Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
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From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. There's an old idea about the purpose of science fiction that I've always loved. It aims to create cognitive estrangement, to make the familiar seem unfamiliar so that it can be looked at anew. But sometimes the opposite is needed. Sometimes we need to make the unfamiliar into the familiar. We need to see what is old in what feels new and strange. This can be a challenge with Donald Trump. He can appear as a hurricane of strangeness. It was a liberal rallying cry in his first term. Don't normalize him. Remember this is abnormal. And it's no less true, in a way, in his second term. An anti-vax conspiracy theorist for HHS secretary? That's abnormal.
A former Fox & Friends host for defense secretary? Abnormal. An underqualified hatchet man who has vowed to use the state to go after Trump's enemies to lead the FBI? The Senate would even consider that abnormal. Billionaire after billionaire trekking to the president-elect's private club in Florida to curry favor with him? Abnormal. And yet we also need to confront the reality that this is all normal. We have seen it all before. Sometimes here, but much more often elsewhere. Donald Trump is something old, not something new. We spend so much time talking about the rules he breaks. We don't spend much time detailing the rules he obeys. But the way I've been looking at this is that America is undergoing a regime change.
We think of that term as describing a change in who is in power, but I mean it in the sense of the political system itself, the way that power works. We're used to our politics revolving around what the political scientists call programmatic political parties. These are coalitions that are bound together by shared interests and goals. They feature agreements that supersede the desires of any particular leader. They have large collections of elites and staffers and functionaries who know how to work together across administrations and periods. And so they bind new administrations. If you had seen Kamala Harris win the election, there's no chance that she would have named a pro-life candidate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Democrats are a pro-choice party. If Ron DeSantis had been the Republican nominee and he had won the election, you would also see a pro-life candidate lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
Republicans are a pro-life party, but Donald Trump won. And because RFK Jr. was useful to him, the fact that RFK Jr. is pro-choice did not stop him from making that nomination, and it may not stop Republicans from accepting it. The fact that they would even consider a pro-choice candidate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, that shows you how much control Donald Trump has over that party. It shows you that that party is working in a different way now. There is this other kind of political party. It's called a personalist party, a party subordinate to a person. It works less like the political parties we're used to and more like royal courts. These parties have become more common worldwide in recent decades. They're nothing new. And when they emerge in democracies, they make backsliding into some form of hybrid authoritarianism a lot more likely. And that's what's different between Donald Trump's first and second terms. I've been saying this for months. You don't watch the man. Watch the institutions.
In his first term, he led a programmatic party. He existed in this uneasy coalition with a Republican party that was there before him, that expected to be there in similar form after him. But he's conquered that party now. He's remade it. Now, it's Donald Trump's party. Speaker Mike Johnson is there only with Donald Trump's support. It is Donald Trump who is a crucial voice in primary contests. It's Donald Trump's daughter-in-law who co-leads the Republican National Committee. Personals regimes, they revolve around transactions with the leader. That's why so many billionaires and elites are now dining at Mar-a-Lago. They understand what the terms on the table are. You win Trump's favor by being of use to him. And then maybe you prosper. You get power. You get money.
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