Why Trump Wins
Many times over the last several years, Donald Trump’s political opponents on the Right claimed he was a drag on the Republican Party’s political prospects. This argument was never very plausible. The reversals that congressional Republicans suffered over the last six years (such as losing the House and Senate by narrow margins) were well within the normal range of the vicissitudes of electoral politics. But whatever meager credibility such criticisms may have possessed has now been completely laid to rest by President Trump’s astonishing return to power, bringing with him Republican control of both houses of Congress—a feat accomplished in the face of unprecedented opposition from some of the most powerful forces in American political life. Trump has proven himself to be a potent political force and a boost to the fortunes of his party.
Trump, however, will only be around for four more years. If the American Right is to continue to succeed after he has left the scene, it will have to learn the secrets of his success. This means admitting that Trump’s impressive wins are the fruit not of mere luck, nor even of his extraordinary energy, but of his even more extraordinary political astuteness. As the pollster Patrick Ruffini remarked, simply but profoundly, in an election night X post: “Donald Trump understands what politics is about at a fundamental level.”
What, then, does Donald Trump understand about politics that previous leaders of the Republican Party, and the Right more broadly, failed to grasp?
In the first place, the establishment conservatism of the last several decades was hampered by its excessive emphasis on waging a “war of ideas.” According to many conservatives, the path to electoral victory—and perhaps, even more importantly for them, the path to moral purity—lay in making the case for conservative principles such as limited government, respect for the Constitution, traditional morality, and individual responsibility. Conservatives spent a lot of time, energy, and money on ever more sophisticated defenses of, and ever more earnest assertions of, their principles—but without accomplishing satisfactory political results.
To be sure, there is much to be said for a political movement that takes seriously the articulation and defense of its ideas. Such efforts are necessary for politics in the highest sense. As Aristotle observed long ago, human beings are by nature the most political animal precisely because of their capacity for speech—that is, for reasoned discourse about the just and the unjust, the noble and the base, the advantageous and the disadvantageous. In modern America, as in ancient Athens, voters rightly expect to be presented with principled arguments about why they should choose one course over another, or why they should entrust authority to one party over another.
Nevertheless, the conservative movement relied too much on the “war of ideas.” Aristotle was right that human beings are by nature rational animals—but they are not simply rational. Human nature is also made up of other elements, just as deeply rooted and ordinarily even more powerful than reason. Attention to these other parts of the human soul is necessary for any successful political movement—and for any complete account of the common good. As Aristotle’s great teacher Plato observed (and as Aristotle understood just as well), the soul is made up not only of reason but also of spiritedness and desire.
Spiritedness, Plato taught, is the seat of anger, affection or love of one’s own, and love of honor—passions that obviously play a perennial and powerful role in political life. Proper attention to spiritedness, especially in an electoral democracy, means waging not only a “war of ideas” but also, we might say, a “war of emotions.”
Trump was able to win the presidency twice because he found a way to appeal more directly and effectively to the spirited passions than movement conservatives had done. Trump’s nationalism and its attendant slogans—Make America Great Again! America First!—tap into the spirited feelings that regard one’s country as meriting our dedication and protection. In comparison, the older conservatism seems technocratic, lifeless, boring—and it accordingly could not draw the numbers of voters necessary to win elections and govern the country.
Of course, effective political warfare means not only using all of the weapons available, but also preventing one’s enemies from using them. Trump is very good at this too. He both stirs the spiritedness of his supporters and blunts the effectiveness of his enemies’ standard appeals to spiritedness. Unlike the more genteel conservatives of the past who often acknowledged their rivals’ good intentions, Trump never concedes the moral high ground to the Left. For him, their aims are not just misguided but “disgraceful,” “anti-American,” “corrupt,” etc.
According to Plato, the third and lowest part of the soul is “desire,” understood as bodily desire. It’s also called the “money-loving” part, because money is instrumental to the satisfaction of the body’s cravings. A successful political movement has to address this part of the soul as well.
To those of high principles, this appeal may seem debased, but it is perfectly consistent with the understanding of politics taught by our own justly revered Founding Fathers. James Madison famously argued in Federalist 10 that faction is an unavoidable part of politics in a democracy; and faction is mostly driven by “interest,” or differences arising from different kinds and degrees of property.
Trump has understood more clearly, and used more openly, the role of self-interest in politics than many leaders of the Right in recent decades. Hence “no tax on tips,” “no tax on overtime,” and “no tax on Social Security.” These, and many other planks in the Trump platform, are direct and powerful appeals to the natural self-interest of voters.
Once again, however, a winning approach to politics means not only creating interest-based advantages for one’s own party but also taking away the interest-based advantages of the rival party. At present, Trump is showing that he understands better than any Republican in modern times that there must be not only a “war of ideas” and a “war of emotions,” but also a “war of resources.”
The Left’s ideas carry a certain natural attraction for many voters in a society like ours, which means that the Democratic Party will always have a substantial electoral appeal. Nevertheless, it is also true, as Trump and his supporter Elon Musk have discerned, that the Left’s ideas also enjoy the benefit of an artificially inflated appeal due to the Democrats finding creative ways to subsidize their own interests with public money. Accordingly, Trump’s DOGE (Department of Governmental Efficiency) is not only a cost-saving venture—it is waging a “war of resources” by attempting to stop the Left’s raiding of the public treasury to promote their own interests.
We take too low a view of politics if we think it is driven entirely by self-interest and by the turbulent passions associated with spiritedness. But we take too high and unrealistic a view if we think that reasoned argument is the sole key to successful politics. The complex—but readily understandable—truth is that all three of these things make the political world go ‘round.
A successful democratic political movement must appeal to the whole soul, or it won’t be able to get voters to care enough to vote. Consciously or instinctively, Trump grasps this, which is why, to quote Ruffini once again, we can say that “Donald Trump understands what politics is about at a fundamental level.” The Republican Party needs to learn to think like Trump if it wants to succeed like him.
The post Why Trump Wins appeared first on The American Mind.