Former US President Donald Trump
Credit: Reuters File Photo
By Ezra Klein
“Many of the same politicians who now publicly embrace Trump privately dread him,” Nikki Haley said in February. “They know what a disaster he’s been and will continue to be for our party. They’re just too afraid to say it out loud. Well, I’m not afraid to say the hard truth out loud. I feel no need to kiss the ring.”
Yet there Haley was at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, kissing the ring. “President Trump asked me to speak to this convention in the name of unity,” she said. “I’ll start by making one thing perfectly clear: Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period.”
Today’s Republican Party is what political scientists call a “personalist” party: It is built around a person, not an agenda or a coalition. The party is co-chaired by Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. Dissidents, including Liz Cheney and Chris Christie and Adam Kinzinger and even former Vice President Mike Pence, have been exiled.
The Democratic Party has proved itself anything but a personalist party. Its convention this week will reflect a historic, collective act: the party’s mobilization to persuade its leader, Joe Biden, to step aside.
How have the two parties come to be such perfect opposites, photo negatives of each other? One reason predates Trump. The other reason is Trump.
There is a contradiction at the heart of the Republican Party that does not exist at the heart of the Democratic Party. Democrats are united in their belief that the government can, and should, act on behalf of the public. To be on the party’s far left is to believe the government should do much more. To be among its moderates is to believe it should do somewhat more. But all of the people elected as Democrats, from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Sen. Joe Manchin, are there for the same reason: to use the power of the government to pursue their vision of the good. The divides are real and often bitter. But there is always room for negotiation because there is a commonality of purpose.
The modern Republican Party, by contrast, is built upon a loathing of the government. Some of its members want to see the government shrunk and hamstrung. This is the old ethos, best described by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist who famously said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
The Trumpist faction is more focused on purging government institutions of the disloyal. “I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single middle-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” JD Vance said in a 2021 podcast interview. “Replace them with our people, and when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Either way, to become part of the government as it exists now — to be engaged in the day-to-day process of governing — is to open yourself to suspicion and potentially mark yourself for a later purge. The Tea Party and later the Freedom Caucus gleefully primaried Republican incumbents and came to wield enormous power in the House Republican Conference. A series of Republican speakers have been deposed and, before they were deposed, humiliated. John Boehner announced his retirement and left whistling “zip-a-dee-doo-dah.” It took 15 ballots for Kevin McCarthy to be elected speaker, and he was ousted by Republican hard-liners less than a year later.
“I can’t tell you which Republican told me this,” Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told me, “but a Republican who I work very closely with has always said, ‘Adam, I’ll trade you our nuts for your nuts.’ And I’ve always said, ‘No deal.’
“I don’t think we actually have nuts in Congress in that sense,” Smith added, referring to the group of left-wing Democrats. “I’ve worked with every single member of the Squad on the National Defense Authorization Act. I know they’re not going to vote for it, but they offer ideas. For the Republicans, if government is trying to do something, they want to try and stop it. Just reflexively. It is something that’s bred into the Republican Party that makes it hard to maintain an organization that is supposed to be functioning in government.”
Nancy Pelosi told me something similar when I asked her why House Democrats have held together more easily than House Republicans. “It’s very hard to find leverage with people who don’t have really any beliefs or any agenda,” she said. “It’s hard to negotiate with somebody who wants nothing.”
Democrats have their own ideological tensions. But Trump’s victory turned Democrats into a ruthlessly pragmatic party. It was that pragmatism that led them to ultimately nominate Joe Biden in 2020. It was that same pragmatism that led them to abandon him in 2024.
Smith was among the first high-ranking Democrats to publicly call for Biden to drop out of the race. “This was what the Biden people fundamentally misunderstood,” he told me. “They thought it was all about Joe. But it has been about Trump and about stopping him since 2017, and we will unite and do whatever we have to do to be successful in the face of that threat.”
There were weeks when the disagreement over whether Biden should run threatened to tear the party apart. “The matter is closed,” Ocasio-Cortez said. The president’s doubters “need to get a spine or grow a set — one or the other,” Sen. John Fetterman sneered. Biden was blunter. “The voters of the Democratic Party have voted,” he warned congressional Democrats. “They have chosen me.”
But the common ground in all of those discussions was the fear of Trump’s reelection. Those were discussions less about who Democrats loved than what they feared. “A lot of Democrats view Trump as antithetical to the whole American project,” David Axelrod, the chief strategist of President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, told me. “If Haley had been running, I’m not sure you’d have had the same sense of urgency that Democrats feel about Trump.”
No Democrat was more central to the effort to persuade Biden to abandon his reelection campaign than Pelosi. She explained her extraordinary role as being motivated by an extraordinary threat. “I wanted to see a campaign that could win,” she said. “Because I had made a decision that I stayed in Congress to defeat what’s-his-name, because I think he is a danger to our country.” When Pelosi dislikes someone, she often treats the calling of that person’s name as beneath her; Elon Musk also came in for this treatment in our interview.
When I asked Pelosi what she thought a second Trump presidency would mean for the country, she visibly blanched. “I can hardly sleep at night as it is,” she said. “But that would be unthinkable, impossible for our country.”
Crucially, this was a belief that Biden shared, too. “Nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy, and that includes personal ambition,” he said when he dropped out. Try to imagine Trump giving up the nomination by saying that his personal ambitions must be secondary to his party’s success in the election.
That is the formula Democrats have found for maintaining coherence as a political party. They are unified in wanting to use the government to make people’s lives better. They are unified in believing Trump must be stopped. And so it is not quite true that this election is just a contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It is that, but it is also a contest between Donald Trump and the Democratic Party.
That is something the Trump campaign knows — and fears. “I don’t think Joe Biden has a ton of advantages,” one of his campaign managers, Susie Wiles, told The Atlantic in March. “But I do think Democrats do.”