Don’t believe the hype about Donald Trump. There is no personality reboot, no Trump 2.0. Appealing for “unity” at the party convention when the nomination is already sewn up is what nominees do. Trump 1.0, the original ’50s banger, is still running. We saw this when he wrestled himself to his feet after being shot in Butler, Pennsylvania. We see it when he muses on why God might have spared him. Most importantly, we feel it.
Populism is about feelings. Government is about institutions. People make policy. This is why “Trumpism” was always an idea in search of an ideology: Making America Great Again is a longing, not a program. It is why Trump, having run against the Washington machine in 2016, struggled to manage the machine as president: There is no button that, once pressed, makes America great again. It is why Trump has chosen Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his running mate now.
Vance is an ideas guy, possibly even an intellectual. Most candidates publish a memoir when they take aim at the presidency. Vance actually wrote Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 lament for the world of his Appalachian upbringing. He makes speeches at think tanks, too. His ideas are coherent, and they add up to an ideology capable of operating the levers of power. To call him Trumpist is to miss the point. Vance is post-Trumpist. As the sci-fi novelist William Gibson said, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”
The German ideas guy Max Weber divided authority into three kinds: charismatic, rational-legal, and traditional. The British monarch and the pope are the last of the big daddies, the last patriarchs and traditionals. Trump has always operated along a continuum of charisma with Don Rickles at one end and Rocky Balboa at the other. His response to being shot was pure charisma, not least because he was aware that the world would be watching. But mostly we experience modern government as rational-legal: creaky websites, expensive licenses, bureaucratic procedures, needless paperwork, and passwords we can’t remember.
There can be no Trumpism with Trump, because he is not rational-legal. Nor can there be Trumpism without Trump, because he is charismatic. Nor can Trump be traditional. Charisma is a challenge to traditional and rational-legal norms, and anyway, traditional authority has no constitutional footing in America. Of course, people still long for it, but the most the system permits is a rogue candidate such as RFK Jr., a charismatic with a dusty whiff of tradition that, like the ringmaster’s top hat, adds a bit of class to the clown show.
Charismatic authority cannot be transferred or faked, so it creates its own succession crisis, especially when there’s a two-term limit. No one cares who Napoleon II was. The Third Reich’s second Führer is a piece of pub trivia (Adm. Karl Donitz, 24 days de facto, 36 days de jure, but all of them defeated). The Trumpian equivalent would be putting Donald Trump Jr. on the ticket. The post-Trump move is to secure his posterity by picking a rational-legal politician who can drive the popular revolt of 2016 into the institutions. This is why Vance is a smart pick.
We shall see if Vance turns out to be a smarter pick than Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who is also very smart and who, unlike Vance, has a proven record of rational-legal achievement as Florida’s governor. Perhaps DeSantis will be offered a Cabinet post in the second Trump administration and help clean the stables. DeSantis will have no choice but to accept: a refusal would sink his chances of securing the Republican nomination in the future. Trump’s return and his choice of Vance as running mate show that the Republican Party has changed for good. We shall see if it changes for the better.
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Revolutions do not succeed or fail in their initial flush of popular violence. Overthrowing the Bastille and murdering your enemies are only the preliminary festivities. A revolution can only go the distance if it can remake the institutions of government. The Left learned this the hard way in the 20th century. When the workers rejected the revolution at the ballot box, the revolutionaries adopted Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions.” The Right has learned this lesson from the Left. “You taught me language,” Caliban snarls at Prospero, “and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse.”
A couple of observations on the new language of the New Right. The head of the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien, addressed the RNC in Milwaukee on July 15. O’Brien berated big corporations and lobby groups for “waging a war against American workers.” This is blunt, but necessary, and congressional Republicans need to hear it. The same goes for Vance taking the realist view that America needs to recalibrate its foreign policy. At home and abroad, the United States needs to prioritize. If you cannot have primacy, you can still put Americans first.