Trump’s bizarre and abrasive style, to be sure, couldn’t be more different than that of the Bush dynasty. And his idiosyncratic tariff policy is a genuine break with what went before. But in most areas, Trumpism is simply Bushism gilded by a tacky coat of paint. In political terms, Donald Trump is the brother-by-a-different-mother of Dubya and Jeb!  

Pop quiz: which of the three last Republican presidents has launched a major war of choice against a populous Persian Gulf country — George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, or Donald Trump? If you answered all three, you are right. Republican presidents began all three Gulf Wars: the First Gulf War of 1991, the Second Gulf War of 2003-2011, and the Third Gulf War of 2026-?.

Second question: which of the last three Republican presidents had, as his major legislative accomplishment, a tax cut that disproportionately benefited the rich and corporations? If you answered all three — the two Bushes and Trump — you are, again, correct.  

Third question: which of the last three Republican presidents successfully promoted the expansion of legal guest-worker programs for cheap-labor industries like agriculture and hospitality? Once again, the answer is both Bushes and Trump.  

Fourth and final question: which of the last three Republican presidents signed laws or authorized regulations to boost the number of rich foreigners who could buy green cards, as a ticket to American citizenship? You guessed it, both Bushes and Trump. In politics as well as policies, the Trump administration increasingly looks like a continuation of the post-2000 Republican norm: pro-war, pro-business.

To see why, it helps to examine the electorate. Over the past decade, much has been made of a supposed “realignment” between the two parties and Trump’s success in attracting a formerly Democratic-leaning working class into the Republican column. Yet this was always overstated. In reality, Trump didn’t create a party realignment, and he hasn’t significantly reshaped one.  He has inherited the Bush Republican Party — a new American political party that coalesced in the Nineties and 2000s.

In 2024, the only two religious groups that viewed Trump favorably were white evangelical Protestants (67%) and white Catholics (51%). Trump won four-fifths of the white evangelical vote in 2016, 2020, and 2024. But his margin was only a slight improvement over Mitt Romney in 2012 (who won 78% of the same group), John McCain in 2008 (74%), and George W. Bush in 2004 (78%). History, then, shows a gradually expanding share of white-evangelical votes for any and all Republican presidential nominees, not a sudden surge under Trump in 2016. 

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The lie of the white-collar job

By Michael Lind

With the white working class as a whole, Trump — who won 62% in 2016, 59% in 2020, and 66% in 2024 — did only marginally better than GOP nominees since 1980, from highs under Ronald Reagan (56% in 1984) and Romney (56%) to a low of 45% with McCain. That this reflects the evolution of the GOP, rather than the unique charisma of Trump, is evident from the fact that in the 2022 midterms, Republican congressional hopefuls won 66% of the working class, the same rate as Trump in 2024.  

The Republican share of the white working class is boosted by ultra-Republican white evangelicals. As the University of Pennsylvania’s John J. Diulio points out, “in 2016 and 2020, Trump won a majority of white evangelical working-class voters, but he lost a majority of white non-evangelical working-class voters. He lost them again in 2024.” White, working-class Americans who were not evangelical Protestants preferred Harris to Trump by a margin of 52 to 45.

Add regional dynamics, and it becomes even clearer that the Trump party is simply the Bush party, only with vulgar rhetoric. The Bush GOP is based in the former territory of New Deal and Jacksonian Democrats — the Confederacy and Appalachia. Its constituents, like small-business owners and working-class evangelicals, are those who formed the base of the Democratic Party for most of its history.

Eight out of 10 white Southerners were Democrats in 1950s, and as recently as 1992, Republicans had only a two-point advantage in the white South. By 2020, two-in-three white Southerners identified with the Republican Party.

Opposition to the civil-rights movement was a factor, but if racism were the only one then white Southerners should have completely abandoned the Democrats by 1968 or 1972. Instead, cultural conservatism with respect to religion, sex, and censorship, along with a distinctively martial version of Southern patriotism, combined with the increasing progressivism of national Democrats, gradually drove many white Southern Democrats into the Republican Party between the Seventies and the 2000s.

Today Republicans from the South hold more than 50% of the seats of the Republican House majority. In the Senate, the Republican majority leader and the Republican majority whip are from South Dakota and Wyoming, respectively, while the Republican conference chair is from Arkansas, the Republican policy boss is from West Virginia, and the Republican senatorial committee chair is from South Carolina.  

In hindsight, John McCain’s 2008 candidacy was a link in the soft transition of the party of Bush into the party of Trump. Having co-sponsored a bill providing amnesty for illegal immigrants with Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy in 2005, in 2008 McCain opposed any amnesty. And to bolster his pseudo-populist bona fides, McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.  

In foreign policy, McCain — a Vietnam veteran and former POW and the descendant of military officers whose extended family owned a Mississippi plantation until after World War II — was one of the most consistently bellicose members of the hawkish wing of the GOP. During his presidential campaign, to the tune of the Beach Boys song “Barbara Ann”, McCain sang “Bomb bomb bomb Iran.” Had McCain been elected president, America might have waged all-out war against Iran a decade and a half ago.

