What Trump Can Learn From the Last G.O.P. Disaster

New York Times

22-02-2025

This is not my first vibe shift. I was there the last time that the American right seemed to have suddenly claimed a real cultural advantage, the last time liberals and the Democratic Party seemed not just politically defeated but existentially baffled, the last time that people talked about conservatism as a rising counterculture poised to rout and remake the establishment.
These have been the vibes around Donald Trump's return to power, and they were also the vibes of George W. Bush's presidency in the period immediately following Sept. 11, 2001. I was a young conservative beginning a Washington career at the time, and it felt as though the terrorist attacks had changed the political landscape permanently: discrediting the progressive left, reviving a spirit of patriotism and heroism and national greatness, perhaps inspiring a large-scale return to religion, definitely shifting the entire American establishment toward the right.
But not, as it turned out, for long. By the time the Bush presidency limped to its conclusion, the right appeared generationally discredited, and the stage was set for Barack Obama's triumph and the Great Awokening beyond. In hubris and in folly, conservatism had wasted its moment and let a generational opportunity slip away.
Could it happen again? Not in the same way or with the same kind of conclusion: Despite his talk about making Gaza an American development project, Trump isn't likely to occupy a Middle Eastern country and attempt a nation-building effort, and cultural progressivism in 2004 had a lot more room to surge forward than does a retreating wokeness now.
But already, in the attempted shock and awe of the second Trump administration, you can see ways that the vibe shift of 2025 could be squandered. So it's worth drawing some lessons from the Bush era that might apply to Trump and Elon Musk and other would-be counterrevolutionaries today.
The first lesson is not to overread your mandate. Bush-era conservatism built its strong position on one overriding issue — destroying Al Qaeda and killing terrorists — joined to a broader affect of patriotism and religious piety, with moderate stances on government spending and the welfare state. It lost its mandate by expanding the War on Terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, from counterterrorism to nation-building, and also by opening its second term, after an election fought on foreign policy and same-sex marriage, by launching a doomed attempt to remake Social Security. In each case, an unrealistic ideological vision triumphed, and a broader conservative opportunity was lost.
Today, Trump-era conservatism has a clear mandate to restrict immigration, fight inflation and wage war on D.E.I., and an arguable mandate in other areas, like the quest for some kind of armistice in Ukraine. It has no obvious mandate for making deep cuts to Medicaid, among other ideas that congressional Republicans are entertaining, or cutting federal funding for the National Park Service or Alzheimer's research (to pick two examples of recent federal work force cuts from Musk's Department of Government Efficiency). In those areas and others, the administration risks reverting to the anti-government style of Republican politics that Trump himself originally defeated, and persuading Americans once again that the right can't be trusted with ordinary stewardship.
This connects to the second lesson: If you change it, you own it. This is a revision of Colin Powell's 'you break it, you own it' rule about Iraq, and it applies not just to occupied countries but also to federal agencies and programs that are currently targeted for renovation and job cuts.
There are unquestionably many places in the federal leviathan where a ruthless outsider might bring about a necessary revolution. But the would-be reformers need to be aware that their efforts will be judged on performance in a crisis, not just cost savings on a spreadsheet. Maybe that means an outbreak of disease testing a reshaped Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or a Hurricane Katrina-level crisis testing a decentralized version of FEMA. Maybe it just means some unlooked-for failure of administration, akin to the botched Obamacare rollout, in the health or education bureaucracy.
In any of these scenarios, the cost-cutters should expect to take blame for failures or disasters, even if their reforms aren't fully responsible for what went wrong. That's just the political risk of being a crusading revolutionary, and it's why it's essential to be careful, prudent and accepting of some institutional wisdom even while you're running an efficiency crusade.
The point about institutions brings us to the third lesson: You can't build a new elite without co-opting part of the old elite. Elites are remarkably resilient: Just check on the historical data showing how the old upper class often reappears on the far side of wars and plagues and literal revolutions. So if you go to war against an establishment, you need to be clearly wooing some of its members, making it easy for them to join the winning side, even while you're roughing others up.
Bush was pretty good at the roughing-up part, at playing the 'rebel in chief,' as one admiring book put it, but when his presidency hit choppy waters his list of allies thinned out very quickly, and what we now call the 'deep state' had its revenge. Likewise, the Trump administration is unlikely to sustain its revolution if it doesn't co-opt part of the existing professional class — which will not disappear just because some agencies are gutted.
The tech right is important in this regard, but it isn't enough. You also need, say, the Federalist Society lawyer currently unsettled by how Trump wants to run the Department of Justice. Or the education wonk who dislikes D.E.I. but cares about the studies that DOGE is cutting. Or the foreign policy hand who welcomes a push to make Europe bear more burdens but recoils from Trump's rhetorical pandering to Vladimir Putin. Or the former liberal who moved rightward in the era of wokeness but still feels wary of identifying fully with populism.
Some populist conservatives of my acquaintance would insist that, actually, you don't really need any of these waverers and doubters, because Trump and Musk are defining figures of our era and they've repeatedly proved the naysayers wrong. They will act decisively, and everyone else will catch up and come around.
I entirely agree about the historical significance of this president and his tycoon-adviser. But even world-historical figures can walk into disasters (or invade Russia in the winter) if they lack allies or prudence or a clear plan or good advice. And this brings us to the final lesson one should draw from the Bush presidency: that high levels of ambition, charisma and intelligence do not guarantee results.
George W. Bush was no genius, but he was the most effective Republican politician of my adult lifetime before Trump came along, and at his peak he enjoyed approval ratings that no U.S. president is ever likely to see again. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were not the equivalent of Musk in terms of entrepreneurial vision and capability, but by the standards of national security officialdom, they were both about as impressive as it gets: exactly the kind of men you would have wanted in charge of an administration facing a new strategic threat.
Yet neither Bush's political savvy nor the intelligence of his advisers prevented bad decisions, bad outcomes and political collapse.
'You can just do things' has been a watchword for many conservatives admiring some of Trump's early run of executive actions. There is real wisdom there: As a Bush-era Republican official once told a journalist, an ambitious presidency can, in fact, create its own reality, rather than being bound by what the political establishment believes to be the limits of the possible.
But it's also true, as that Republican official discovered, that there are important limits on just how much reality bends itself to power — and it's a very, very good idea to be aware of their existence in advance.