So your government has been taken over by a delusional King Lear figure and his billionaire henchmen, now what? One possibility is that the minority party will start using the tools available to them to delay and obstruct Trump’s brazenly illegal actions (rather than, say, tweeting about the price of pizza). Another possibility is that, after a chaotic flurry of executive orders and a ham-fisted power grab, the Trump administration will encounter significant pushback and reveal its own weakness.
Yet as AJ Bauer has recently argued, there’s more that we can do. A robust opposition should work to identify and exploit divisions within the Trump coalition — a motley array of conflicting and often contradictory interests, more often united by common enemies than by shared priorities. To help think through this idea, we reached out to a mix of policy scholars and scholars of the right and asked if they’d be willing to share their perspectives about possible fissures on the right.
Daniel Martinez HoSang
“Demography is destiny.” It was, to be sure, always a thin political bromide, but one that seemed to pass the common sense test. At the height of Obama’s multicultural coalition, the prediction that the nation’s growing racial and demographic pluralism would inevitably shift the electorate and its politics to the left was widely embraced. Even the GOP, in its 2012 electoral postmortem, called for the party to be more “inclusive and welcoming” or risk losing its appeal to young voters and voters of color.
Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, of course, lit a match to that playbook. Unvarnished celebrations of nativism, racism, transphobia, and misogyny became standard campaign fare. His policy agenda — deportations and travel bans, attacks on DEI and trans health care, gutting civil rights enforcement — demonstrated he meant what he said.
Yet across all three elections, Trump’s electoral coalition has grown more racially diverse, giving rise to a new multiracial right that has reached deep into the progressive base.
Many progressives imagine that a kind of buyer’s remorse will develop among Trump’s multiracial base, as the loudest racial chauvinists and bigots make their disdain for any kind of diversity or difference clear. As a lonely counter protester at a racially diverse Trump rally in the South Bronx last May put it in a hand-lettered sign, “WARNING: Trump Hates You.”
But this is not the fissure likely to erupt. At the right wing conferences and rallies I have attended for my research, it has become increasingly clear that even the most far-right and nationalist figures recognize that their aim to make MAGA a permanent governing majority will not succeed if its base and leadership are all white. The right has learned to offer inroads to voters of color around issues like abortion restrictions, school choice, nationalism, immigration restriction, and Christian nationalism that don’t require them to moderate their policy agenda, even as that agenda includes rolling back a broad range of civil rights and anti-discrimination protections.
The fissure likely to expand within the multiracial right is different. A significant fraction of people of color are drawn to the right because they embrace conservative politics and ideas. They include Black, Asian American and Latino evangelicals who support hard right stances on gender, education, abortion, and religion; people with deep ties to ICE, the military, law enforcement, and the sprawling criminal justice system who favor punitive approaches to crime; business owners and self-styled entrepreneurs who favor low taxes and deregulation and oppose labor protections and unions; and nationalists who regard closing the border and enacting mass deportations as necessary and beneficial to the multiracial working class.
Yet an equally sizable number of people of color who cast their vote for Trump in the last election do not share those ideological convictions. Like many other voters, it was their bleak outlook about their jobs, debt, housing, and the economy that led them to MAGA. The priority for these voters has little to do with moral panics over girls in sports, displaying the Ten Commandments in schools, or DEI on campus. They want an alternative to the humiliation, precarity, and desperation that a generation of neoliberal social relations has authored.
The Trump Administration has no agenda or plans to address these concerns. Giveaways to private equity, tech, and energy barons will only worsen those conditions. An organizing strategy and governance vision that exposes those contradictions and envisions a robust social democracy can still win back large segments of the multiracial right. Telling these voters they are hated or duped will not.
Lindsay Owens
After spending over a year courting working-class voters on the campaign trail, President Trump spent his inauguration cozying up with the world’s richest men, while quite literally leaving his supporters out in the cold. It was an ominous preview of the brand of fiscal policy we can expect from his administration: plenty of room for Elon Musk’s tax breaks, none for your health care.
