Reports of the GOP establishment’s death have been somewhat exaggerated.
In his second term, President Donald Trump has filled his administration with many hard-line ideologues, personal loyalists, and more recent converts to his cause — spurring many to conclude that this was a fully MAGA White House.
But, going against that trend, certain establishment figures continue to hold key administration posts — and their importance and influence have risen in recent weeks, as they’ve won internal battles and steered Trump’s policies in their preferred direction.
Take Scott Bessent, a financier close to Wall Street who Trump named Treasury secretary.
During and immediately after Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, which made little rational sense, Bessent often appeared hapless and at a loss. But Bessent eventually convinced Trump to pause many of the tariffs and has since clearly taken the lead in the administration’s trade negotiations — sidelining hardliners like Peter Navarro, at least for now. He even took on Elon Musk and won, getting Trump to retract an acting IRS commissioner appointment that Musk had sneaked through without Bessent’s knowledge.
Or take Marco Rubio, a more traditional GOP hawk Trump named secretary of state.
The knives were out for Rubio from the start, with much of Washington joking about how he’d inevitably be fired. He too seemed hapless at first as Musk took a wrecking ball to USAID, real estate developer Steve Witkoff took over key foreign negotiations, and Vice President JD Vance gleefully helped scuttle a minerals deal with Ukraine that Rubio had championed — a deal that was, effectively, the hawks’ effort to win Trump over on a more supportive posture toward Ukraine.
But last week, when Trump suddenly needed an interim national security adviser, he turned to Rubio, giving him now two of the administration’s most prominent foreign policy jobs. Rubio also recently got White House permission to fire Pete Marocco, the hardliner who carried out the USAID cuts (in what a Politico source called “the first MAGA world killing from inside the White House”). And that US-Ukraine minerals deal? It was just finalized.
The dynamic is broader than Bessent and Rubio. In contrast to many policy areas where the hardliners are clearly ascendant — immigration, the “anti-wokeness” culture war, Trump’s retribution agenda — there’s something more akin to a tug of war on economic and foreign policy, with dueling factions seeking Trump’s favor.
Trump himself doesn’t yet appear to be ready for a “full MAGA” administration on these fronts. At times, he favors disruption and drama — but at other times, when he decides things have gotten too messy, he returns to establishment figures like Rubio and Bessent to help clean things up.
What the establishment has learned from Trump’s first term
The establishment pushback isn’t happening quite the same way as in Trump’s first administration, when his position as leader of the GOP seemed more tenuous. Back then, you had incidents such as National Economic Council chair Gary Cohn physically taking trade papers off Trump’s desk to prevent him signing them and causing a crisis.
This time around, Trump signed the papers on “Liberation Day” and caused the crisis. Yet a similar situation unfolded, in which Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick reportedly waited until anti-trade hardliner Peter Navarro was sidelined in a meeting far from the Oval Office, then made a beeline for Trump to urge him to lift some of the tariffs — and succeeded.
There’s an important difference in those two anecdotes. Cohn took a decision out of Trump’s hands, because he didn’t believe he could be trusted to make good decisions. Bessent and Lutnick, however, fully accepted that Trump was the decider — and instead focused on convincing him to make what they thought was a better choice.
A similar shift has occurred on foreign policy. In Trump’s first term, establishment hawk officials like John Bolton often seemed to be focused on carrying out their own preferred policy rather than Trump’s. Top Defense Department officials and generals, meanwhile, repeatedly slow-walked and stymied Trump’s efforts to withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan.
Rubio, in contrast, has tried to make it very clear that he’s a team player — by, for instance, helping execute very harsh immigration policies like deporting people to an El Salvador prison and revoking the visas of foreign students criticizing Israel. When Trump criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, so did Rubio.
Yet the big blowup with Vance and Zelenskyy in February was not actually followed by a total US-Ukraine breach, as many in the MAGA base wanted (and as many US allies feared). The minerals deal was revived, and Trump has taken a more critical line toward Putin in recent weeks, giving the Russian president some of the blame for prolonging the war as a peace deal remains elusive.
Now, it would be too much to characterize any of this as a GOP establishment victory.
Trump has already moved policy far away from their preferences with regards to tariffs and Russia and Ukraine, and he could at any point bring the chaos back. What it does show, though, is that the establishment has a pulse — and can still convince Trump that going full MAGA is a mistake.
At least sometimes.
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