As divided as they are, it’s a wonder the Republican Party and Donald Trump get anything done.
That’s the portrayal often given out by the Leftmedia, which also plays up the fractures on the Left but obscures the fact that Democrats seldom vote out of lockstep, particularly when they’re in the opposition. On the other hand, Republicans are known as the party that has to herd cats to get anything done for a reason. Witness, for example, the finagling required to get the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by a self-imposed Memorial Day deadline.
Since we’re in off-year election mode and apparently those who remain at the much slimmer Washington Post don’t have much else to do, they’ve decided to play the parlor game of identifying the six factions of “Trumpworld.”
Truth be told, the Post has embellished a bit by giving the “tech right” and “MAHA” their own factions, the latter in particular being represented by former Democrats HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. (Perhaps that just shows the GOP really is the big tent.) Yet in a way, those two represent millions of other disaffected Democrats who have moved to the Republican column. In the cases of Kennedy and Gabbard, however, they sought safe harbor from a party whose leadership had abandoned them because their goals didn’t align with the party line. (Recall how savage Gabbard was to both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.) Moreover, the shift from Democrat to Republican is nothing new; four decades ago, thousands of working-class people abandoned the Democrats for Ronald Reagan, so the strong GOP “Morning in America” mindset that Donald Trump has revived with his promise of a “golden age” has proven more than once to be a formula for building the Republican Party.
Nor is it like the GOP hasn’t been divided into factions before. While the MAGA populists are somewhat new, the other three factions identified by the Post (traditional Republicans, small-government conservatives, and religious Right) have been slugging it out since the libertarian wing of the GOP fought its way into the fold as a result of the Tea Party movement 15 years ago, leading to the massive wave midterm election of 2010. In some respects, the MAGA group is the revival of the Tea Party, which finally found the leader it had always needed in Donald Trump.
It’s not a surprise, then, that the Post is rehashing old news.
Enter The New York Times, which is trying to play up the influx of gay Trump allies in his administration as a way to shear off the religious Right. You can read the NYT Style section piece by Shawn McCreesh — who, in the way of context, is gay himself — in that way, or you can shrug it off as Trump simply selecting the most qualified people for a particular task regardless of personal preference, as he did the first time around. As the president is quoted in the story from an old episode of “The Apprentice,” when he found out a contestant was gay, “I like steak, somebody else likes spaghetti. That’s why they have menus in restaurants. It’s a great world.”
For Trump, as long as Scott Bessent does a good job as treasury secretary, his personal life is really his business — it’s been less of a celebration of the “first gay” in the position than it is that he happens to have a “husband.” In other words, his appointment was on merit, not done as “diversity” for diversity’s sake, like, say, a Kamala Harris or Ketanji Brown Jackson.
However, Joel Abbott at Not the Bee makes a good point about the divide between Trump-allied gays in the administration and gay Democrat staffers: “It’s easier to be allied with Christians like SecDef Pete Hegseth because Christians are less mean to sodomites like him than other sodomites. People who want to share the hope of eternal life and forgiveness of sins tend to be more compassionate than people who wrap their identities in sexual desires.”
For better or worse, the Trump MAGA coalition is a broad lot with some competing interests within it. The difference between that and the coalition on the Democrat side is that it takes a little more work to keep Republicans together. Willingly ceding power back to the people through decreasing federal spending and regulation is something only the strong-minded will do.
It’s also worth noting that the Founding Fathers didn’t have “groupthink” either. They wrestled through some of the most intense debates in American history, and we benefited greatly from their collective genius.
