David French: The Republican Party has a split-personality problem

There is a paradox at the heart of Donald Trump’s campaign, a potentially irreconcilable divide that could damage his potential new presidency right from the start.

The people who would make Trump president want different things from him, and those differences present political perils for Trump and also make it difficult to predict the contours of his second term precisely. It could be just as extreme as millions of Americans rightly fear, or it could be more moderate – with the deciding factor being Trump’s own sense of self-interest and personal grievance. And when Trump’s emotions ultimately dictate policy, it’s fair for Americans to be concerned about worst-case outcomes.

As we have all learned, Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters have become deeply radicalized, convinced that the nation is on the verge of extinction, in need of revolution. Even worse, they feel personally persecuted by a “uniparty” or “regime” that despises them and rejects their values. They want disruptive change, and if violence is necessary, so be it. As the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, put it recently, our country is “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

The Heritage Foundation is arguably America’s most powerful and influential right-wing think tank, and Roberts said those words on “War Room,” the podcast hosted by a former Trump adviser, Steve Bannon. Bannon, however, didn’t host the interview. He’d reported to prison the day before to serve a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress. Before he entered the prison, he hosted a circuslike news conference that featured a who’s who of MAGA cranks.

Bannon sounded the same themes as Roberts. “Victory or death,” he declared. “We either win, or we’re going to have the death of a constitutional republic.”

But here’s the paradox. If Trump does win again, it won’t be because of the MAGA revolutionaries. It will be because millions of his voters want the opposite of revolution. They want calm. They want the world to feel less dangerous, and they want milk, eggs and gasoline to cost less. These are the nostalgia voters, the people whose impressions of Trump’s presidency have improved since he left office, who long for the world of Jan. 1, 2020.

Both the MAGA revolutionaries and the nostalgia voters do share a sense of distress about the current state of the country (most notably about immigration), but they diverge on both the depth of the crisis and the extent of the necessary remedies. The complaint of the nostalgia voters is simple and straightforward: They still feel the effects of the spikes in inflation, they’re worried about crime, they want the border brought under control, and they feel uneasy about the multiplying conflicts abroad.

If nostalgia voters dominated the Trump coalition, then one would expect a rather normal second Trump term, at least by Trump standards. Yes, he’d bluster and yell and post rants on social media, but his policies would not be that problematic. Many of the worst domestic challenges are easing. Inflation is lower, and violent crime is much lower. President Joe Biden’s recent policy changes tightening border controls have contributed to a sharp drop in illegal crossings.

It does not require a revolution to change U.S. foreign policy. It does not require a revolution to decrease inflation or crime. But don’t tell that to the MAGA revolutionaries. For them, the clock is about to strike midnight, and only the most drastic measures will save the United States from descending into universal darkness.

To the MAGA revolutionary, the country is in the midst of a foreign invasion, groaning under the oppression of woke tyrants and fighting for the very survival of the Christian faith in America. Defeating this corrupt American establishment requires extreme disruption. That means deportation on a scale that America has never seen. That means mass firings of civil servants. That means altering First Amendment jurisprudence to suppress the speech of cultural and political opponents. That can even mean prosecuting political opponents because they’re your opponents.

All of those measures (and those are hardly the only dangerous proposals in MAGA America) add up to chaos. That’s just fine with Bannon. As he told my colleague David Brooks in a disturbing conversation, “We need to be street fighters.” He speaks of taking a “blowtorch” to the Department of Justice. He seeks the “deconstruction of the administrative state” and the “complete, total destruction of the deep state.”

So how do we predict the future when the different halves of the Trump coalition have such different outlooks and such different goals? Is it a true coalition at all or more an amalgamation of competing perspectives?

Predictions are complicated by Trump himself. Temperamentally, he’s angry and impulsive. His record of public statements is replete with threats of war crimes, vows to punish his enemies and malicious lies about his opponents. Politically, however, he is less ideological than he is self-interested. He will abandon any person or any movement that he perceives as a threat to his power.

For now, that means the Heritage Foundation and the anti-abortion movement have to pay the price. Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s signature, comprehensive (it’s outlined in a more than 900-page book) policy program for a second Trump term.

Most significantly, the proposed Republican Party platform on abortion is the weakest it has been in more than 40 years. Rather than seeking meaningful national restrictions on abortion, the party now says it wants to punt the issue almost entirely to the states. It’s a strategic change that would probably have split the Republican Party in the years before Trump, but he now rules with such authority that many of the most outspoken anti-abortion activists have meekly fallen in line.

We don’t know which Republican faction will prevail or for how long, if Trump wins. Will his next term be as malicious and radical as many of us fear? Or will it be tempered by the understanding that a vast majority of Americans desire calm? The nostalgia voters may not like an uncontrolled border, but they’d almost certainly recoil at the sheer misery and disruption of a true mass-detention and mass-deportation regime.

But there is one thing we can be sure of in a second Trump term, and that is Trump himself. If anything, he is angrier and more erratic and than he was in 2016. He cares far less about his supporters’ needs than his own impulses and desires, and the darker those desires become, the more we risk the chaos that Bannon craves.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.