The Iran war has revealed President Trump’s true weakness. There is a kind of person who truly flummoxes Trump, the person he just can’t understand — the true believer.
Trump’s central political insight (and perhaps his key political advantage) is that he understood that Americans weren’t quite cynical enough about many of our politicians. As much as we already thought they placed power over principle, we didn’t know the half of it. He could see our politicians more clearly than we could — perhaps because he’d spent a lifetime in their presence, writing them large checks while hearing their empty promises.
And he showed it by placing a big carrot and a giant stick in front of the Republican political class, and then we watched as virtually everyone fell in line.
It’s worth emphasizing the size of the carrot and the stick. First, the carrot: Joining with Trump doesn’t just mean that you gain access to the room where it happens, to use Lin-Manuel Miranda’s memorable phrase. For a substantial number of supporters, it means access to a degree of autonomy and impunity that’s virtually unknown in modern American politics.
As Corey Lewandowski was reported to have said when he was at the Department of Homeland Security, “I’m not worried. I do whatever the f — k I want. DJT will pardon me.” Joining with Trump gave Republican elites access to wealth and power more reminiscent of a banana republic than a constitutional democracy.
But it was about more than just joining with Trump — the deeper your devotion, the greater your opportunity. Deep devotion, not personal accomplishment, became the single most important qualification for high office. Write a series of children’s books praising “King Donald,” for example, and you can become F.B.I. director.
Conversely, break with Trump, and you’d face a personal and professional apocalypse. Republican state senators in Indiana learned that lesson once again on Tuesday night — most of the Republicans who refused to redistrict the state to make it more favorable to their party lost their primaries, and it wasn’t close.
Trump is not a man who values dissent, to put it mildly. The idea of a “team of rivals” is completely alien to him. Talk to virtually any prominent person who breaks with Trump, and they can tell you stories of terrifying days and sleepless nights as MAGA’s minions made their lives a living hell.
At the core of Trump’s worldview is a belief that the world is a fundamentally transactional place, and that everyone has a price.
The Republican Party has done nothing to disabuse him of the notion. Even the religious leaders around him are fundamentally transactional. As they’ve demonstrated, they’ll put up with virtually any behavior from Trump so long as he delivers on a few, simple promises. And now — especially when it comes to abortion — he doesn’t even have to deliver on those. For some it seems as if access to power alone is compensation enough.
The key to Trump’s power isn’t just that he accurately sensed that much of the Republican establishment paid lip service to principle but really cared about power — it’s that he knew millions upon millions of voters possessed similar values. Their commitments to character or ideology took a back seat to the simple desire to defeat their opponents. The most important thing was to win. Anything else was a luxury.
And, in a strange way, they appreciated him for his brazenness. In this cynical view, all politicians are, deep down, just like Trump. They were faking their dedication to principle. As for Trump, he was the honest crook. He was like the mob boss who didn’t insult our intelligence by pretending to be in the sanitation business.
Like calls out to like, and over time Trump has built one of the most purely transactional coalitions in politics. It should surprise no one that prosperity gospel pastors were among the first Christians to answer Trump’s call. Their entire religion is transactional — with God dispensing health and wealth in direct response to the financial donations of the faithful.
Nor should we be surprised that such a substantial proportion of the nation’s tech moguls found their way to MAGA. Forget culture, their politics are downstream of commerce, and Trump has promised crypto and A.I. riches to all those who fall in line behind him.
From pardons to prediction markets, the transactional nature of the Trump administration is perhaps its most obvious characteristic. And transactional people often soothe their own consciences with the belief that everyone else is ultimately transactional as well — the only question is their price.
But that’s wrong. Not everyone is transactional. Some people — for better and for worse — actually have beliefs that they’re willing to die for, and Trump is painfully, obviously baffled when he encounters belief like that.
It’s embarrassing, for example, to watch him flail his way through the Iran war, shifting strategies, objectives and timelines sometimes by the day. It’s obvious that he thought Iran would be another Venezuela. In Venezuela, he was able to capture the leader and then more or less bend the remaining regime elements to his will, at least for now.
But in Iran, he helped Israel decapitate virtually all of the nation’s senior leadership, and the rest of the regime seems to have become more intransigent and less willing to negotiate. Even worse, he also seems to have enabled the most fanatical elements of the regime — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — rather than the slightly more moderate clerics.
In response, Trump plays the only cards he knows how to play — alternating between threatening death and destruction and proposing business deals. Remember when he considered a “joint venture” to control the Strait of Hormuz with Iran?
It turns out that there is an immense difference between your median South American autocracy and Twelver Shi’ism, the dominant religion of the Iranian regime. Threatening death to people who are willing to die for their cause doesn’t have the same effect as threatening people who seek mainly wealth and power. They are also quite willing to make other people die for their cause as well — and that means the Iranian regime (like Putin’s Russia) will endure catastrophic casualties without shaking its commitment or tempting it to yield.
