No War But The Culture War

 Early in Trump 1.0, Adam Serwer offered a pithy line that still encapsulates a lot of Trumpism: The cruelty is the point. Now, as we find ourselves between the hammer and anvil of Trump 2.0, Jon Chait offers a new maxim: There is no war but the culture war.

Ostensibly keen observers of American politics are baffled by the chaos of Trump's tariff zig zags, the lawlessness of his Executive Orders and his contempt for the global order that America has established and preserved for almost a century.

Richardson today offers a nice summary of WHY the priority of Trump - and especially the Brown Shirts that surround him - is to dismantle everything good that America does. She returns, as one should, to Project 2025. (The news media's failure to adequately cover this was perhaps its biggest failure of the last election.)

It's actually JD Vance who offers up the rationale for this assault on basic decency.

In place of those structures, today’s MAGA leaders intend to create their own new institutions, shaped by their own people, whose ideological purity trumps their abilities. As Vice President J.D. Vance explained in a 2021 interview, he and his ilk believe that American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.

This is the crux of the matter. These are not "conservatives"; they are counterrevolutionary extremists. The point of Project 2025 and everything they have done so far is to overwhelm opposition and create so many targets for this outrage that they overwhelm everyone and everything.

This is not popular. Not even with Trump voters. There's a sense that they might be getting just how unpopular they are. They've withdrawn Elise Stefanik's nomination to be UN Ambassador. They did so because they legitimately fear losing the special election in Florida to replace Mike "Wanna Join My Secret Group Chat" Waltz. Trump won that district by 30 points. That would mean Stefanik's district is up for grabs. 

Losing the House this early would be extremely damaging to their plans. However, as Josh Marshall has often noted, the federal government is only one locus of power. The states are another, the people a third. There is no guarantee that the American people will continue to let the republic end to placate a handful of religious extremists. 

My dad and I would argue politics all the time. He was a Southern Democrat who moved right, and he would complain about why the Democrats were so focused on culture war stuff like abortion and gay rights. That sort of person isn't going to like the same dynamic from Republicans.

Yes, the Signal Scandal is bad and has legs. However, the markets are freaking out and Americans are waking to the fact that Trump lied to them again. Trump is not an engine of American Greatness; he is a chaos agent acting to destroy everything that is even close to something that might be considered "the other side" of the culture war.