Constituent interests, not the theories of Curtis Yarvin or Patrick Deneen, explain the policies of the post-Nineties GOP, under Trump and the Bushes alike. In terms of counties rather than states, the American red-county economy is predominantly exurban and rural and dominated by three kinds of industries: extractive resource industries like oil and gas and coal; the federally funded defense industries and the local businesses and jobs that military spending supports; and low-wage industries, most notably agriculture and services. Republican economic policy reflects the economic interests of employers and investors in red counties across America.

In 2019, 55% of all primary energy — chiefly oil, natural gas, and coal — was produced in the United States came from six mostly red states: Texas, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and North Dakota, with the Lone Star State accounting for 41% of all US crude production. Naturally, the Republican Party supports the mantra “drill, baby, drill” (and “mine, baby, mine”) and opposes the Green New Deal, with its goal of phasing out all fossil-fuel use in the United States and the world in favor of renewables.

By far the most important social base of the Bush-to-Trump Republican Party, and the greatest influence on Republican economic policy, is made up of small-business owners who, according to the Stanford Business Review, “represent a distinct, Republican-leaning constituency.”

Business owners are a minority of Republican voters; the majority of voters in both parties are mostly wage earners. But they are overrepresented among GOP primary voters, lobbyists, staffers, and politicians. Apart from professional and technical services, small businesses are concentrated in construction, natural resources and mining, trade, transportation and utilities, manufacturing, and leisure and hospitality. Republican-leaning billionaires and mega-corporations draw the ire of progressives and some conservative populists, but the party’s center of gravity is found among provincial Republican millionaires. Small and regional capital, not big business, forms the social power base of the Trump party and that of the Bushes before him.

You don’t have to be a Marxist to understand that mainstream Republican economic policy reflects the economic interests of this sector of capital. Compliance with federal, state, and local regulations is a bigger challenge for small-business owners than for large, managerial corporations, so it isn’t surprising that Trump 2.0 would hire Elon Musk and Russell Vought to theatrically cut regulations, fire federal bureaucrats, and dismantle government agencies. 

For most small businesses, wages plus benefits and payroll taxes are the greatest cost. Mainstream Republican policies toward American workers under Trump and the two Bushes form a consistent policy designed to minimize the bargaining power of workers in wage negotiations and to make workers so economically desperate they will be compelled to take jobs with poor pay and bad working conditions.  

Some of these policies — such as unremitting hostility to organized labor — have obvious benefits for cheap-labor small businesses. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump pretended to show respect for unionized workers by inviting Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to speak at the Republican National Convention. Less than a month later, in a social media conversation with Elon Musk, Trump told Musk: “You’re the greatest cutter. I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone.’ ”

Trump was evidently unaware that federal law prohibits the firing of striking workers. The United Auto Workers union immediately filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, a New Deal-created agency that Musk is suing on the specious claim that it has been unconstitutional from the beginning. In January 2025, having returned to the White House, Trump crippled the NLRB by illegally firing a board member, removing the board’s quorum.

Crushing unions and dismantling the NLRB are only two of the strategies used by mainstream Republicans, including Trump, to shift the balance of power in wage negotiations from workers to employers. Tight labor markets that result from low immigration and low workforce participation by mothers of young children can create a seller’s market in labor that strengthens the power of workers, male and female, to demand higher wages. To this end, employer lobbies dominated by Republican-leaning small-business owners for decades have supported mass low-wage immigration and promoted the employment of mothers of young children.  

The US Chamber of Commerce, the National Small Business Association, and the National Federation of Independent Business all support expanding guest worker programs, whose workers, unlike green card holders (legal permanent residents), don’t qualify for a path to citizenship and voting. According to an NFIB spokesperson, “our members support an enforceable guest worker program and expanding H-2B visas for economic need.” 

The US Chamber of Commerce advocates doubling the number of immigrants. According to the NSBA, meanwhile, more than a third of small businesses employ workers who belong to one of three categories: green-card holders, temporary foreign workers, or visa holders. The NSBA advocates lifting country caps on employment-related visas, allowing unlimited numbers of non-citizen foreigners to work in the homeland. 

This is one of the surprising and little-noticed threads that tie the Bushes to Trump. As United Farm Workers comms director Antonio de Loera-Brust has noted in these pages, the Trump II administration has moved to increase the number of agricultural guest workers. This, notwithstanding its showy enforcement actions in blue cities. Far from being a radical break with Bush-era Republican immigration policy, Trump’s actual immigration policy has been a continuation of employer-first policies in substance, though not in rhetoric. 

In a cabinet meeting on 11 April, 2025, Trump said that “we have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to, where they tend to NEED people.” The second Trump administration has used a variety of methods, including extreme vetting of applications and travel bans, to reduce legal immigration to the United States by an estimated 35% and 50%, if the present rate continues over four years.  

While blockading legal immigration overall, the Trump administration has exempted the low-wage H-2 visa categories from obstructionist delays. And the administration has doubled the number of H-2 visas for low-wage workers for 2026. 

