Trump Has Reached the Mountaintop
But is he still alone atop his party?
Big day for Mike Johnson, whose job and reputation are on the line, to say nothing of his role as dedicated MAGA selfie background guy. The speaker told reporters this morning he feels confident he can retain his gavel, and do so on the first ballot. Trump authored a post wishing him good luck and urging Republicans to elect him. But, ya know, these folks live for the drama, and between the time we drafted this and sent the email, there was some. Happy Friday.
Our New Reality
by Bill Kristol
Donald Trump has dominated American politics for almost a decade. Thrice the Republican nominee for president, twice the victor in general elections, currently the undisputed master of a political party which will now control both the Senate and the House—Trump is the most consequential American politician of the 21st century.
And he’s only just begun.
For what we are about to see is something new. Not just Trump rising but Trump ascendant. And not just Trump ascendant but Trump triumphant. And not just Trump triumphant but Trumpism triumphant.
That’s the reality of 2025.
Today we will have the organization of the 119th Congress. Republicans will be in charge. And it’s a Republican party shaped by and subservient to Trump that will be in charge. The Republican party of 2017 was different. It was, to a considerable degree, a pre-Trump Republican party. Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan had preceded Trump in their positions. They didn’t owe their rise to Trump. Today’s Republican party, by contrast, is shaped by Trump.
We’ll see the new Congress assemble today. But that will merely be a prelude. The new reality will really hit in just over two weeks, with the second inauguration of Trump as president.
The Trump administration that takes power in 2025 will be very different from the Trump administration that took over in 2017. Trump’s first term featured non-Trumpist figures in key jobs. This one will not. And unlike in 2017, there are in 2025 well worked-out plans to staff his administration with loyalists and to advance a Trumpist agenda throughout the executive branch and on the Hill.
Of course, Trumpism isn’t a fully coherent ideology. There are many varieties of Trumpist loyalists, ranging from MAGA true believers to DOGE oligarchs to Mar-a-Lago cronies. So there will be lots of discord and disarray. Trumpism will not be a well-oiled machine.
Still, we face an unprecedented moment. January 20, 2025 will mark the beginning of something new in America: An utterly shameless demagogue at the head of an authoritarian movement in control of the executive branch and to a considerable degree Congress, with a massive media infrastructure behind him, oligarchs supporting him, and with a demoralized opposition trying to prop up unsteady guardrails.
We’re all familiar (or should be!) with this much-quoted passage, from Abraham Lincoln’s December 1, 1862 message to Congress:
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
The fact that we’ve invoked this statement often—too often!—in the past shouldn’t blind us to its real applicability to the present. Trumpism Triumphant is new.
Today we’ll watch as the 119th Congress convenes, and its members take the oath of office. In just over two weeks, we’ll watch Trump be inaugurated as president. The civic forms will be familiar.
But we will in fact face a new reality. To rise to the occasion, we will have to think anew, and act anew.
The GOP’s Twin Stars
by Andrew Egger
There’s something odd going on. As Bill correctly notes, Donald Trump is at the apex of his political triumph. So why does it feel like he isn’t in the driver’s seat of the right-wing political conversation?
Time and again in recent days, the person setting the agenda for what the GOP nattering class talks about online hasn’t been Trump. It’s been Elon Musk.
It was Musk who sent lawmakers scrambling after he blew up a spending package last month. It was Musk who sparked a MAGA media civil war prior to the new year over the issue of H-1B visas. It’s Musk whose serial mini-obsessions provide a daily agenda for the decentralized right-wing content mill. You probably didn’t have “MAGA media spends days relitigating how effectively British law enforcement prosecuted child sexual abuse back in the aughts” on your early-2025 bingo card; then Musk waded in.
Meanwhile, Trump—long the ur-poster of our politics—is hanging out in the warm bath of Truth Social, replaying the hits. Tariffs are great. Trump’s enemies in the “deep state” suck. Joe Biden is the worst president in history. “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!” he wrote yesterday, after getting it terribly wrong about the terrorist attack in New Orleans. He then posted the same message in meme form.
It’s not that Trump has lost his ability to influence the behavior of Republican elected officials. But Musk has—for now—clearly supplanted him as the guy driving Republican conversation. Presumably this will be righted once Trump actually returns to the White House. Even then, though, we shouldn’t expect Musk to simply fade into the background.
How does a conversation driven by Musk differ from one driven by Trump?
For starters, Trump is an online creator, but he isn’t much of an internet consumer. He cooks his brain the old-fashioned way, by mainlining the boob tube. He doesn’t even read articles on his phone; he has a lackey lug around a portable printer to keep him supplied with hard copies. And he rarely thinks about the world outside America beyond the degree it impacts himself.
Musk, by contrast, is a true power user/abuser of the internet, which means his attention span is cooked and his serial obsessions are wide-ranging and bizarre. Two weeks ago, there wasn’t a thing Musk cared about more than U.S. government spending. Today, as Republicans gear up to elect a speaker who will set their spending agenda, Musk is spending double-digit hours posting dozens of times about unprosecuted gang rape in northern England. (We’re sure Mike Johnson appreciates the absence of attention.)
