“His intent is getting worse, but his capacity is diminishing. The next two years will be some kind of mad race to figure out which of these two things will prevail.” — Jonathan Rauch
As the nights get shorter, we are drifting into the autumn of the patriarch. That, at least, is the view of two old friends of the show, Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner, who argued in The New York Times that Trump has finally lost the plot. So will this really go down as the fall that Trump failed?
Rauch and Wehner note what’s failed and what hasn’t. MAGA’s revolutionary project — the regime change, the campaign against the universities, the idea that America had become Flight 93 — was an attempt to rout liberals from the commanding heights of American culture. At first this conservative Leninism succeeded, with universities and law firms folding in the face of a bullying state. But then civil society reorganized, fought back on the streets and in the courts, and district judges mostly held the line. But while the atmosphere of fear has evaporated, Rauch notes, what Trump has won is the transformation of the American state into a patrimonial form of government. With the complicity of Congress, it’s hard to untangle the state as personal property and as a family business.
Wehner’s ethical diagnosis is starker. Coining it as the autumn of the sociopath, he observes sociopathy fused with visible cognitive decline, an old fool with enormous power and fewer people willing to check him. Rather than Trump losing the plot, the plot has lost the doddering patriarch. Forget Venezuela and Cuba. The concluding series in this North American version of The Autumn of the Patriarch will be aired live from La Casa Blanca.
Five Takeaways
• Losing the Plot. The New York Times piece is, Rauch says, consistent with his earlier Atlantic essay on fascism rather than a retreat from it: that piece argued Trump was a fascist type of leader who would probably fail, and this one says the failure has happened. The plot in question is the revolutionary one — the attempt by the people around Trump to rewire American culture from the White House. Wehner’s account of the man is bleaker than the politics. There were guardrails in the first term, Kelly and Mattis among them, and there are far fewer now; what has changed is a fusion of sociopathic tendencies that were always there with a cognitive decline that is obvious to anyone watching. He would update García Márquez’s title to the autumn of the sociopath. And the image that lands: a doddering old fool wandering out of meetings to opine about the ballroom and the White House grass — except that he is a doddering old fool with a tremendous amount of power, surrounded by advisers who in some cases want to go further than he does.
• The Part He Won. Rauch is careful not to declare victory: the article spends its first third on what succeeded, and the most important of those elements to Trump personally is patrimonialism — the organization of government in which the state is the personal property and family business of the leader. That is how he runs the presidency, the Justice Department, trade policy, the Pentagon and the architecture of Washington, with a great deal of complicity from Congress. Why did the Republicans fold? Three reasons, in Rauch’s account: members who defied him were primaried and often beaten; they swim in a media and political environment where ninety per cent of the people they meet judge them by their fidelity to Trump; and they are physically afraid — death threats follow a social-media finger-point, and members of Congress are not wealthy people with round-the-clock security. The first crack in the patrimonial edifice, Rauch notes, came this week from Senator John Curtis of Utah, who called for an investigation into the president’s son’s wedding.
• Minneapolis. Both men treat the Minneapolis protests as the hinge. Before them, Wehner sensed powerlessness and despair among Trump’s critics — a loss of human agency. Then people stood up, peacefully, in freezing temperatures, and ICE pulled out. You can prove the possible by the actual, he says, and Minneapolis was something actual. His caveat is unsparing about his countrymen: much of the rediscovery of virtue has been driven by economic pain — gas prices, grocery prices, interest rates, the Iran debacle. He describes a Trump voter he met in a McLean coffee shop who had voted for the man three times and now says he wouldn’t again. But if the economy were growing at four per cent with inflation at one and a half, Wehner suspects many would not give a damn — and that, he says, is an indictment of who they are. Seventy-seven million people voted for a man who had incited an insurrection. As for the coming memory hole, he expects plenty of retrospective distancing; he cites Gerard Baker and Laura Ingraham as early examples.
• Civil Society Held. The most encouraging thread. The revolutionary project had a theorist — Patrick Deneen, whose 2023 book Regime Change argued that conservatives must not merely constrain the elites who run American society but replace them — and an architect in Christopher Rufo, plus Bannon, the Heritage Foundation and the Flight 93 conviction — Michael Anton’s 2016 essay — that it was now or never. Universities and law firms submitted first, and Rauch thinks the law firms never needed to. Then it turned: lawsuits, reorganization, district court judges doing a remarkable job at some personal risk. What looked like a bulldozer in the first six months now looks like something people are much less frightened of. He is still renaming lakes and excluding networks from the press pool, but the momentum is gone. Their diagnosis of the error is structural: you cannot win a razor-thin margin and then remake a fundamentally non-revolutionary country in two years. Wehner adds the deeper irony — conservative Leninism is a contradiction in terms, since the conservative temperament is anti-revolutionary by definition. Meanwhile the MAGA coalition is cracking up: Shapiro against Levin against Kelly against Carlson, the acrobats going one way and the clowns the other.
• What They Got Wrong. Andrew asked both men what a decade of Trump has changed in them. Wehner has rethought his party and his faith — he remains a Christian but no longer calls himself an evangelical — while his conservatism, the Burke and Oakeshott kind, he still holds. Rauch’s answer is more unsettling: what has not changed is his conviction that the founders got the system right, but he misjudged the character of the American people. It never occurred to him that a man who attempted an insurrection could be a viable candidate, let alone re-elected, and he quotes Roger Sherman’s line at the Constitutional Convention that the people are poorly informed and easily misled. He also missed the distress signals — the people left behind economically and culturally, who were not a hundred per cent wrong about a cosmopolitan conspiracy of the Davos crowd — and pleads guilty to complacency, then and now, because he still doesn’t know what the next agenda looks like. On party: he has been a functional Democrat since 2018, voting only for Democrats until the Republicans rejoin the camp of liberal democracy. And to A...
