Likewise, he’s made the old institutions of movement conservatism, think tanks and magazines, even Fox News, seem superannuated or irrelevant while presiding over a transition to the new forms forged in imitation of his success — the world where podcasters and influencers and online celebrities set the terms of conservative debate, where political allegiances are inseparable from personal feuds and grievances.
But if all this means that Trump is now much more significant and transformative than a disjunctive figure like Carter, he still doesn’t quite match Skowronek’s description of “reconstructive” presidents, figures like Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt who gave a new political era its full shape. For one thing, Trump is not especially popular, and his party doesn’t seem well positioned to achieve the decade-plus of dominance that we associate with the Reagan and New Deal coalitions. A broad right-of-center coalition was visible immediately after Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris, but it’s been receding for the past year as the administration has alienated non-MAGA voters.
For another, the new nationalist era is still defined primarily negatively, in terms of things that probably won’t return to Republican politics any time soon: the nation-building efforts of George W. Bush, the immigration amnesty of the Reagan era, the sweeping changes to entitlements pushed by Paul Ryan, the buttoned-up moralism of Pence. In terms of a positive agenda, there are a lot of very different ways that the Republican Party of 2028 or 2032 could be nationalist, and many of the fiercest battles inside the Trump coalition — especially the great influencer war that broke out after Charlie Kirk’s assassination — reflect fundamental divisions over what, exactly, a nationalist right should want.
Consider a few examples. First, in foreign policy, a nationalist right could be isolationist or realist or imperialist. It could play global great-power politics with the cold-eyed gaze of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, aim for a “come home, America” agenda in the style of Pat Buchanan and maybe now Marjorie Taylor Greene or try to split the difference with a Donroe Doctrine that dominates Latin America but cedes ground outside the Western Hemisphere.
Trump himself has bounced among these perspectives, lately disappointing the isolationists with his willingness to pursue regime change (albeit on the cheap), while he swings between imperialism and realism depending on whether the last person in the room whispered “Greenland” in his ear or reminded him that Vladimir Putin keeps giving the finger to his overtures.