Trump’s second term is fundamentally reshaping American politics.
The first sign of just how revolutionary President Trump’s second term would be actually came two years before his re-election. On June 6, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, delivering pro-life conservatives a victory decades in the making—but which, in the end, was only made possible by Donald Trump.
Before Trump’s first term, Republican presidents had displayed a remarkable knack for preserving a pro-Roe majority on the Court: George H.W. Bush more than offset the conservative jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas by appointing Anthony Kennedy and David Souter. And while both of George W. Bush’s appointees voted to reverse Roe, the younger Bush had tried hard to place a family crony, rather than a judicial conservative like Samuel Alito, on the bench.
Would Alberto Gonzales or Harriet Miers, Bush’s preferred choices, have overturned Roe? Would Chief Justice John Roberts have borne the burden of being the man who ended Roe if his had been the deciding vote, rather than just one of a 6-3 supermajority made possible by Trump’s three anti-Roe justices? Mitt Romney was a staunch supporter of Roe—and a financial contributor to Planned Parenthood—until he started running for the Republican presidential nomination. Would a Republican like Romney, or John McCain, or another Bush have dared do what Trump did?
Trump is the opposite of the Republicans who preceded him. They specialized in telling conservatives what they wanted to hear, but they were afraid to act—on Roe, on racial discrimination against whites and Asians, on immigration, on fulfilling Ronald Reagan’s pledge to dismantle the Department of Education, and on most other priorities for the American Right. The title of a book by Pat Buchanan that was published in 1975—Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories—accurately described the relationship between the Republican base and the leaders it typically put in office through 2015.
What President Trump has done in his first 100 days back in office is to implement as much of the Right’s agenda as he could in a little more than three months. He’s done more for conservative principles in that small span of time than the last two Republican presidents, the Bushes, did in their combined 12 years in the White House. The two Bushes did accomplish a great deal—but in the service of left-liberal aims.
These past 100 days provide a new perspective on the last 45 years of the American Right’s history.
Ronald Reagan was elected to do much of what Trump is now doing. Yet the Reagan era was in one sense not the triumph but the death knell of the post-World War II conservative movement. Before Reagan, it was usually a liability—even within Republican circles—to be identified as a conservative. After Reagan’s victory in 1980, however, centrist and liberal Republicans began to perceive an advantage in rebranding themselves as “conservatives.”
Voters liked what Reagan had offered, but perhaps political insiders who were accustomed to offering something else could retain their power by simply changing their labels and adjusting their language. They astutely recognized which themes in Reagan’s own rhetoric could be appropriated for their ends. His emphasis on America’s greatness and goodness, for example, could be—and soon would be—weaponized against anyone who called attention to the decline of the nation’s industrial workforce or who questioned whether Americanizing the planet through military force was either desirable or possible.
Voters put Reagan in office to do something radical, but many of the Republicans the president placed in his administration—beginning with his choice for vice president, George H.W. Bush—were not political conservatives but institutional conservatives, determined to preserve in Republican drag the institutions built by liberal Democrats.
The permanent “non-political” federal bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., which then as now was overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic in orientation, was also at cross purposes with President Reagan.
According to the Constitution, Reagan was the head of the executive branch. But according to progressive mythology, which even Republicans had internalized, “the government” was something permanent and “independent” of voters’ choices and the Constitution’s provisions. If Republicans wanted to lead the government rather than fight it, they would have to accept the administrative apparatus liberal Democrats had built, along with its attendant mythology of legitimacy—a mythology which necessarily de-legitimized the Constitution itself. It became unthinkable that Republicans would actually abolish the Department of Education or defund National Public Radio. And if the GOP was scared enough of Big Bird, what were the prospects the party would dare put an end to affirmative action or Roe?
Yet President Trump, who is not an ideological conservative, is doing all these things and more. He’s doing them despite the opposition he has faced, and continues to face, from the gatekeepers of ideological conservatism.
They attack him for his tariffs. They attack him for not wanting to prolong the war in Ukraine. They attack him for flouting the commands of judges, though they know the Constitution does not place the executive branch under the judiciary. They know it’s up to Congress to discipline the president with the power of the purse or impeachment. But the mythology of permanent bureaucracy, as opposed to the Constitution, makes it impossible to defund any part of government, even when the opposition party—which in this case is not the Democrats, but everyone who is anti-Trump—insists that the most sacred principles of the rule of law have been violated.
By reinvigorating the distinctions between the federal government’s branches, Trump in his first 100 days has been advancing the urgent task of reorienting the nation away from the progressive blueprint of a permanent, unitary, unelected government of bureaucrats and judges and back toward the Constitution’s design of separate branches that jealously guard their roles, with most powers vested in Congress and the president—not the courts and an executive bureaucracy “independent” of election results.
The hostility that Trump has faced from the elite gatekeepers of conservative or libertarian purity suggests something about what the function of “principle” was in the pre-Trump conservative movement: it was designed to arrest action. The useful thing about an all-or-nothing approach is it allows the self-righteous to believe they’re holding out for “all” when their actions consistently obtain “nothing.” It’s a way of turning the vice of fecklessness into the virtue of moral superiority. And it’s a way for hypocrites to defraud the innocent but gullible.
Even better, to the extent that “principle” excuses doing nothing that alters the status quo, it’s a way to feel righteous without having to live with the consequences of changing the world. As the example of Dobbs illustrates, sometimes the consequences of doing the right thing are disheartening—the country as a whole has not become pro-life simply because Roe has fallen, and many states have even liberalized their abortion laws or enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. As long as “principle” remains out of practical reach, one can imagine its realization would lead to no downsides or disappointments. The danger of actually advancing principle in practice is that the idealist must face reality.
Donald Trump has always forced the American Right to stop daydreaming and confront reality—and the first 100 days of his second term have done that to a greater degree than ever before.
Procedural purists don’t like the reality of what cracking down on illegal immigration entails, though they should know full well that illegal immigration is, by definition, a violation of legal procedure in the first place.
The American Left has for decades succeeded in conning the Right into playing by a more restrictive set of rules than the Left itself follows. If there’s a “principle” that says immigrants may break the law by coming here, and once here they are under the protection of the laws they broke, why shouldn’t there be a “principle” that says judges can be ignored if that’s what it takes to send illegal immigrants away, with the corollary that once they’re no longer in our country, they’re no longer protected by our laws? Elite conservatives and libertarians who are socially and professionally comfortable in public and private institutions controlled by progressives have their reasons, of course, for accepting progressive lawbreaking while condemning any departure the Trump Administration makes from the norms established by liberal opinion.
These have been 100 days of conflict. Trump won’t win every battle, either in the law courts or in the court of public opinion. But he changes the political landscape just by engaging in the fight. He’s doing for every key issue what he did with abortion and Roe.
President Trump in 100 days has opened a frontier, one that the nation, and especially the Right, will be exploring for years to come, after long living on the progressives’ reservation. The frontier is dangerous and uncomfortable, but it’s free, and this frontier, unlike the one tamed by our ancestors, is only political—pending the acquisition of Greenland and Canada anyway. The men and women who will flourish in the America to come after some 1,360 more days like these first 100 will be those with the frontier spirit. Those without it, who have been well-fed and content in a liberal ideological cage, will merely continue to complain.
