The 6 thinkers who would define a second Trump term

There is one thing Donald Trump’s critics and fans can agree on: He is not an intellectual. 

His politics come from the gut, a combination of his own instincts and an animalistic talent for reading his supporters’ emotions and enthusiasms. The idea that Trump is attuned to the debates roiling conservative intellectuals — arguments about Hungarian family policy and concepts with names like “postliberalism” — doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Yet in Trump’s first term, his intellectual incuriosity opened up a curious avenue for ideas to matter. With the president in his own world, various senior staffers had the ability to build little fiefdoms, each working to turn their own beliefs into official US policy. In the past, that often meant old-school Republicans obstructing Trump or even slipping their own policies in under his nose. 

A second term would likely be different. Since 2020, Trump has purged much of the Republican old guard. Trump-aligned institutions like the Heritage Foundation have put together vast lists of loyal staff who can come in on day one. A second Trump term would likely be a self-consciously revolutionary project: one in which Trump-aligned ideologues work to turn vague outlines of Trumpism into a governing doctrine. 

With Trump-aligned ideologues running the show in the White House, the ideological debates inside the Trump movement would be far more than a matter of intellectual curiosity. The ideas that have captured the MAGA world’s imagination could well be shaping the future of the United States — and quite possibly the world. 

The six thinkers below have developed some of these influential ideas. Their worldviews are diverse and heterodox, advancing political visions that sound extreme or even outlandish. One is a Silicon Valley monarchist blogger, another a retired Harvard professor who writes on the virtues of “manliness.” A third is a deceased proponent of state-run economies.  

Despite their differences, it is impossible to understand the modern Trump-aligned right without appreciating their influence. Studying them closely will do more than clarify what the MAGA movement wants in the abstract; it will help us think through what its return to power might mean for all of us.

Patrick Deneen, the regime changer

In May 2023, now-vice presidential nominee JD Vance appeared at a book event in Washington for Patrick Deneen, a conservative political theorist at the University of Notre Dame. The book, Regime Change, received an enthusiastic response from the panel; Vance told the audience that he viewed his political mission as “explicitly anti-regime.”

But what does that mean, exactly? To understand, it’s worth looking at Deneen’s ideas — and the broader “postliberal” movement he belongs to.

Deneen’s first big book, Why Liberalism Failed, argued that the shared philosophy of the American center — a liberalism focused on rights and individual freedom — had produced a miserable world. While claiming to liberate people to pursue their own life plan, liberalism in fact cut them off from traditional sources of community and stability. Americans were depressed, lonely, and immiserated — and they had their governing consensus to blame.

After the book’s success, Deneen would become a leader in the emerging “postliberal” movement: a heavily-Catholic group of conservative scholars developing a political vision of an America beyond liberalism. Their basic idea is abandoning liberalism’s core commitment to neutrality about the good life and instead proposing a politics in which the US government uses policy to foster Christian virtue among its citizens.

Different postliberals have different ideas of what that looks like. Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law professor, argues for integralism — an old Catholic idea that essentially merges elements of the Church into the state. Other postliberals, like Gladden Pappin and Rod Dreher, have become champions of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s vision of “illiberal democracy” — literally taking posts in Budapest at government-aligned institutions.

Deneen’s own path to postliberalism, presented in Regime Change, is, well, regime change: “the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a postliberal order in which existing political forms can remain in place, as long as a fundamentally different ethos informs those institutions and the personnel who populate key offices and positions.”

On its face, this is an exceptionally radical proposition. It would require, at minimum, hollowing out the US government by replacing most of its key leadership with dedicated postliberals. These people would then use their posts from within to promote a conservative Christian vision for governance without formally changing the foundations of the American system — in effect, a quiet, invisible overthrow of the government.

When Vance declares himself to be a “postliberal” with “explicitly anti-regime” politics, this is the cause to which he’s dedicating himself. But what does that look like in more concrete terms?

In Regime Change, Deneen himself doesn’t match his radical rhetoric with radical policy. Most of the specific ideas presented in the book are either widely discussed among the American elite (like national service for teens) or already implemented (like tariffs aimed to improve domestic manufacturing). Those handful that are truly radical tend to be unconstitutional (a total ban on pornography) or narrowly focused on higher education.

So, for the most part, Deneen’s work shouldn’t be seen as a policy guide for a second Trump term. However, it can be seen as an inspiration for how some of its top officials see their jobs. Talk of an evil “regime” in Washington is now widespread on the intellectual right; Vance and other like-minded Trump officials will see their task in the second term as moving against it. Their task of rooting out the “deep state” is not merely revenge against Trump’s enemies but a revolutionary Christian act of laying the groundwork for a postliberal America.

