Contrary to its portrayal in the newspapers, Trumpism was a movement of democratic restoration. At its center was the idea of the deep state. In recent decades, selective universities created a credentialocracy, civil-rights law endowed it with a system of ideological enforcement, the tax code entrenched a class of would-be philosopher-kings in the nonprofit sector, and civil-service protections armed government bureaucrats to fight back against any effort at democratic reform.
The Trump movement is what happened when Americans discovered the system could not be reformed democratically, only dismantled. It was not a move against democracy, or even liberalism. In fact it was a return to the original constitutional understanding that Alexander Hamilton laid out in Federalist No. 70: Americans are led not by a class-based bureaucracy but by an executive they choose.
Unfortunately, this democratic idea is dangerous. That is why no one ever dared try an American-style presidential system before 1788, and it is why progressives hemmed the presidency in with the deep state. Without it, there are really only two safeguards against a rogue executive: first, the public must elect a public-spirited person of unimpeachable character, and, second, that person must honor the constitution. The Iran assault shows neither condition to be operative.
Caldwell writes with the confidence of a man who has already filed the autopsy. Trumpism is over, he tells us, killed by the Iran war, betrayed by Jared Kushner’s real estate ambitions and Benjamin Netanyahu’s patient opportunism. The essay is sharp and often right about the details. But the central argument has a flaw that runs through the whole piece: Caldwell treats Trumpism as a coherent ideological project when it has always been something messier and more durable than that.
Start with his definition. Caldwell frames Trumpism as a movement of democratic restoration, a revolt against the credentialed governing class, the deep state, the nonprofit philosopher-kings, the civil-service bureaucrats who could survive any election. He invokes Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 70 to give this a constitutional pedigree. On this reading, Trump’s rise was not a lurch toward authoritarianism but a return to something older, a presidency accountable to the people rather than to a managerial elite. It is an appealing frame, and Caldwell argues it well. The trouble is that it describes a slice of the coalition, not the whole thing.
Trumpism was never a single thing. It held together because it fused groups with very different priorities: populist voters who wanted economic protection and cultural recognition, libertarian-leaning skeptics of foreign intervention, nationalist hawks who wanted America to project strength, evangelical Christians who wanted judges and culture-war victories, and a media ecosystem that translated all of these grievances into a shared enemy. The glue was not a constitutional theory. It was a common antagonist, the elite, variously defined depending on which part of the coalition you were talking to. Caldwell’s clean definition papers over that. When he says the Iran war is “diametrically opposed” to the base’s reading of the national interest, he means the anti-war wing of the base. He does not fully reckon with the parts of that coalition that are pro-Israel, or hawkish on Iran, or simply reactive to whatever Trump says.
His strongest point is the Kushner-Witkoff section, and it deserves more weight than Caldwell gives it. The argument is not really about nepotism, though that is how it reads at first. It is about a structural substitution: Trump dismantled one elite network, the credentialed foreign policy establishment, and replaced it with an informal personal network of real estate developers with undisclosed financial interests in the region they were sent to negotiate. Kushner raised money for his investment firm while working as an envoy. Witkoff’s family joined Trump’s in a crypto venture that received two billion dollars from the UAE, which then received Nvidia chip clearances. These are not incidental details. They are the argument. Trump did not replace elite capture with popular sovereignty. He replaced one form of capture with another, less accountable one, answerable not to Senate confirmation or institutional doctrine but to whoever had access and money.
This is where the David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory analysis sharpens things. It frames the shift as moving from bureaucratic capture to personal capture, from institutional alliances to informal networks. That distinction matters in foreign policy because institutions carry doctrine, precedent, and constraint. Personal networks carry interests. When Kushner and Witkoff sat with Netanyahu, there was no State Department doctrine in the room, no career foreign service officer to say what American strategic interests required. There was Netanyahu’s clarity about Israeli priorities and two men whose financial ties to the Gulf and to Israeli-adjacent political circles were extensive and unexamined. Caldwell sees this, but he frames it primarily as a character failure. It is also a structural one.
Where Caldwell overreaches is in the conclusion. The mutual respect between Trump and his movement has been ruptured, he writes, and the revolution is over. He points to Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly reacting with incredulity to the invasion. But incredulity is not defection, and these talkers are not the movement itself. Movements absorb contradictions constantly. They do so when the leader keeps delivering wins in other domains, when the alternative feels worse, when the enemy remains vivid enough to hold the coalition together. Trump’s base has survived Access Hollywood, two impeachments, a criminal conviction, and a pandemic response that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The suggestion that the Iran war, however reckless, finally breaks the bond requires more evidence than three talk show hosts expressing shock.
Caldwell also underestimates how much the demand signal outlasts any particular leader or policy. The anti-elite energy that produced Trump does not disappear because Trump disappointed the anti-war wing of his coalition. It looks for a new carrier. Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance are possible successors, and that is plausible. What matters is that the raw material of Trumpism, the class resentment, the suspicion of expert consensus, the hostility to internationalism, the sense that elections should mean something against the bureaucracy, none of that evaporates. It mutates. The end of Trump’s credibility with his base, if that comes, is not the end of Trumpism. It is the beginning of a succession fight over who gets to define what America First means in a world where the original standard-bearer went to war for reasons a small but loud number of his own people did not understand.
There is one more thing Caldwell does not quite say but that his essay implies: the contradiction at the heart of the whole project was always structural, not personal. He argues that a strong executive without guardrails requires a public-spirited leader of unimpeachable character. Trump, he concedes, fails that test. But the problem is not just Trump’s character. The problem is that dismantling institutional constraints on the executive while installing a president loyal primarily to himself and his financial network produces not democratic restoration but a different kind of oligarchy. Hamilton’s Federalist No. 70 makes sense in a republic where Senate confirmation, cabinet accountability, and congressional oversight still function. Strip those out and you do not get a presidency answerable to the people. You get a presidency answerable to whoever has the president’s ear and enough money to keep it.
Caldwell is right that the Iran war represents a rupture. He is right that the Kushner-Witkoff arrangement is a scandal hiding in plain sight. He is right that a part of the anti-war, anti-elite base feels something close to betrayal. But betrayal is not burial. Movements rarely end with a single act of apostasy. They transform, fragment, and recombine under new leadership with adjusted grievances. The populist energy that lifted Trump will not dissolve because Trump turned out to be capturable. It will look for someone less capturable, or at least someone better at pretending not to be. That is the more likely future. Not the end of Trumpism, but Trumpism without Trump, leaner and angrier and without the excuse of inexperience.
