Trump Doesn’t Believe Anything.
That’s Why He Wins.
Transactionalism is Trump’s secret weapon.
January 9, 2025,
5:30 PM ET
Last
week, President-Elect Donald Trump nominated Morgan Ortagus, a
longtime State Department official, to serve as a deputy special envoy for
Middle East peace—and immediately undercut her. “Early on Morgan fought me for
three years, but hopefully has learned her lesson,” Trump wrote when he announced her hire on Truth
Social. “These things usually don’t work out, but she has strong Republican
support, and I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for them.”
It might seem bizarre for an executive to employ someone
they consider at odds with their agenda. But there is a design behind this
seeming dysfunction, and it reflects one of Trump’s strengths: He is a nakedly
transactional coalition leader with few, if any, core beliefs. This enables him
to balance the demands of opposing constituencies without alienating them.
Because Trump has few real commitments, he can take contradictory positions and
appease rival factions—in this case, hiring a member of the GOP establishment
that he has assailed as “freaks,” “warmongers,” and
“neocons”—without paying a price for inconsistency. On the contrary, Trump’s
unapologetic amorality is a proven electoral asset that allows him to do things
other politicians cannot.
Trump’s transparent transactionalism permits him to
assimilate the anti-vaccine support base of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into his camp
while simultaneously trumpeting the success of Operation Warp Speed, with both
sides believing they can leverage the president-elect to their advantage. It
enabled Trump to deliver anti-abortion Supreme Court justices for the religious
right but then declare on the 2024 campaign trail that he wouldn’t ban
abortion—and to have voters believe him, because they rightly surmised that
Trump genuinely doesn’t care about the issue. In the same way, Trump was able
to say that he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital “for the evangelicals” and then appeal to
Dearborn, Michigan, as the “peace” candidate who might one day do something for
Muslims.
Read: The real reason Trump picked Mike Huckabee as
ambassador to Israel
On most issues, Trump has no principles, and even on
subjects where it seems like he might—such as China—he has shown remarkable
flexibility, as when he moved to ban TikTok in his first term but
then about-faced after one of the platform’s
chief investors became a top donor. Because Trump believes
nothing, he holds out the tantalizing prospect that he could do anything,
and many people are willing to take him up on the offer.
Such overt double-dealing allows Trump to manage the many
contradictions of his coalition by giving something to everyone: evangelical
Zionists and Muslim anti-Zionists; Jewish conservatives and anti-Semitic white
nationalists; devout Christians and libertine Barstool bros;
elite Silicon Valley moguls and working-class union members. Outsiders look at
Trump’s supporters and see an unruly rabble riven with irreconcilable tensions.
But they miss what makes the entire operation tick.
By contrast, Democrats and most traditional politicians
sell everything they do under a banner of moral conviction and coherence, which
makes deviations from ideology hard to countenance, difficult to sell to the
base, and unconvincing to the people they’re meant to reach. Vice President
Kamala Harris was dogged throughout her decidedly moderate 2024 campaign
by past progressive stances precisely because
voters expected her positions to be consistent and reflect a principled
worldview. As a result, she reaped the worst of both worlds: The left was
disappointed in her defections from orthodoxy even while many swing voters did
not buy them.
Likewise, presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney and
John Kerry were branded as flip-floppers for their shifts on key issues such as
abortion and the Iraq war. Successful politicians avoid this fate by presenting
their policy pirouettes as authentic “evolution,” but thanks to his unabashed
reputation as a self-interested cynic in it for his own advantage, Trump is
relieved of the need to even pretend.
Of course, we demand moral consistency from our politicians
for a reason. A politics empty of principle, in which everything is for sale,
breeds corruption and public nihilism about the ability of democracy to deliver
on its promises. That said, today’s politicians might take a less corrosive
lesson from Trump: that there is value in honestly acknowledging the
compromises inherent in governance rather than concealing them behind a mask of
sanctimony that will inevitably slip. Balancing competing interests is what
politics is about. The problems arise when those trade-offs are made in service
of the leader, not the people.
Regardless of whether Trump’s mercenary approach to
politics is good for the country, it has undoubtedly been good for him.
Ironically, after failing as a businessman in Atlantic City, the
president-elect has finally succeeded in creating a casino at the White House
where everyone wants in on the action.