Why hasn’t Trump been able to force an end to the Ukraine war? There are true believers on both sides. The Ukrainians won’t willingly yield an inch to the man who wants to destroy them, and Vladimir Putin is infused with his own sense of religious purpose and historic destiny.
Again, this true belief can be good or bad. Ukraine’s zealous defense of its own liberty and independence is heroic and deeply virtuous. So is Denmark’s defense of its own sovereignty in the face of Trump’s bullying. In fact, much of Western Europe was transactional with Trump until they realized the price of dealing with Trump was simply too high to pay.
They thought they could hunker down and weather another Trump term, but he created a crisis so grave that Europe had to stand if it wanted to preserve any shred of dignity and independence.
The pope’s steadfast adherence to Catholic doctrine is yet another example. One gets the sense that he’s almost amused at the idea that Trump’s bellicose rhetoric should have any influence at all on his public professions of Christian faith.
At home, Trump has obviously been flummoxed by judges who stubbornly stick to principle and seem immune to his bluster. Constitutional fidelity is alien to him. He cannot understand why the justices he appointed will not do exactly what he wants.
At the same time, it’s no coincidence that the members of the MAGA coalition who are most apt to break with him are the cranks and conspiracists — people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, and even Tucker Carlson. They came into the MAGA coalition as true believers, and they’re the ones who seem genuinely outraged when Trump breaks his promises and betrays their trust.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the last 10 years of American political life has been the way that Trump has exposed layers of differences in American life beyond right versus left. In fact, in many ways right versus left has been the least consequential aspect of the American divide. The Republican Party bears little ideological resemblance to the G.O.P. of even the very recent past.
Instead, it’s been between decent and indecent. Honest and dishonest. Transactional and principled.
The first Trump administration was a complex hybrid of all these characteristics. The president’s indecency and dishonesty were paramount, of course, but for years they existed side-by-side with the integrity of Jim Mattis, for example, and in the run-up to Jan. 6 and on the day itself, Trump encountered the lines that Mike Pence would not cross.
There is no Mattis or Pence in the present administration, and that doesn’t just mean that Trump’s id and impulses are unrestrained; it also means that he’s staffed his administration with people who can’t even comprehend integrity, much less genuine belief.
It’s not that you can’t negotiate with people who possess real convictions. Of course you can. But the nature of the negotiation is entirely different. You have to take into account the other side’s values. You have to know their red lines. And you have to know that they can’t be personally bought. If a person genuinely believes their soul is at stake, then no amount of money or power can compensate them for an eternity in hell.
As Trump has concentrated the most transactional figures in American politics into his coalition, it’s clear that they’ve created their own alternate reality — where everyone is like them, willing to surrender even their deepest values (if they even have deep values) when the price is right.
Yet that alternate reality was never going to hold. Trump was always going to confront true believers, and it is quite plain that MAGA is now fighting forces of both good and evil that they can’t even begin to understand.
Some other things I did
In lieu of writing my normal Sunday column, I had the chance to sit down with Justice Neil Gorsuch and talk to him about his new book — a children’s book about the Declaration of Independence — and discuss the American founding, originalism and his view of the role of history in constitutional jurisprudence. Here are some of the more interesting excerpts.
First, here’s Justice Gorsuch on the importance of the separation of powers:
We’re a creedal nation, right, David? I mean, we don’t share a religion, we don’t share a race, we share an idea, OK? And that idea has to be passed down generation to generation through history, as we discussed.
The Constitution, with its separation of powers, is our how-to manual. And the one thing James Madison knew, in devising the Virginia Plan basis of the Constitution, is that men are not angels, all right? And you have to separate power assiduously to keep us free, to ensure that everybody is treated equally, to make real the idea of self-rule, and certainly to protect your unalienable rights.
Next, here’s Justice Gorsuch on the role of the Supreme Court versus Congress:
Well, I do think that it would be crazy to say we are a democracy or a republic, and yet simultaneously entertain the notion that nine old judges in Washington should govern us all. Now, you’d want nine wise old judges to decide the meaning of a law independently, without fear or favor to anyone, and vindicate your rights in a trial. Absolutely, that makes perfect — but to rule everybody? To pass the laws? To amend the Constitution? That would make a mockery of the Declaration and of the Constitution.
I also asked Justice Gorsuch about his jurisprudence, particularly his emphasis on individual rights and the protection of individual liberty in the face of large and complex governmental systems:
I would say that one of the most striking and inspirational things about the American experiment, to me, is the emphasis it places on the individual and its intrinsic value. You’re not valuable as a cog and a machine to others’ ends. You have value in your own right. You are my equal. You have inalienable rights. You have every bit as much right to rule yourself as I do. And those ideas, I just think those are perfect ideas. Are they imperfectly executed? Do we have a ways to go, even today? You betcha. But those ideas speak to every human heart. They exclude no one and they inspire me, yes.
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