The news from the West Wing this week is the seeming demise of the Trump Administration’s so-called nationalist faction. It is losing policy battles, and Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist and the leading nationalist, is being marginalized. He was recently removed from his position on the National Security Council, an unprecedented role for a political adviser, and many reports suggest that could be a first step toward Bannon being pushed out of the White House altogether. Trump did little to dampen the speculation. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump described Bannon as “a guy who works for me.”
Not so fast, the nationalists say, insisting that it’s all overblown. “Nationalism winning,” a top adviser and member of the team insisted to me in a message this week, comparing rumors of their demise to inaccurate election forecasts: “Everybody predicted Trump lose!!!!”
He’s correct that the recent skirmishes are only the latest in a long war to define Trumpism. The nationalists, led by Bannon and Stephen Miller, Trump’s top policy adviser, view themselves as a small band of rebels fighting off the traditional power centers of the G.O.P. They believe their philosophy of trade protectionism, restrictive immigration policies, and non-interventionism is the future of the Republican Party. They see the old guard, those they derisively call “the globalists,” as in decline politically but still far more powerful in Washington. Just because Trump won with a nationalist platform doesn’t mean that nationalism has taken over the Party. If anything, Trump’s capture of the Party was only the beginning of the war.
The nationalists’ fight isn’t just inside the White House, where Trump’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, the head of the National Economic Council, is opposed to the Steves on most big issues. They also face a Congress in which there is no real coalition that represents Trump’s ideology. “Look at the neocons in Congress,” a senior White House adviser said. “They still seem to be in control. But Congress is a massive lagging indicator.”
According to this perhaps rose-colored view, Trumpism is ascendant, but it will require several election cycles to sweep away the establishment Republicans. “The path to become an elected member of Congress means that you are probably deeply engaged in national politics for over twenty years,” the senior White House adviser said. “You probably fought some of your biggest fights during the Bush years, and by the time that you’ve developed a level of prominence in Congress you’ve already been on the scene for a very long time.”
The senior White House adviser argued that the Trumpists will start infiltrating Congress when they challenge Republican incumbents from the right in the run-up to the midterm elections. “When you get a genuinely open primary environment, the candidate that’s going to be elected is going to have much more of a nationalist view,” the adviser said, pointing to Trump’s surprise win in the Presidential primaries. “A huge part of Trump’s success—and you saw it in his debates in the primary—was his questioning of conservative foreign-policy orthodoxy.”
Over the last few weeks, the globalists have seemed to be exerting more influence over Trump. He declined to declare China a currency manipulator, which was a signature promise of his campaign. While he frequently promised to tear up NAFTA, recent reports suggest that the White House will make “mostly modest changes” to the trade agreement. This week, the President embraced NATO, which as recently as January he had described as “obsolete,” with the same kind of fulsome praise as any of his predecessors.
Trump’s missile strike last week on a Syrian air base that was used by Bashar al-Assad to launch a chemical-weapons attack suggests a break with his campaign foreign-policy rhetoric. “My attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much,” Trump said after the strike. But unless he dramatically escalates the U.S. role in Syria, Trump has retained his nationalist views on foreign policy, though they’re sometimes misunderstood. The senior White House adviser recently noted that this was “an area where Trump has been remarkably consistent for a long period of time.” He has a point.
Trump’s foreign-policy nationalism breaks with the recent G.O.P. view around one crucial issue: values. Trump almost never speaks about human rights, democracy-building, or Western values as something that the United States has a mission to spread. He speaks of American foreign policy only in terms of interests. Even after the missile strike in Syria, an attack that many human-rights lawyers and liberal internationalists defended, Trump tried to avoid moralistic language, framing the attack as a deterrent that would promote stability. Trump and his advisers have also lived up to their promise of abandoning a values-based foreign policy during meetings in recent weeks with autocrats from Egypt, Russia, and China, who were unburdened by lectures about democracy and human rights.
Trump has always been a skeptic of the universality of Western values, especially democracy. In a 2004 interview with Esquire, Trump said, “Does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the country? C’mon. Two minutes after we leave, there’s going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over.”
He echoed this view in two major foreign-policy speeches last year. Speaking of the chaos in the Middle East, he said in April, “It all began with a dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interests in becoming a Western democracy.” He added that he will focus on “stability,” not democracy, and the United States would stop “trying to spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants.”
In a speech about terrorism in August, he said, “President Obama and Hillary Clinton should never have attempted to build a democracy in Libya, to push for immediate regime change in Syria, or to support the overthrow of”—President Hosni—“Mubarak in Egypt.”
To the extent that there is an emerging Trump doctrine, it is this same sort of realism. Before the Syrian air strike, the senior White House adviser told me, “His criticisms of Iraq, of Syria, of Libya, of Egypt is in every one of them he was saying that these interventions didn’t advance our national-security interests. Bannon’s point is it’s not a rejection of a muscular U.S. foreign policy, it’s the rejection of the idea of U.S. foreign policy as a tool for the expansion of democracy.”
We’ll know that the nationalists have really lost when Trump starts talking about promoting American values abroad.
