On Saturday, Donald Trump had revenge on his mind. As he prepared to campaign in Atlanta, the former president attacked several Georgia Republicans who helped thwart his efforts to steal the 2020 election, including the state’s governor, former lieutenant governor, and secretary of state. “We have to purge the Party of people that go against our Candidates, and make it harder for a popular Republican President to beat the Radical Left Lunatics,” he wrote on social media with his characteristic odd capitalization.
It was an alarming and familiar post. For nearly a decade now, Trump has railed against his enemies, critics, and opponents within the GOP, arguably going after them as much as Democrats. His targets on Saturday were particularly notable because the “purge” he was advocating wasn’t just of Republicans he had deemed “anti-Trumpers” or “RINOs”—it was explicitly Republicans who did not back his lies about the 2020 election. But what ultimately stood out about his posts on Saturday is how far Trump has come from his first presidential campaign and presidency, during which many members of the party’s establishment, including former presidential candidates and sitting congressmen, opposed and occasionally even thwarted him. Trump doesn’t really have very many enemies left in the Republican Party—his takeover of the GOP is more or less complete.
That assimilation was destructive and—with the possibility of his winning in November—scary. If he returns to office, he will face far fewer obstacles than at any point during his first presidency. The Supreme Court has shown open deference to him. He and his allies plan to remake the entire federal bureaucracy in their twisted image. Four more years of Donald Trump would be cataclysmic to our political system. At the same time, younger Republicans look more like Trump: They are more outwardly xenophobic and cruel; they embrace conspiracy theories like “the great replacement”; they increasingly depict liberals, people of color, childless people, and others as enemies who also must be purged.
But that is the silver lining to Trump’s Republican Party conversion. Voters really, really do not like the Trumpist candidates with whom he has replaced the “purged” moderates and anti-Trumpers. The young Republicans who have risen up via his coattails and playbook—most notably J.D. Vance, but also Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Blake Masters, and others—certainly constitute a movement but one with decidedly limited appeal. Each represents a different mix of Trumpist qualities and those of the quasi-populist “New Right.” They are, as it stands, the future of the Republican Party.
Vance, Trump’s running mate, is the most prominent. He first gained attention as a Trump critic, suggesting that the demagogic politician was promising easy fixes to systemic problems (and that if poor white people really wanted their lives to be better they should just work harder). But Vance changed his tune when it became clear that Trump was here to stay, offering a mix of election denying, conspiracy theorizing, race-baiting, and misogyny that drew Trump’s backing for an Ohio Senate seat in 2022, which he won.
But Vance is also the best evidence for the limits of the Trumpist approach. Voters have responded to his selection by recoiling, largely. Donald Trump has never been wildly popular, but he has consistently posted a favorability rating in the low 40s—Vance has been mired in the mid-30s since rising to national prominence, something unheard of from previous vice presidential selections.
Gaetz, Boebert, and Greene will all undoubtedly have long careers in Republican politics—but they are seen as clowns (albeit sinister ones) outside of it. Masters, meanwhile, has followed a different path. He has close links to the online right that has emerged since Trump rose to power and has molded himself in the image of right-wing bloggers and theorists, as well as libertarian Silicon Valley tycoons, particularly his mentor Peter Thiel. Voters hate Masters; he lost a winnable Senate seat in Arizona in 2022 and recently lost in a Republican congressional primary in the same state.
Part of the problem is that Trumpism is a vibe as much as an ideology. It has core components, yes, largely related to xenophobic campaigns to stop immigration. Beyond that, though, it’s fuzzy. There is a larger cultural pugilism, centered on stopping “the left” at all costs. But how exactly one does that or, for that matter, what issues one focuses on is ill-defined. Trump’s own political career gives surprisingly few clear examples: Most of his feuds are driven by personal animus more than anything else. (Case in point: At Saturday’s rally in Georgia, he targeted Bruce Springsteen, saying he “only like[s] people who like [him].”)
Trump’s followers have responded by attempting to fill that void with any number of boogeymen, particularly focusing on transgender people and sexuality more broadly; Vance has made anti-feminism a core message, arguing that women should leave the workplace and focus on raising families. These messages have not caught on. Indeed, the vagueness of Trump’s cultural attacks have historically aided him in part because they’re incoherent and to some extent undefinable. Efforts to make them more coherent—beyond immigration—have largely fizzled.
To some extent Trump himself is responsible. An inveterate narcissist, he can tolerate no one sharing the spotlight with him. Vance was selected not because he was someone to whom he could pass the baton but because he is an arch-loyalist lapdog who won’t actually ever threaten him. Still, it’s notable that no natural successor exists at all. Trump’s adult male children, Eric and Don Jr., clearly crave the spotlight. But neither has shown any political aptitude beyond hard-core Trump admirers—as evidenced by their reportedly pivotal role in Vance’s selection as vice president.
The only conclusion to draw, nearly a decade into Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, is that Trumpism itself doesn’t have legs. It is still largely dependent on its namesake. Its ideology will clearly be around for a long time, but there are few signs that it will remain potent without Trump’s own weird charisma. In the long term, that’s something to be hopeful for—even if Trump very much remains a threat right now.
