from fluoride, too, despite the lack of evidence in support of the notion that fluoridated products pose health risks in either municipal water systems or drug-store supplements.                                                        

Consumers should be spared the benefits associated with the use of pesticides, which ensure a stable and abundant supply of American agricultural products. Also, they should have less sugar — especially if they are poor.

Arming Americans with knowledge is not enough, since some cannot be trusted to make the right choices for themselves — not you and me, of course, but them. Without the mandatory guidance of an enlightened bureaucrat, the public will consume antidepressants by the fistful and subsist on a diet of empty carbs.

Never one for rhetorical prudence, RFK Jr. spent the post-2024 election transition period arguing that Trump should ignore the law that compelled the Chinese-owned social media site TikTok to divorce itself from its communist overlords.                

 “It’s full of spies,” Kennedy said contemptuously. Well, “so’s Facebook, but it’s the CIA instead of Chinese spies,” he continued. “Are you more worried that the Chinese are spying on us and propagandizing us,” Kennedy asked, “or are you more worried that the CIA is spying on us and propagandizing us?”

The answer to that question depends on whether you believe hostile foreign powers are a greater threat to your safety and liberty than your neighbors. For a growing number on the right, the latter is now a decidedly graver menace than the former.

We see manifestations of that irrational suspicion in the MAGA right’s dogmatic description of America’s elections as fixed, an assertion originally pioneered by the American left.                                                                                                                                          

We see it in the presumption that vaccines are unsafe and not properly tested, another evidentiarily deficient claim once championed by the left (and by RFK Jr.). And we see it in the embrace of far-left conspiracy theories, up to and including the belief that the truth of the 9/11 attacks and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers — perhaps the most studied engineering failures in history — was suppressed. “What actually happened on 9/11? What do we know? What is being covered up?” Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson asked in April.

These are expressions of a crisis of confidence in America and its governing institutions. That’s what you should expect from those who believe they are political outsiders, which was once the left’s conception of itself.

Today, that is how the Republican governing coalition perceives its place in the political pecking order, nevermind that they are in total control of the levers of government in Washington. The most prominent and powerful people in the country maintain that they are, in some form, victims — the unwitting targets of omniscient but ill-defined forces secretly pulling the strings.

The Conservative Advantage

The Trump administration is a Republican administration, and this presidency is staffed with enough conservatives who still preside over plenty of initiatives that proponents of limited government should welcome.

Trump 2.0’s energy policies are a desirable departure from Democrats’ hostility toward the exploration, exploitation, and export of American fossil fuels.

His deregulatory initiatives — devolving power from the federal government to the states and stripping the feds of the capacity to dictate minutia like how much water should flow from your shower head per minute — are just common sense.

Elevating merit over identity-based preferences in federal hiring practices, cutting the bureaucracy down to size, withdrawing funding for the United Nations’ most corrupt and compromised assets — for all this and more, the Trump administration deserves praise.

But the right didn’t need a vulgarian disruptor to pursue these initiatives.                                                                                              

 Almost any other Republican would have taken up these causes, too.                                                                                                               And they would have done so without smuggling into the GOP the attitudes and ideological assumptions that were once duly relegated to the GOP’s leftwing opponents.

Prescriptions for limited government might have fallen out of fashion on the right, but conservatives hold no brief for fashion. They’ve seen their philosophy come in and out of vogue, a consequence of their ideological constancy.                          

And when the cycle turns again, the conservative right will be there with the tried-and-true formulas for real American greatness — ready to save this presidency from its dalliance with faddish populism.

 We won’t even demand a thank you for our efforts

.Noah Rothman

Noah Rothman is a senior writer at National Review.                                                                                                                                                He is the author ofThe Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back against Progressives’ War on Fun                                                    and Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America.