All of this shows that Trumpism is merely the higher stage of Bushism. It was George Herbert Walker Bush who signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which in hindsight was the foundation for the mass immigration of the last half century. The 1990 Act simultaneously created the EB-5 visa selling green cards to the foreign bourgeoisie, created the H1-B guest-worker visa, expanded existing guest-worker programs, and created new guest-worker categories. It also created the Temporary Protected Status program, under which President Joe Biden granted legal status to nearly a million otherwise ineligible foreign nationals.

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Republican foreign policy, like tax and labor policy, can be explained in terms of Republican voters and donors. Republican policy towards the Middle East is influenced but not wholly determined by support for Israel’s annexationist hard Right among evangelical Christian Zionists and Right-wing Jews, who, however, are a minority of America’s mostly Democratic Jewish voters. In 2020, after moving the US embassy, Trump declared, “and we moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. That’s for the evangelicals.”

And Republican policy towards Latin America is influenced by anti-communist Cuban-Americans, a crucial Florida voting bloc, who nurtured Marco Rubio. In Trump’s second term, the former senator from the Sunshine State, long associated with the hawkish wing of the GOP, has magnified his influence by holding multiple foreign policy jobs simultaneously at times — Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and acting administrator of USAID.

The underlying divide in GOP foreign policy is among three schools of thought: global hegemonists who favor American military hegemony in every major region; balance-of-power realists or “prioritizers” who want to focus America’s limited military resources on the Chinese challenge in Asia; and neo-isolationist “restrainers.” The global-hegemony strategy’s major supporters since the end of the Cold War have disproportionately been Southern conservative hawks like South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsay Graham and Arkansas’s Senator Tom Cotton. The armed-services committees in the Senate and House are led by two Republican Southern hawks — Mississippi’s Senator Roger Wicker and Alabama’s Representative Mike D. Rogers. 

Their militarism is unusual by national standards but typical of the martial tradition of the American South. Nearly half of new military recruits are from the South, even though it contains only about a third of young adult Americans. 

The hawks whom Southern voters send to Congress ensure that the region profits from defense spending. The list of states that derive more than 3.5% of their GDP from defense contracts is dominated by states in the South and Southwest: Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Maryland, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri (Connecticut and Maine make the list because of their Navy bases and shipyards). Meanwhile, the importance of defense spending to California’s economy has declined, as military investment in Florida has increased.

Under the two Bushes and Trump, congressional Republicans in Washington, among other things, have been subsidizing the folks back home by increasing defense spending while further ballooning deficits enlarged by their tax cuts for the rich and business. 

Under Trump as under the Bushes, the Republican Party, based in the former Confederate states, is the party of unnecessary wars, tax cuts for the rich, and anti-worker, low-wage labor-market policy. Anti-interventionist realists and restrainers and economic populists on the Right who dreamed that Trump would favor their causes may not want to hear the truth. And the truth will be resisted as well by Democrats and Never Trump Republicans who idealized the two Bushes while demonizing Trump. But the fact is that, apart from his colorful personality, Trump has been a relatively conventional post-Cold War Republican president. 

The Third Gulf War is the latest reminder that there is no Trump party and never has been, only the Bush party under new management.

Americans on the Right have reasons to wonder. Recently a number of self-styled spokespersons for MAGA have claimed that the president has betrayed his populist base on issues ranging from foreign policy (with his bombing of Iran and threats of war against Venezuela), to higher education (with his insistence on admitting Chinese students to US universities to maintain university enrollments and budgets). At the same time, old-fashioned conservatives complain that Trump has betrayed the legacy of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes with his stances on trade and immigration. 

Both sides are half-right — and thus half-wrong. Just as he demolished the East Wing of the White House to add a new ballroom, while leaving the rest of the structure intact, so Trump, instead of completely replacing the older version of conservatism, has added a new populist wing based on trade and labor protectionism.

Pre-Trump “fusionist conservatism,” forged by the likes of William F. Buckley and Frank Meyer in the last century, is often compared to a stool with three legs: a hawkish foreign policy, free-market libertarianism in economics, and social conservatism. Trump himself never fit that model. During his 2016 campaign, he described the Iraq War as a “disaster” and vowed not to cut Social Security or Medicare. And while George W. Bush is a born-again Christian, Trump is a thrice-married playboy who told evangelicals at Liberty University that his favorite book in the Bible is “Two Corinthians.”

In contrast to their leader, the priorities of most congressional Republicans in Trump’s second term, as in his first, have been Bush-like: to expand the deficit with tax cuts for the rich, or to attempt to cut or destroy ObamaCare without offering any replacement other than a few half-baked ideas. Little seems to have changed with the GOP caucus since the days when Paul Ryan was House speaker (Ryan himself, feeling betrayed as a “true” conservative, refused to vote for Trump in 2024 and said: “I’m going to write in a Republican”). 

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Don't mention the old World Wars

By Michael Lind

Yet the betrayal charges — from MAGA populists and doctrinaire Reaganites alike — misunderstand something fundamental about Trump. 

