Last week, President-Elect Donald Trump nominated Morgan Ortagus, a longtime State Department official, to serve as a deputy special envoy for Middle East peaceand 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 dont work out, but she has strong Republican support, and Im not doing this for me, Im 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 Trumps 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 factionsin this case, hiring a member of the GOP establishment that he has assailed as freaks, warmongers, and neoconswithout paying a price for inconsistency. On the contrary, Trumps unapologetic amorality is a proven electoral asset that allows him to do things other politicians cannot.
Trumps 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 wouldnt ban abortionand to have voters believe him, because they rightly surmised that Trump genuinely doesnt care about the issue. In the same way, Trump was able to say that he recognized Jerusalem as Israels capital for the evangelicals and then appeal to Dearborn, Michigan, as the peace candidate who might one day do something for Muslims.
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On most issues, Trump has no principles, and even on subjects where it seems like he mightsuch as Chinahe has shown remarkable flexibility, as when he moved to ban TikTok in his first term but then about-faced after one of the platforms 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 Trumps 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 theyre 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.
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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, todays 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 Trumps 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.