There are a lot of ways to parse the Trump coalition. The recent spat between Bannon and Musk is an example of the broader rift between the agendas of MAGA adherents and the ascendent oligarchs (or what Bannon refers to as the globalists). But there is also Trump’s unholy alliance with legacy arms of the conservative movement like the religious right. And we shouldn’t forget the budget hawks — who you can reliably find crowing about fiscal restraint during the dawn of a new Republican administration but voting for budget-busters like wars and tax giveaways for the wealthy by the end of it.
There are certainly a few different shades of red in Trump’s party, but there has always been one fight that unifies them all: tax cuts. We saw it in 2017 when Congressional Republicans of all stripes banded together to vote for Trump’s only signature legislative achievement, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. This bill gave a tax cut to the richest 0.1 percent of Americans that was 277 times larger than the one teachers and firefighters got, and nearly doubled billionaire wealth in this country. It also offered corporations a whopping 40 percent discount on their taxes, which they quickly parlayed into record stock buybacks for their wealthy shareholders and price hikes for everyone else. After all, it was a lot more fun to overcharge you when they get to keep a bigger slice of their winnings.
According to the Treasury Department, extending the provisions of his tax law that are slated to expire next year (as Trump has promised to do) would put another $314,000 in the bank accounts of the top 0.1% of Americans, but less than $1 a day in the pockets of 75 million families.
Meanwhile, it is projected to add $4.6 trillion to the deficit — a far cry from the fiscal restraint some in his party pretend to aspire to — but a price tag that will nonetheless be used to justify all manner of cuts to the programs American families rely on, including many who voted for President Trump last November.
The coming tax fight represents perhaps the best chance Democrats will have over the next two years to drive a wedge between Musk and his billionaire brethren on Trump’s inauguration stage and working-class voters. In 2017, Democrats united in their opposition to Trump’s tax cuts and drove Trump’s approval rating to the lowest point in his presidency, setting the stage for a blue wave in the midterms. Eight years later, the American oligarchy is more visible than ever. Democrats must use this fight as an opportunity to cleave Trump from working Americans.
David Austin Walsh
It is paramount for the left to not overestimate the strength and durability of Trump’s political coalition. Trumpism is making a bid to remake fusionism, but there are real and meaningful fissures between various elements of the right, for both ideological and personal reasons, and we need to be attentive to those cleavages and seek to exploit them. But we should also be careful to not overestimate the potency of these fissures.
Even with the real divides on the right — between the Tech Right and America First, internationalists versus isolationists, Christian nationalists versus ecumenicists — most factions are getting something they want. America First may have lost on H1B visas, but they are getting the tariffs. Project 2025 was derided as incoherent by liberals and some leftists during the 2024 election because of its many internal tensions, but this is exactly why it has been politically successful. It provided a grab-bag template to simultaneously cripple — for instance — the oversight functions of federal agencies while expanding — again, for instance — the policing powers of ICE and other security agencies. In general, the contradictions embedded in Project 2025 were not non-negotiables between the most politically influential factions on the right.
Meanwhile, the reckless pace of Trump’s executive orders – along with exogenous geopolitical shocks like DeepSeek – suggest to me that we are in a moment of extreme political fluidity, one which does offer the prospect of real splits for MAGA opponents to capitalize on. But we should also be aware that the dynamic political situation can also submerge fissures. Now that China appears to have beaten Silicon Valley at its own ridiculous AI game, do we really expect Silicon Valley firms to be a counterweight to America First? Or will Silicon Valley seek to leverage its newfound power in Washington — and that of its America First allies — in pursuit of aggressive protectionism for its own business interests? And if it does prove to be the latter, then the left must be attentive to the new divides that will emerge within capital as a result.
