Let's start with the really easy one.
Fiscal conservatives only care about one thing: making sure the country doesn't spend more than it earns. In their view excessive budget deficits lead to economic distortions and inflation, knocking all of society out of kilter.
Fiscal conservatives have had a rough time of late. George W Bush ran the biggest post-war deficits in the country's history, only to be outdone by Obama, only to be outdone by Trump. Then came coronavirus; the new batches of deficit spending nearly sent fiscal voters into straightjackets. They've not had a friend in the Republican Party at the national level for a while now and are clearly the weakest of the three old-guard Republican factions. Trump viewed their accounting-inspired fuddy-duddyness as a check on his power. They were among the first groups of traditional Republicans that he sidelined. Trump completely purged them from his administration and the Republican Party apparatus, and even campaigned against them – successfully – in the 2018 midterms. The few that are left in public office spend most of their time looking for beer to cry into.
A far larger and more powerful faction are the
national security conservatives.
This faction is particularly sick from the events of January 6. What went down at the Capitol complex is
not what they have fought and bled and sacrificed for, and to have a sitting president be the cause of the riot is so far past disgusting the entire military is likely to be in a state of shock and rage for some time. The breach between the national security establishment and the Trump administration is deep and bitter and likely permanent.
For me, the single biggest takeaway is that on January 6 the Pentagon did
not insist that the order to mobilize the National Guard come from the president. The military acted despite Trump's obvious objections. Then, on January 12, the Joint Chiefs released a statement condemning the riots and anyone playing a role in them, supporting the election process and expressly noting that Biden won, and making
very clear they would not respond to illegal orders. It doesn't take much reading between the lines to understand what they think about Trump. You can read the Joint Chief's statement for yourself
here. Functionally speaking, the military stopped recognizing Trump as Commander in Chief.
The bad blood hardly began on January 6.
Trump relied heavily upon "my generals" to staff his cabinet, with James Mattis, HR McMaster, and John Kelly being the three most prominent (and respected) to serve. All three (and many others across the national security community) acted to educate and inform a president who had little desire to be educated or informed. All three (and many others across the national security community) worked to rein in Trump's darker impulses, and all three (and many others across the national security community) were dismissed for their diligence and integrity.
Trump has used the military as a political prop since the beginning of his presidency. Trump has berated any intelligence official who dares do their job, which is to present the country's leadership with the truth, no matter how personally, politically, or ideologically inconvenient that might be. Federal law enforcement's job is to…enforce the country's laws. Even applying them to the President's allies. And inner circle. And the President himself.
Trump's casual – and in some cases, caustic – dismissal of everything the national security community has been trained to do and molded to stand for reverberated throughout the services. Once Trump realized the community wasn't simply going to unquestioningly carry out his will, he began a thorough (if erratic) campaign to root out the national security community from positions of influence within his administration, then within Congress, and finally within the Republican Party. For all intents and purposes, national security conservatives are no longer Republicans. And in the aftermath of January 6, it is likely they will not rejoin.
The final leg in the Republican old-guard triad is the
business community.
The relationship started out smashingly. Right out of the gate Trump slashed corporate tax rates, began a bonfire of the regulations, and formed a series of advisory councils of business leaders to advise him on every aspect of the economy. Businesses
loved that. (Fun fact: I loved it too! Several of my clients snuck copies of my books onto the
Resolute desk. No photos unfortunately. V sad.)
The affair cooled quickly. Recommendations were met with ideological, even nonsensical, rhetoric and personal insults. More than one captain of industry was called a "f**king fag" to his face. Disagreements, no matter how delicately or respectfully presented, were rewarded with expulsion and isolation. In less than six months, Trump had disbanded
all the advisory councils. Then came the harangues on supply chains. And the trade wars. And the demands for campaign funding that bordered on the threatening.
When COVID struck in early 2020 the business community had loads of ideas about what the federal government could and could not and should and should not do. But on everything from the possibility of building a domestic supply chain for personal protective gear to how to prepare the logistics of vaccine distribution, the responses from the Trump administration ranged from bewilderingly obtuse to outright hostile. Businesspeople felt like they did…during the Obama administration: under rhetorical siege and facing a hermetically sealed White House that they could neither penetrate nor understand. The business community lays most of the blame for America's poor coronavirus management at the feet of the man charged to do the managing: the president.
And then we had the Capitol riots on January 6.
All Republicans say they value law and order in society, and arguably all do. But just as all of us internally rank-order what's important, so too does the business community. For them, law & order is
always near the very top. They have facilities, staff, reputations. If law & order breaks down, nothing else that they do matters. To see the president summon and rally the rioters and launch them against the Capitol complex was simply too much to bear. The bulk of the American business community – up to and including the American Chamber of Commerce – condemned the President that day and called upon Vice President Mike Pence to remove him from office.
Trumpism scares the business community for the same reason terrorism and the Black Lives Matters movements scare them. It is disruptive. To laws. To regulations. To taxes. To the workforce. To consumption. To investment. To supply chains. To stability.
What began with Techworld's deplatforming of TeamTrump has extended across the entire business space. Companies are falling over one another to cut their ties not simply to TeamTrump but to
any affiliated politician who participated in efforts to undermine the 2020 general elections. Rex Tillerson, both former Exxon CEO and Trump's first Secretary of State, has been particularly vocal, laying out how and why the United States is "in a worse place today than we were before he [Trump] came in".
But if you're looking for a truly monumental turning point, the names to watch are Koch, Ricketts, Marcus, and Griffin. All are huge business names
and massive Republican donors
and staunch social conservatives. None were thrilled when Trump took over the Republican Party. All got (very) quiet when Trump turned the party into a cult of personality. All have (very
very) quietly signaled in recent days that they are reevaluating…everything about their relationships with politicians, candidates, and the party's infrastructure, with particularly narrowed eyes on those Congresspeople who after the January 6 riot still chose to vote against certifying the election results. A mass desertion of the business community would be bad enough for what's left of the Republican Party but should names like these leave – names that have fused business and social conservativism – the breach would be deep and permanent. The Republican Party would no longer be the party of money.
The business and national security communities are having a bit of a dark contest over who is more pissed off at President Trump, because in Washington no one is in charge of the things they care about. The Defense Secretary has been in the big chair only since the week after the election. The Attorney General only since Christmas. The Department of Homeland Security Secretary was the administrator of FEMA until midnight January 12…which left FEMA without a captain. None of them have been Congressionally confirmed, and arguably none of them are sufficiently qualified for the jobs they now hold. Such positions have never been empty at a time of a presidential transition, much less all four at once.
Similar inadequacies and vacancies spill down the staff rosters throughout the federal government – especially at DHS and Commerce – and are at least in part responsible for the lack of law enforcement preparedness at the Capitol on January 6. For these communities, it feels as if for Donald Trump, law & order and national security are not even worthy of consideration.
And yet elections aren't just about money or numbers of factions, but also about the numbers of voters. Even if the fiscal, national security and business factions fully disconnect from the Republican coalition and none of them ever vote red again, Trump will have still
increased the size of the Republican Party simply from mobilizing the populists. This isn't over.
Not by a long shot.
Now for those of you on the Left who are getting all giddy. Curb your damn enthusiasm. If you think I would wax philosophic for 3000 words about Republicans-changed-this and Republicans-gone-that and
not take the Democratic Party through the wringer in the next breath, well, then you don't know me at all.
Coming soon:
Life After Trump, Part IV: Building a Better Democratic Party…Maybe