Far from breaking completely with Republican anti-statism, he began his second term by assigning Elon Musk, a libertarian tycoon, and Russell Vought, a veteran of pre-Trump conservatism, with the task of firing as many civil servants as possible and wrecking as many agencies as they could, often in blatant violation of statutory law and the Constitution. 

In foreign policy, it’s true that Trump in his first term was cautious compared to his predecessors. He didn’t start any new wars, unlike George W. Bush, who launched an unnecessary “forever war” in Iraq alongside the one in Afghanistan; and Barack Obama, who presided over a needless war of choice against the Qaddafi regime in Libya and who fueled an insurgency in Syria that empowered an Al Qaeda warlord, now donning ill-fitting suits.

In the first year of his second term, however, Trump has called for the annexation of Greenland and renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” He has bombed Iran, something the two Bushes refused to do. In recent days, he has threatened to invade Nigeria in response to the Islamist persecution of Nigerian Christians, and appears to be making preparations for war with the Maduro dictatorship in Caracas.

Venezuela happens to be No. 1 among the countries in proven crude oil reserves, surpassing Saudi Arabia, and No. 8 in gas reserves. Iran is No. 4 in crude oil reserves and No. 2 in gas reserves. Nigeria is No. 10 in oil reserves and No. 9 in gas reserves. Wars or threats of wars of regime change against an axis of oil-rich countries bring to mind those two Texan oil men, George W. Bush and the late Dick Cheney, and appealing to evangelical voters (as the Nigeria initiative does) in the service of Petropolitik is very Bushian.

Trump, then, hasn’t broken with the legacy Reagan-Bush consensus on all issues. But on two issues — trade protectionism and labor market protectionism through immigration enforcement and restriction — he has departed radically from the older conservative agenda. Trump has won the presidency twice because he has added to the inherited GOP base a bloc of non-college-educated working-class voters — mostly, but not exclusively, white — who were alienated by the support for free trade and mass immigration of the Bush Republicans in the 1990s and aughts. In other words: He has united Reagan-Bush voters with the kind of voters who in the 1990s voted for H. Ross Perot.

Despite his successes in foreign policy, including the prosecution of the Gulf War and negotiations to end the Cold War, George H. W. Bush, who promoted economic austerity and free trade, repelled many white working-class voters who had been “Nixon Democrats” and later “Reagan Democrats.”

Many of these voters were drawn to the folksy Texan billionaire Ross Perot and his personal presidential vehicle, the Reform Party. Perot garnered 19% of ballots when he ran as an Independent in the 1992 election, more than any third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt ran as the nominee of the Progressive Party against his Republican successor, William Howard Taft, and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Perot’s strongest supporters included many high-school-educated white men and women and union members in the industrial states — the kind who later put Trump in the White House twice. 

Of Perot’s two main issues, economic nationalism and the budget deficit, the former was critical to his working-class support. NAFTA was negotiated under George H. W. Bush and later pushed through Congress by President Bill Clinton in 1993 with only Republican votes. In the House, most Democrats voted against NAFTA, 156 to 102, while Republican support was overwhelming, 132 to 43. GOP senators voted for NAFTA 34 to 10, while Democrats opposed the treaty by 28 to 27.

Perot was ridiculed when he claimed that the passage of NAFTA would result in a “giant sucking sound” of factories and jobs offshored to Mexico. But he was right. Thanks to offshoring by US companies and investment by European and Asian auto makers exploiting low Mexican wages and access to the American market, Mexico today is the third-largest automotive exporter in the world, above the United States and Japan and below only China and the European Union, while Detroit, the former “Motor City,” is a desolate wasteland.  

With the transfer of production to Mexico and the anti-union American South, the wages of formerly well-paid auto workers, adjusted for inflation, declined by more than 17% from 1990 to December 2018, falling below the private-sector average in general.

In his two terms, George W. Bush compounded the damage done by NAFTA to America’s working class by complacently presiding over the offshoring of much of American manufacturing to Communist China as well as to Mexico and other low-wage nations.  Meanwhile, his administration, on behalf of cheap-labor employers, turned a blind eye to massive illegal immigration from Mexico and elsewhere. “Protectionist” became an epithet in the Bush-era GOP.

In 1999, after Perot indicated he wouldn’t run a third time, Trump ran for the presidential nomination of Perot’s Reform Party but dropped out. The nomination went instead to the paleoconservative firebrand Patrick Buchanan, whom Trump denounced as an “anti-Semite” and “Hitler lover.” In 2015, Trump chose to run for the presidential nomination of one of the two major parties, instead of a third party, and unlike Perot, he became president — twice. 

While most of the pre-Trump Republican coalition of hawks, social conservatives, and free-market libertarians remains, Trump has won back many of the working-class voters of the kind who were drawn to Nixon and Reagan but driven away by the two Bushes. Trump doesn’t owe his success to the “culture war,” which was a specialty of the Bushes, as they tried to divert attention from their country-club economic agenda by waving the flag and thumping the Bible.  Trump won because, like Perot, he made protection central to his agenda — the protection of American industries from foreign competition, and the protection of American workers from immigrant competition. 

