Endings and Beginnings

Is the second Trump administration a passing storm we just need to ride out? Or might it be the first chapter in a new story whose meaning we can't yet grasp?

President Donald Trump speaks during the swearing in ceremony for Attorney General Pam Bondi in the Oval Office at the White House on February 05, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Even after all this time—more than nine years removed from the launch of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign—we’re still struggling to make sense of him. How do we assimilate Trump into the history of American conservatism, the Republican Party, and the American political tradition as a whole?

A recent Peggy Noonan column in the Wall Street Journal contained a couple of suggestions I want to highlight and develop here—because they’ve helped me to begin thinking outside the comforting boxes in which I’ve found myself withdrawing from time to time since 2016. I hope my readers will appreciate these insights, even if they provoke some discomfort. It’s precisely from such experiences of intellectual distress that fresh thinking can emerge. And boy could we use some fresh thinking about Trump.

The Dawning of a New Dispensation

There is a buried assumption in nearly all negative center-left and center-right commentary on Trump and his MAGA movement. That assumption goes like this: This isn’t who we are. America is a noble, exalted idea. It’s deeply moral. Our enormous economic and military power is deserved. We don’t just love the country because it’s ours. We love it because it’s worthy of love for being the world’s greatest champion of human rights and dignity, democracy, and self-government. Trump traduces and poisons all of this, like an invading virus wreaking havoc on an immunocompromised host. We must fight to expel this invader so the host can recover and return to its own true self. We’re better than this—we used to show it regularly with our words and deeds, and we will show it again in the future once an exorcism has been performed.

Another way of putting the point: A lot of negative commentary on Trump that originates from the liberal center assumes the truth of Ronald Reagan’s highly mythologized construal of the country and its history. How interesting, then, that one of Reagan’s most accomplished speechwriters would be one of the few Trump-critical pundits to attain some distance from the myth.

In her column dated February 1, Peggy Noonan writes about “The Collapse of the Old Order,” as she describes it in her title. Noonan doesn’t dispute the truth of the old Reaganite pieties to which she helped to give voice during the 1980s. But she does recognize that there is something a little off at this point about assuming we aren’t what Trump’s second ascension to the presidency clearly shows that we are. On the contrary, from speaking (anonymously) to Republicans in Washington, Noonan gets the strong feeling that we’ve living through an “inflection point.” She senses

That the second rise of Donald Trump is a total break with the past—that stable order, healthy expectations, the honoring of a certain old moderation, and strict adherence to form and the law aren’t being “traduced”; they are ending. That something new has begun. People aren’t sure they’re right about this and no one has a name for the big break, but they know we have entered something different—something more emotional, more tribal and visceral.

There is the strong man, and the cult of personality, and the leg-breakers back home who keep the congressional troops in line. In 2017, a lot of people who watch closely and think deeply, thought: We’re having an odd moment, but we’ll snap back into place. Now they are thinking something new has begun. American politics was a broad avenue with opposing lanes for a very long time, at least a century, and now we have turned and are on a different avenue, on a different slope, with different shadows.

Now, before my paying subscribers stop reading and skip ahead to the “Comment” button so they can leave me an angry reply to this suggestion, I want to make something clear: I understand why you may want to reject this line of reasoning. You will probably say it sounds like capitulation, like accepting Trump’s lawless power grabs as the “new normal” that we just have to accept and even, perhaps, approve of.

But that isn’t the point at all.