Trumpism Without End
The right’s smartest pundit thinks we’ve reached the end of MAGA. If only it were true
Christopher Caldwell is as good as it gets on the American right. No analyst is smarter, more informed about the world, or as capable of weaving historical, cultural, and economic evidence into fresh accounts of how and why we’ve ended up in our deranged, and deranging, present. He was the best writer at the old Weekly Standard in the times Before Trump, and he’s the best writer now affiliated with the rabidly MAGA Claremont Institute.
But even Homer nods—and even Caldwell can lose his way in trying to make sense of the senselessness unfolding all around us. It’s clear to me that this is what’s happened in his latest column for the U.S. Edition of The Spectator.
Who or What is Trump’s Base?
Much of the essay, “The End of Trumpism,” I admire and agree with. Caldwell has never shown an interest in serving as a propagandist for any cause or politician, and here he doesn’t hesitate to hit Trump hard for various moves over the past 14 months, including the ruinous global tariffs and risky bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer. But those are just a prelude to the column’s main event, which is a reckoning with Trump’s decision to join Israel in launching a vastly larger full-scale war on Iran.
As I’ve made abundantly clear in two recent posts, I’m with Caldwell on this. But I draw the line with the following:
Trump has escaped other predicaments of his own making, but there is something different about this one. The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project. Those with claims to speak for Trumpism—Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly—have reacted to the invasion with incredulity. Trump may entertain himself with the presidency for the next three years (barring impeachment), but the mutual respect between him and his movement has been ruptured, and his revolution is essentially over.
Caldwell is hardly the only one on the right pushing this interpretation of events. The paleoconservative American Conservative magazine and its “restraint”-minded spokesmen do so every day, as do Carlson and Kelly, not to mention their down-market ideological compatriots Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens.
But how many Americans do these people speak for?
