Donald Trump’s decision to launch all-out war against Iran has pleased the legacy GOP establishment and wide swathes of MAGA, while disillusioning independents and others who sincerely believed that he was a Republican of a new and different kind: less trigger-happy in foreign policy (and more pro-labor in domestic policy). To anyone who has been paying attention, however, it has long been obvious that Trump’s two presidencies mark a continuation of the Bush-era Republican mainstream.
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.
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.
“John McCain’s 2008 candidacy was a link in the soft transition of the party of Bush into the party of Trump.”
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.’ ”
“Some of these policies have obvious benefits for cheap-labor small businesses.”
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.
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.