In his first term, he rewarded these voters with the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which replaced NAFTA, and in his second term, he has cracked down against illegal immigration, including not only criminal migrants, but also unauthorized workers used as pawns by scofflaw employers to lower wages and evade workplace laws.

But in domestic policy, Republicans remain mostly hostile to organized labor and regulation of any kind, and Trump has gone along with the old anti-government Right in backing Vought and Musk and DOGE. The result under Trump is a hybrid — a synthesis of economic nationalism in trade and immigration policy with old-fashioned anti-government conservatism inside America’s borders.

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By Richard Hanania

Is tariff-fenced free-market conservatism in one country a stable policy? It worked for the Republicans for more than half a century between the Civil War and the Great Depression, when most of the GOP combined support for protective tariffs with opposition to organized labor and costly government. In his second Inaugural Address, Trump declared that President William McKinley, known in his time as “the Napoleon of Protection,” “made our country very rich through tariffs.”

He also echoed President Calvin Coolidge, who on Labor Day in 1924, told a group of union leaders that high wages for American workers depended upon immigration restriction and protectionism in trade policy. A “tremendous influx” of immigrants would be followed by “an almost certain reduction of wages.” He continued: “Under free trade, the only way we could meet European competition would be by approaching the European standard of wages. I want to see the American standard of living maintained. We shall not be misled by any appeal for cheap goods, if we remember that this was completely answered by President McKinley when he stated that cheap goods make cheap men. By restrictive immigration, by adequate protection, I want to prevent America from producing cheap men.”

Such hybridity is a feature of American party politics. Party realignments in the United States never involve the complete replacement of an old party with a new party that differs on every issue. American political parties are Frankenstein’s monsters that are altered with the amputation of some limbs and the addition of pieces of  dismembered parties.

Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party stitched former Jacksonian Democrats opposed to secession and slavery, and single-issue abolitionists to the remnants of the moribund Whig Party.  Franklin D. Roosevelt sewed formerly Republican progressives, black voters, and white-ethnic urban immigrant groups that had been divided among the parties onto the Southern core of the older Democrats. 

In 1968, the American Party candidacy of George Wallace, the segregationist Democratic governor of Georgia, split the Democratic coalition, allowing Richard Nixon to defeat Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee. Four years later, Nixon managed to weld many former Wallace populist voters to the Republican Party, creating a presidential majority coalition that Reagan inherited.

Like Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan, Trump has brought about a genuine realignment, recruiting formerly disaffected voters by adding a fourth leg to the conservative tripod, providing two economic legs, as it were — protectionism and immigration restriction in external economic affairs and free-market libertarianism at home. But his voters, again like Perot’s, are swing voters, not part of the Republican base. 

As Trump himself has pointed out, other Republican office-seekers do best in election years when he is on the ticket. And like their predecessors, they can be driven away from the GOP by too much militarism on the part of the hawks, too much anti-government fervor on part of the free-marketeers, and the kind of religious rhetoric that appeals to the dwindling number of evangelicals in America but repels most other voters.

For all his flaws, Trump saved the GOP from dwindling into a permanent minority party of bellicose hawks, evangelicals, and libertarian opponents of the New Deal. Whether the Trump coalition survives Trump’s departure from office may depend on whether the GOP swaps out the old three-legged stool for Trump’s four-legged stool.

As former Trump chief strategist Steven Bannon said, “I don’t care about Hunter’s feelings. This is war.” Hunter is treating it as such and has been preparing a legal counteroffensive in the form of his own threats of prosecution and defamation lawsuits against prominent conservatives. With these opening moves, the battle lines of the 118th Congress have been set, and Americans can expect to hear more and more about Hunter and his laptop (and all its tawdry contents) in the months ahead. Whatever else Joe Biden hopes to accomplish in the second half of his term, his administration will now be weighed down by the need to fight a daily rearguard battle against a Republican House determined to illustrate just how far his second son has fallen from grace.

Occasions like this may help to remind Americans of how their forebears came to found a government rooted, at least in theory, in a rejection of monarchical and aristocratic principles. Members of the founding generation apparently even rejoiced that the father of the nation, George Washington, could not father any children of his own. Many, including Washington himself, saw his infertility as a providential blessing on America’s republican experiment, lest the general’s heirs form the basis of a new kingly dynasty or, more likely, trade in the prestige of the Washington name for personal profit. Which is precisely the charge that today’s Republicans have levelled against the Bidens and the Clintons, and what Democrats have, in turn, accused the Trump children and in-laws of doing.

