Over the last decade, it’s become commonplace to describe President Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party as hostile — as if the one-time New York real estate mogul was the political version of a corporate raider. That’s a gross mischaracterization, one that has contributed to a misunderstanding of the source of Trump’s hypnotic influence over the GOP.

Trump managed to upend the party because, long before he announced his first bid for president in June 2015, there was a robust faction of conservative populists inside the GOP yearning for a figure just like him. Populists who preferred a street fighter to a statesman; a domestic industrialist to a free trader; a quasi-isolationist to an internationalist. All they needed was a champion who could also appeal to enough Republican voters to win a presidential primary.

Trump’s takeover rebalanced power within the Republican governing coalition. The populists, long the junior partner, rose to take command, and the Ronald Reagan Republicans, for years the controlling bloc, found themselves demoted. Even after all this time, they find it disconcerting.

“I feel a bit politically homeless at times,” Republican operative Mike DuHaime told me. DuHaime runs a public relations firm in New Jersey and is a longtime adviser to Chris Christie, the Republican former Garden State governor who challenged Trump for the 2024 nomination. He concedes never voting for Trump but emphasized his continued support for the party down-ticket. His biggest gripe with the GOP’s new (populist) establishment?

“I never agreed with the party on everything, but there was some tolerance of differences of opinion from leaders in the party. Not so much anymore,” DuHaime said. “I find myself agreeing with Trump on some stuff and disagreeing on others. But there’s a purity test now. It’s sad to see so many people twist themselves into pretzels to comply with whatever Trump says.”

Kevin Madden, who spent years in Republican politics, first as a congressional aide and later as an adviser to 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, said feeling the party transform beneath his feet has been “humbling.”

“When you spend years working as a staffer in Congress, and then years working on political campaigns, it’s a seven-days-a-week, 18-hours-a-day lifestyle. That amount of time and devotion can lead you to convince yourself that you know everything about the party,” explained Madden, now a government relations executive in Washington, DC. “The party shift since 2006 to where it is today has been an education.”

There’s a misperception, especially among MAGA activists, that center-right opposition to the president equals “Never Trump.” But in dozens of conversations I had with Republican primary voters in 2024 on the campaign trail for The Dispatch, and in regular discussions I have about Trump and the state of the party with GOP operatives, I’ve discovered more nuanced views of the president.

After 10 years of Trump dominating American politics, everyone is familiar with the aspects of the president’s personal comportment and policy agenda that can cause some Republicans heartburn. Who knows; Trump’s expansive use of tariffs and belligerent treatment of American allies overseas may yet reopen fissures with elements of the center-right that bedeviled the president in his first term and helped sink his 2020 reelection bid.

But there’s also plenty about Trump that Reagan Republicans like: tax cuts, deregulation, military spending and support for Israel, to name a few, not to mention his decision to let technology titan Elon Musk take a hatchet to the federal bureaucracy. And even when their public scolding of Trump makes them outcasts in their own party, they don’t feel any more welcome in the Democratic Party, which they believe veered too far to the left — culturally, economically and on some foreign policy matters — to even consider jumping ship.

“While I love Liz Cheney and her courage, saying she was ‘proud’ to vote for Harris was dissonant to anti-Trump Republicans. What those Republicans would have identified with was that she hated that she had to vote for Harris,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican operative in Sacramento, recalling how Cheney, a former Wyoming congresswoman who disowned Trump after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, talked about her support for Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.

Indeed, if Democrats are wondering how Trump won over Republicans who shunned him during his first term and in 2020, they need to look in the mirror, many Republicans, both voters and party insiders, have told me.

This anecdote from Stutzman, the rare Republican vocal about his opposition to Trump, was instructive: “When I was working with No Labels in hopes of recruiting a third (presidential) candidate, we would see in focus groups that GOP voters who didn’t like Trump were pushed to him by Biden. Biden, and then Harris, consolidated Republicans into Trump.”

“There is no doubt to me that the Democratic party of the past decade completely fertilized the ground that allowed Trump to grow,” Stutzman added. “I blame them.”

Neither Trump’s populist supporters nor the president’s displaced conservative skeptics are convinced the GOP’s current power dynamic is irrevocably locked in place. “It’s been a long fight; it continues every day,” Steven Bannon, a prominent Trump supporter — whose daily podcast, War Room, is ground zero for the president’s MAGA movement — told me during a recent telephone conversation. “I tell people: Don’t think we’ve ever won.”

Tim Chapman, veteran conservative activist and adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate in 2016 and 2020, is engaged in that fight, hoping to contribute to a restoration of the Reagan wing of the GOP.

“There’s a weakness to the national conservative populist position, which is that they really don’t have yet (ideological buy-in) across the board, but they have the power,” he told me recently.

“The question is: Can they hold onto the power long enough to change rank and file voters’ opinions on what it means to be a conservative?”

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

David M. Drucker is columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of "In Trump's Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP."

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