This highlights another striking difference: Unlike Trump, Musk isn’t even putatively “America First” in any meaningful way. We’ve long joked about how American “nationalists” see other nations’ nationalists—rather than their own compatriots who disagree with them about politics—as their closest allies. But Musk has lately been taking this to new extremes. First it was his endorsement of Germany’s extreme AfD party. This week, it’s been his support for hard-right British figures like soccer hooligan turned anti-Muslim activist Tommy Robinson. Musk’s agenda isn’t national at all; he wants to ringlead a global populist movement.
What any of this means for our politics remains to be seen. But the “President Musk” stuff doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Even if Trump tires of his schtick or starts to resent his place in the spotlight, Musk has his own massive megaphone and seemingly unlimited wealth. Going forward, the MAGA solar system orbits around two stars, each burning out in its own special way.
Quick Hits
HIS BEST FOOT FORWARD: As noted, it’s a big day for Mike Johnson, who needs to survive the thunderdome of his super-thin, fractious majority today if he wants another term as House speaker. Naturally, he’s pulling out all the stops. Johnson “met with a bunch of conservative influencers Wednesday,” Semafor’s Kadia Goba reports, “who plan to launch a large scale campaign against any holdouts at tomorrow’s speaker’s vote especially targeting Reps. [Thomas] Massie and [Chip] Roy who endorsed [Ron] DeSantis.”
Johnson’s attempts to ingratiate himself with the firebreathing online right didn’t stop there. Last night, he teed off on the news of President Biden giving Liz Cheney and Rep. Bennie Thompson the Presidential Citizens Medal, calling it “a complete joke and utter embarrassment” and writing that the recipients “intentionally and repeatedly lied to the American people.”
“Be assured of this: House Republicans WILL continue our investigation into this corrupt committee and it will be FULLY FUNDED so it can continue next Congress,” he went on.
This was Johnson’s staunchest endorsement yet of the whitewashing investigation Rep. Barry Loudermilk is spearheading into January 6th and the congressional investigation of it—an inquiry that, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney notes, has lasted longer than the January 6th Committee itself. As we reported last month, Loudermilk is openly calling for the Trump DOJ to pursue criminal charges against Liz Cheney for her work on the committee. Johnson needs the near-unanimous support of his caucus today; this, apparently, is the thing he thinks they can all agree on.
CATHY ON VANCE: Elon Musk isn’t the only one cheering on Germany’s AfD these days. Vice President-elect JD Vance weighed in on Thursday, praising Musk’s pro-AfD stance and adding this nugget: “American media slanders AfD as Nazi-lite, but AfD is most popular in the same areas of Germany that were most resistant to the Nazis.”
Nazi-lite? Maybe more like “anti-anti-Nazi.” AfD has prominent members who keep saying the darndest things—for instance, that Germany needs to get over the Holocaust already, or that some SS members were very fine people. It’s gotten bad enough that France’s hard-right party, Marine LePen’s National Rally, recently cut ties with the AfD.
That aside: Vance gets an F in history and geography. As numerous replies pointed out, the most pro-AfD regions today tended to be the most pro-Nazi in the 1930s.
So where did Vance get this idea? Maybe, in the great MAGA tradition, he just made it up. But there’s another possibility: Maybe he extrapolated it from the fact that AfD is more popular in former East Germany. In which case, Vance is channeling Soviet propaganda, in which Germany’s communist east was associated with “antifascism” and its liberal democratic West was seen as Nazi-lite. (The official German name of the Berlin Wall was “Antifaschistischer Schutzwall,” “the antifascist rampart.”)
—Cathy Young
FOOD (AND WINE) FIGHT: Read the New York Times on an important dietary-guidelines spat currently preoccupying our public-health elites:
Alcohol is a leading preventable cause of cancer, and alcoholic beverages should carry a warning label as packs of cigarettes do, the U.S. surgeon general said on Friday.
It is the latest salvo in a fierce debate about the risks and benefits of moderate drinking as the influential U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans are about to be updated. For decades, moderate drinking was said to help prevent heart attacks and strokes. . . . But growing research has linked drinking, sometimes even within the recommended limits, to various types of cancer. . . .
Alcohol directly contributes to 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 related deaths each year, the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, said.
Read the whole thing. And . . . enjoy your dry January.
Cheap Shots
Although I completely endorse the Surgeon General's warning about the dangers of alcohol consumption, it seems downright unfair that such a warning be issued less than 3 weeks away from a very good reason to begin drinking.
Mike Johnson reminds me of Tom Nichols' homage to The Screwtape Letters in The Bulwark back in 2019. In part 7, Screwtape advised Wormwood as follows regarding the latter's "patient":
"You take what the man values and defends, and then force him to lie about it in order to protect his sense of himself. In a very short time, you will find that he ends up caring only that he can stay near the continual narcotic of power. Without even realizing it, he will be driven by ego and by a growing fear of being found out for the hypocrite he is. Soon, it will become second nature to him to mobilize his religious beliefs as self-serving protection while the actual voice of the Enemy, if he hears it at all, will be only a dim and muffled annoyance."