Amanda Hollis-Brusky
Back in 2008, when I was a wee graduate student interviewing members of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies about how and why they thought the organization had been so successful, I heard some variation of the following over and over again: “you fence out the people who don’t belong… the Federalist Society has never, ever come close to lunatics.” Starting up in the 1980s, the fledgling Federalists understood that if they were going to be taken seriously within the law, they would need to distance themselves from the fringe, radical flanks of their movement. They needed to, as another interviewee described it to me, “kick out the kooks.” This was especially important after Ted Kennedy publicly excoriated one of their mentors, Robert Bork, as a regressive pro-segregation, anti-woman, anti-science “extremist.”
The Federalist Society was engaging in the “politics of respectability,” distancing themselves from more radical wings of the conservative legal movement — specifically Christian nationalists and (overt) white supremacists — in order to be seen as serious and legitimate. The movement took a page from William F. Buckley’s playbook in the 1960s. In order to make conservatism look respectable, Buckley, founder of the National Review, worked hard to “marginalize the people he felt made conservatism look bad — the reactionary John Birch Society and the Ayn Rand atheist Objectivists.”
It worked for the Federalist Society. By elevating elite-credentialed, Ivy League lawyers as its mouthpieces and exercising its power and influence quietly in GOP administrations, the Federalist Society managed over the course of three decades to secure a five-Justice majority on the Supreme Court, to mainstream Originalism, and to deliver significant victories for the movement on federalism, gun rights, and campaign finance.
Enter Donald Trump. We’re all familiar with how Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society entered into a Faustian Bargain with then-candidate Trump — giving Trump the Federalist Society seal of approval in exchange for courting the votes of more respectable, mainstream GOP voters and elites. Nine years into its relationship with the twice-impeached, insurrection-inciting, overt racist and dictator-worshipping populist president, the Federalist Society has certainly benefited from its relationship with Trump. But at what cost to the movement’s legitimacy?
As Trump 2.0 ushers in a controversial and racially-coded “America First” agenda through dubious readings of the Fourteenth Amendment and enacts Project 2025’s thinly-veiled Christian nationalist plan for government, the movement that built its power and reputation leveraging the politics of respectability is facing internal fissures over their relationship with the president. On the one hand, Trump handed the Federalist Society a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future and long-awaited victories on everything from abortion to the administrative state. On the other, the longer its leaders stick with Trump and his band of democracy-dismantling “kooks” and “lunatics,” the harder it will be to remove the stain of Trumpism from the Federalist Society when (if) he does leave office.
Todd Tucker
In 2016 and 2024, billionaire Donald Trump leveraged a longstanding critique of trade policy into an unlikely means of identification with workers and regions left behind by globalization. In so doing, he pulled along Republican voters (and some elected officials), after decades where Democrats struggled to define their message on jobs in a more open economy.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama campaigned as critics of the North American Free Trade Agreement, only to pass or expand that template in office. Hillary Clinton flipped this script by negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership while serving as Secretary of State, but then campaigning against it in 2016. The subsequent Biden and Harris campaign and presidency pulled Democrats closer to their working class roots on trade and industrial strategy, but then ran a re-election effort centering a critique of Trump’s tariff proposals. It was an odd choice, since Biden had largely maintained the Trump administration’s tariffs, and the constituencies Biden and then Harris were courting were tariff-friendly union voters. As such, Democrats’ 2024 message often fell flat with with labor audiences that otherwise applauded Biden’s labor stances, allowing Trump an open lane to run against their perceived inconsistency. (A particularly muddled moment came in the 2024 vice presidential debate, where venture capitalist JD Vance appeared to “out-populist” trade unionist Tim Walz on trade.)
But it’s important to note the Republican Party’s own inconsistencies on trade. In the 920-page Project 2025 treatise, which largely advances a consensus right-wing theory for taking apart government, the chapters on trade policy are notable for their internal disagreements. Therein, Democrat-cum-Republican Peter Navarro outlines a populist theory of boosting manufacturing and shrinking trade deficits, while his sparring partner Kent Lassman calls for traditional pro-Fortune 500, Bush-era policy. In other chapters, calls to roll back Biden’s clean energy industrial policy coexist uneasily with calls to compete with China in those sectors.