What Tolstoy wrote about unhappy families rings truer still for political families. Though patricians and political dynasties are — despite its professed ideals — as old as America itself, no one among them has yet written a manual for how to manage the merciless pressures of public life, which inevitably strain the bonds that are supposed to hold families together as well as keep them grounded. Furthermore, the often grossly uneven distribution of talent within such dynasties (which may produce an abundance of leadership traits in one child and a total absence of them in another) leads to expectations that are impossible to fulfil and throws the inadequacies of the “failson” into even starker relief. Indeed, the term “failson” may be a recent coinage, but the archetype it describes — “an incompetent, unsuccessful middle-class or upper-class man who is protected from… duress by his family’s wealth or influence” — is an all too familiar sight in the annals of American politics. Hunter Biden may be its ultimate Platonic form but presidential history furnishes plenty of examples of this dynamic.

Theodore Roosevelt had to deal with the alcoholic excesses of brother Elliott (father of Eleanor), whom he called “a maniac, morally [and] mentally” before his untimely death; the Kennedys had one fabled generation with Jack, Bobby, and Ted, only for Camelot to be inherited by a largely mediocre and often no less controversy-prone successor generation. Among George H.W. Bush’s sons, it was widely assumed that Jeb would take the mantle of leadership while eldest George W. was “the family clown” who threatened to disgrace the Bush name with beer-fuelled antics (to his credit, George W. overcame his alcoholism, became the 43rd president, and managed to disgrace the Bush name while sober). Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, and the Rodham brothers, all with their own questionable business ventures, can similarly stake a claim to being their family’s designated failsons.

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But perhaps the most poignant historical parallel to the current president’s dilemma vis-à-vis his deeply troubled son can be found in Joe Biden’s predecessor as both vice president and president, John Adams. Like Biden, Adams had one son who excelled in all the virtues of statesmanship, John Quincy, and another who utterly failed in the race of life, Charles. While the former went on to succeed his father as president and became a political titan in his own right, the latter, a rakish drunkard and philanderer, was disowned by President Adams (a dramatic rendition was performed to heartbreaking effect by Paul Giamatti in the 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams). Charles Adams died a broken man not long after.

In the case of the Bidens, the part of the natural leader belonged to Joe’s firstborn, the late Beau Biden, who was said to have had all the father’s virtues and none of the flaws, very much the John Quincy to Hunter’s Charles Adams. The contrast between the two could not be clearer: when Hunter flailed in business, sunk into addiction, and began to meet with foreign oligarchs (around the time Joe Biden became vice president), Beau built a profile in Delaware as Attorney General, served in the Iraq war, and was considering a 2016 run for governor just as he was felled by cancer in 2015. He died aged 46.

This was the crowning tragedy in the life of a political family defined by the concurrence of tragedy and triumph. Four decades previously, in 1972, Beau and Hunter survived a car crash that killed Joe’s first wife Neilia and their infant daughter; the accident took place just weeks before the beginning of Joe Biden’s first term as senator. When Beau died, the path opened for Joe to run for president for a third time and win, although the ex-vice president always felt that he was a placeholder for his dead son: the day before his own inauguration, Joe reportedly said: “We should be introducing him as president”.

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Beau had also been a caring and attentive brother to Hunter who made sure he stayed on the wagon and attended Alcoholics Anonymous. Beau’s death only accelerated Hunter’s decline. His involvement with Ukrainian and Chinese energy firms and various tax troubles, for which he is under investigation by a US attorney, as well as the more lurid accounts of his drug and alcohol addictions have been reported on extensively and need not be repeated here. Twitter’s rash decision to censor the New York Post report about “Hunter’s laptop” (which, like “Hillary’s emails”, is now a rallying cry for Republicans) in the middle of the 2020 election campaign turned what could have just been a personally embarrassing story into a far more politically compromising affair. The tragic lot of Hunter Biden, especially in the shadow of his brother’s death, was given expression by Hunter himself when he said to a friend after having just purchased a new .38 handgun, “I know you all think the wrong brother died.” Unlike the Adams’s family, it was the future president who perished and the failson who lived.

Republicans have yet to prove that Joe Biden had any complicity in the suspicious business activities of his son. It is more likely the case that, rather than being the “chairman of the board” and mastermind of a criminal outfit, as the Republican narrative holds, the President’s pitfall, if it can be called that, is in being too doting a father to his delinquent son. There is not enough of the stern Puritanism of John Adams or the cold Victorianism of Theodore Roosevelt in Joe Biden for him to be able to say to his flesh and blood what Adams said to his: “I renounce you.” The excerpt of a call released last year in which Joe Biden offered some tender words of support to his son (which was mocked on conservative media) was simply what any loving American parent (who didn’t subscribe to John Adams’s colonial-era social values) would say to a child, no matter how far lost or broken.

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Do the unwholesome actions and overpriced artworks of Hunter Biden warrant the attention and scrutiny of the press and — where evidence for potential criminal wrongdoing exists — of the relevant authorities? Absolutely. Should the House of Representatives (as all the evidence indicates is the plan) now spend the bulk of its political energies over the next two years on revisiting every sordid twist and turn of the Hunter Biden story before the American public? Absolutely not.

If Republicans were smart, they would know to focus their fire on the President’s policy record, not the human frailties that afflict his already scarred family. A discerning opposition would know how to separate the personal from the properly political, the petty issues from the truly meaningful ones, and this goes for Democrats obsessed with Trump’s tax returns just as much as for any Republican. While the instinct to remain vigilant against corruption is a sound one, taken too far, it can devolve into desperate conspiratorial scandalmongering.

Keeping the focus of politics on actual issues around the functioning of government, instead of on such personality-driven tabloid stories at least helps to make sure that the American people are well-served at an everyday institutional level by their elite, whatever their personal failings or vulnerabilities. For in spite of what Americans have been telling themselves since 1776, “the iron law of oligarchy” ensures that all societies must have an elite composed of elite families, whether it be the Adamses, the Clintons, the Trumps, or the Bidens. And if the country is to have a ruling class, at least make them rule well. Failsons and all.

Youngkin took up residence in the Virginia statehouse in 2021, unexpectedly defeating (51% to 49%) the incumbent, Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe, in a state that is increasingly Left-leaning. The election was decided by independents, who split for Youngkin 54% to 45%. There is a lesson here: the back-and-forth tendencies of the unaffiliated — usually driven by the desire to punish incumbents for failures in the run-up to the election — decide most American elections, which often come down to little more than a coin flip. Youngkin’s election therefore offers a blueprint for a Republican Party free from Donald Trump and trying to win over a nation that’s only getting more liberal.

Youngkin focused his campaign on education. He leaned heavily on the issue of removing “critical race theory” from classrooms and giving parents and local elected officials more control over public school curricula. Meanwhile, private-school graduate (and parent) McAuliffe handed him some excellent fodder for attack ads. The Democrat, who wanted to veto legislation that would have required schools to inform parents about sexual content in educational materials, told his opponent: “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and take books out and make their own decision… I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” This blunder did not go down well with voters.

Since his victory, the liberal media has cloaked Youngkin’s success with a narrative: his privilege appealed to Virginia’s conservative elite. But this is a fiction. Youngkin may be rich (the former private equity executive is worth hundreds of millions), but he actually didn’t over-perform in the state’s wealthy northern counties — Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate who opposed Terry McAuliffe in 2013, fared considerably better in suburban Fairfax, Prince William, and Loudoun, three of Virginia’s five wealthiest counties. Youngkin’s campaign did, however, dramatically increase turnout in the southern and western corners of the state. For instance, he won 80% of the vote in southwestern Dickenson County, the poorest county in Virginia. Winning these areas by massive margins, partly by significantly increasing turnout relative to the 2018 midterm elections enabled Youngkin to more than offset his losses in the suburbs.

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This is the Republican Party’s most viable plan for long-term success: swaying independents, or at least not driving them away, while also increasing turnout in poor rural areas. (The prosperous suburbs are likely lost forever, at least in terms of winning majorities and congressional seats.) Key to achieving it in 2021 was the delicate balance that Youngkin maintained vis-a-vis Trump’s legacy. Initially, he benefited from an event staged by Steve Bannon, at which Trump himself appeared via video. Youngkin thanked them for their endorsements, but later criticised the fact that attendees had pledged allegiance to a flag that had flown at the January 6 rally. Youngkin also found ways to dodge issues related to the propriety of the 2020 elections and whether he would certify its results.

Youngkin walked a fine line when it came to the classically Trumpist issues as well. After securing the nomination, he quickly pivoted from stressing his opposition to abortion (he supports banning the procedure after 15 weeks) and expanded handgun purchase limitations, as he had done during the primary. Instead, he emphasised education, even declining to fill out the candidate survey necessary to secure the formal endorsement of the National Rifle Association.

Crucially, though, he refrained from making these strategic moves in an obvious way. His team did not scrub abortion-related language from his website after he won the primary, as losing Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters’s did. He issued no ringing denunciations of Trump in the style of Wyoming Congressperson Liz Cheney or Utah Senator Mitt Romney. He merely segued from one set of advertisements that were intended to win over the base, to another set of advertisements that would appeal to independents (though he did, once safely atop the party’s ticket, acknowledge Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election).

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Youngkin understands something that is overlooked by both good-government, establishment Republicans, such as Mitt Romney, and potential head-to-head Trump competitors, such as Ron DeSantis: you cannot drive up turnout from the base if you veer too far from their red-meat social issues and support for Trump, but you cannot win the general election if you fail to appeal to independents. Youngkin, according to University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato, is sitting around 0% in the 2024 presidential polling; but he is playing a much longer game than either Trump or DeSantis — he is, as one might expect of someone with a background in finance, engaged in succession planning. 

There is precedent for this, particularly within the Republican Party, and particularly after the departure of a conservative whose rhetorical style set the tone for an entire decade. When then-Vice President George H.W. Bush was preparing to run for president in 1988, he had to fill the shoes of Ronald Reagan, a man who defined the priorities of an increasingly conservative, family values-oriented GOP.