This “protectionists in disarray” theme continued into the first weeks of the Trump administration. Whereas Trump called tariffs “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” during the campaign and promised high across-the-board fees on all imports, his governing stance on trade has (so far at least) been more conventional. Instead of reappointing Bob Lighthizer, the intellectual architect of Trump 1.0’s trade policy, Trump 2.0 has elevated Wall Street alums to key economic policy posts. After a conversation with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, he said he’d “rather not have to use” tariffs. After threatening Colombia with tariffs for not accepting deportees, he quickly backtracked. As of this writing (Sunday evening, February 2), a similar offramp is being sought for tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Will we get Trump the populist or Trump the Wall Street minder concerned about billionaire sidekick Elon Musk? Even Trump’s business and congressional allies don’t seem to know.
This creates an opening for progressive populists and labor groups. For example, Shawn Fain of the United Autoworkers penned an Overton-window pushing op-ed that would use trade policy to help guarantee high quality jobs in his sector. This has a precedent: congressional Democrats in 2019 were able to use Trump’s renegotiation of NAFTA to push for labor rights provisions that are now the envy of pro-worker policymakers around the world. At worst, these tactics call Trump’s bluff and diminish his credibility with the working class voters that are increasingly the fought-after prize of both parties. At best, they lead to policy change desirable on its own terms that may also yield political benefits – provided the center-left remembers to clearly claim the pro-worker mantle.
Dessie Zagorcheva
There is a profound division within the Trump coalition on foreign policy, and a smart strategy for opposing Trump’s dangerous vision is to exploit these rifts by pitting Trumpists against traditional Internationalists.
Though Trump is often mistakenly cast as an isolationist — allergic as he is to military alliances and mutual defense pacts — Trump’s “America First” vision goes far beyond the cautious restraint associated with isolationists past and present. His ambitions reflect a disturbing mix of 19th-century imperialism and 21st-century authoritarianism. Trump’s praise for autocrats, such as Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Xi Jinping, paired with his impulsive desires to acquire territories like Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, marks a radical departure from both traditional isolationism and internationalism.
Understanding the nature of his foreign policy stance — rooted in authoritarianism, not isolationism — is key to ensuring the U.S. continues to defend democratic values both at home and abroad. Trump’s agenda fundamentally contradicts decades of Republican foreign policy, shaped by the party’s Internationalist wing, which advocated for U.S. alliances, freedom, democracy, and an open global economy. In his Westminster speech of June 8, 1984, Reagan stated: “We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.”
Trump represents such a threat to this traditional Republican vision of foreign policy that more than a hundred former staffers and national security leaders from past Republican administrations were even willing to support Kamala Harris. And while the Liz Cheneys of the world were not numerous enough to defeat Trump at the ballot box, the willingness of these Internationalist Republicans to make common cause with Internationalist Democrats, especially in the Senate, could be decisive in preventing Trumpists from radically shifting U.S. foreign policy in authoritarian direction.
Former Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is now the Chair of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, has emerged as a key figure in this coalition. He strongly criticized Trump’s ideas in a recent article in Foreign Affairs and urged the president to support Ukraine and U.S. alliances and to stand firm against dictators. McConnell’s rare public rebuke of Trump underscores how he and other Internationalist Republicans in leadership positions in Congress could serve as a crucial counterbalance to the Trump faction.
Leveraging these deep divisions within the GOP has, moreover, proven effective in the past. For example, during Trump’s first administration, growing concerns over his ties to Putin and his refusal to acknowledge Russian interference in the 2016 elections led a majority of Congressional Republicans to join with Democrats to handcuff Trump on Russian sanctions. This legislation, passed with veto-proof majorities, required Trump to justify in writing any intention to ease sanctions on Russia and mandated a Congressional review. More recently, in December 2023, Congressional Republicans and Democrats united again to pass a bill that would prevent any U.S. president from leaving NATO without Senate approval. By continuing to capitalize on the GOP’s foreign policy divisions, we can thwart Trump’s dangerous vision.