Bush’s similarities to Youngkin are striking but unsurprising — tall, soft-spoken former college athletes with elite pedigrees tend to have political instincts that incline them to moderation. And the course Bush took to victory in his first presidential election mirrored Youngkin’s approach to winning Virginia last year. During the primary, Bush tacked to the Right, noting that he had repudiated his Seventies-era support for Keynesian economics and now backed the idea of a Human Life Amendment that would have effectively overturned Roe v. Wade. Lacking Reagan’s endorsement, Bush finished third in the Iowa caucus, behind centre-Right Senator Bob Dole and far-Right televangelist Pat Robertson. It forced him to curry favour with moderate New Hampshire governor John Sununu, whom he would reward with an appointment as chief of staff following his victory in the general election, while running even harder to the Right to peel the base away from Robertson, who had shocked the political establishment with his strong Iowa performance. Thus was an initial polling deficit in the New Hampshire primary turned into a resounding victory for Bush, the momentum from which carried him to the nomination. 

During the general election, Bush faced Michael Dukakis — Massachusetts’s longest-serving governor and the ostensible architect of the “Massachusetts Miracle”, one of the fastest service-driven economic turnarounds in the history of the rapidly deindustrialising United States. Bush quite astutely ran towards the centre during the general election, hammering home a pledge to oppose tax increases — popular with independent voters, as this was the part of the Reagan legacy that resonated most strongly with them. He paired this with extremely effective attack ads tied to Willie Horton, a convicted felon from Massachusetts who raped a woman while on furlough during Dukakis’s administration, to paint the centre-Left Dukakis as dangerously soft on crime.

He also seized on Dukakis’s opposition, while governor of Massachusetts, to a law that would have required all students to recite the US Pledge of Allegiance — another issue that polled well at the time with independents and painted Dukakis as an extremist and Bush as the patriotic centrist. In one of his most famous campaign speeches, Bush called for a “kinder, gentler nation” in dealing with discrimination, illiteracy and even the environment (a speech derided by Trump in 1990, a mere two years after Bush gave it). The result was a resounding victory in the electoral college, where Bush won the popular vote in 40 of 50 states.

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Bush offers Youngkin, and any aspiring Republican leader, a useful model. He took the popular language of activists and ideologues and finessed it, in order to move the party back towards the centre sufficiently to win over independent voters. The base will always be there, as long as they’re not infuriated by your criticism of their supposed backwardness. But you can increase their turnout if you focus your attack ads on subjects that relate to the nature of governance, but demand minimal expense or executive follow-through to deliver on once elected. Attempting to rewrite the public school history curriculum, which members of both parties have been doing since the early 20th century, is relatively cheap, for instance, compared to issuing pronatalist family subsidies such as those those championed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. But thunderously condemning that curriculum can pay dividends at the ballot box.

Youngkin is going to have to maintain this balance until he can run neither alongside nor against Trump. At the moment, he is having less success than many had hoped during this year’s midterms. In perhaps his worst gaffe of the campaign cycle, he told the audience at a congressional campaign rally for former Latino police officer Yesli Vega that her election could help “send Nancy Pelosi back” to be with her husband Paul, who had been attacked inside their house in California. This kind of tough talk might elicit laughter were it coming from Donald Trump, but from Youngkin — whose relaxed Southern prep-school bonhomie can lapse into something akin to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s sad exhortation to “please clap” — it came across as odd and off-putting.

In a closely-watched congressional election, incumbent Virginia Congressperson and centre-Left “Blue Dog Democrat” Abigail Spanberger withstood a fierce challenge from Yesli Vega. This defeat was cited as a failure of the Youngkin model, but not only was Spanberger — a former CIA officer — arguably the most moderate Democrat in the running, she actually underperformed relative to Terry McAuliffe in her own district, suggesting the tide is still swinging in Youngkin’s direction. 

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If Youngkin is experiencing growing pains, no matter: he is a youthful 55-year-old amid the gerontocracies controlling both parties. Like Bush in 1988, he has a long road ahead of him, but issues he has championed, such as school choice, have major support behind them. On the subject of Covid vaccines, lockdowns and employment mandates — towering issues over the past three years — his middle-of-the-road positions, coupled with recent data suggesting that school lockdowns had a negative impact on educational attainment, suggest he’s comfortably on the winning side of the current national consensus. And so far he’s resisted spitting the excessive venom that could cost him votes from independents. 

If Youngkin is to challenge the likes of DeSantis for the party’s throne, his admittedly thankless job will be to carefully guide the Republican Party back to the centre. As he does so, he needs to pick his culture wars wisely, focusing on issues that offer the greatest return on investment from a marketing cost and the least post-election investment in their fulfilment.

This might seem cynical, but politics is a game played by cynics, or at least by practical operatives — and if Republican leaders generally fail to think like this, the party is in danger of splitting in two. Imagine a nationalist wing for Trump and DeSantis and another, smaller, pro-business wing for Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. That sort of shock therapy might be what many diehards sorely want, but it isn’t what they — or the party — actually need, at least if they’re planning to win elections over the next decade or so. It is certainly not in the best interest of the independent voters splitting their tickets and budgeting their inflation-ravaged paychecks, for whom a flourishing, bipartisan civil society is preferable to civil war.