James Burnham, prophet of “managerialism”

Silicon Valley is typically seen as a place obsessed with the new. But in the tech conservative set likely to influence a second Trump term — people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel — there’s recently been a renewed interest in a 1941 book by conservative intellectual James Burnham.

The book, titled The Managerial Revolution, prefigured the current right’s concerns about “wokeness” conquering the American business world. Despite a series of almost comically wrong predictions, it remains an important guide to how a second Trump term might conceive of its role in waging culture war.

Burnham’s book predicts a world defined by class war between the capitalist and “managerial” classes (the proletariat, in his view, are too weak and disorganized to seize power). He defines the managerial class as the people who supervise the key functions of a modern economy: “operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers, supervisory technicians; or, in government … administrators, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on.”

In Burnham’s view, a complex modern economy inevitably directs power away from capitalists and toward managers. Because the managers actually understand and direct the technical tasks involved in modern corporate life, they truly control the means of production. Their nominal bosses, the capitalists, only owe their power to little pieces of paper calling them owners; the managers can, and almost certainly will, figure out some way to seize full control.

This, for Burnham, meant a future of state-controlled economies. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would prove that state-controlled industry, where managers didn’t have to deal with capitalist overlords, would be so efficient that they’d consign democratic capitalism to history’s dustbin.

Today, we know Burnham’s predictions were wrong in basically every particular. So why his enduring influence on the right, and especially those conservatives in tech — the sector that singlehandedly has proven that technical experts can become capitalist titans?

The answer is the culture war. 

Silicon Valley’s conservative CEOs and venture capitalists often have to deal with an employee base with radically different politics. While these tech leaders may be all-in on Trump, your average engineer or programmer is much like other college-educated American urbanites: very liberal. Feeling besieged and hemmed in by their own employees, tech conservatives see Burnham as a prophet of their lived experience.

“Most woke ‘labor’ scandals in tech are an entitled middle-management class at odds with founders.” writes Antonio García Martínez, an influential tech conservative. “What Elon is doing [at X] is a revolt by entrepreneurial capital against the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise everywhere dominates (including and especially large tech companies).”

Inasmuch as the tech conservative sector wields influence in a second Trump term, we should expect a good chunk of their efforts to be directed along Burnhamite lines. They will want the administration’s assistance not only in slashing taxes and regulations but in ensuring their own control over unruly “woke” employees. 

Curtis Yarvin, the monarchist

Curtis Yarvin, a blogger also known by the pen name “Mencius Moldbug,” fuses many of the traits of our first two entries. 

Like Deneen, Yarvin believes that the liberal American “regime” must be overthrown. He has also been cited by JD Vance as an influence — specifically on the question of seizing control over executive branch staff.

And like Burnham, an avowed influence on his thought, Yarvin believes that society is defined by a struggle for power between competing elite groups. Yarvin is likewise widely influential among tech conservatives — he is, in fact, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur himself.

But unlike either of them, Yarvin has advanced a clear vision for what 21st century America should look like. Democracy, he believes, should be toppled — replaced instead with a new kind of corporate monarchy.

“A well-managed enterprise hires the right people, spends the right amount of money on them, and makes sure they do the right things. How do we achieve effective management? We know one simple way: find the right person, and put him or her in charge,” he writes.

In Yarvin’s view, the United States has approximated this system under three presidents: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Because the country was either young or in crisis, these leaders wielded extraordinary amounts of power — which Yarvin believes was mistakenly taken from our chief executives.

“These three Presidents, and to some extent a few more, were almost true CEOs of the executive branch. Their monarchical regimes then decayed into oligarchies, each of which was rebooted by the next monarchy. By the clock, we are about due for another,” he writes.

Naturally, Yarvin has implied that Trump might be the man to turn the clock forward. In an interview with Michael Anton, a former senior official in the Trump National Security Council, Yarvin mused about the mechanics of a Caesarist takeover by Trump. This includes setting up an app, “the Trump app,” designed to get millions of supporters out into the streets to support a series of swiftly executed power grabs.

At other times, however, Yarvin has expressed skepticism that Trump has the chops to execute this kind of audacious authoritarian coup. “He is who he is. His capacities are what they are,” Yarvin mused resignedly in a 2022 essay. In his mind, someone like Elon Musk would be a better choice for dictator/CEO.

Yarvin’s not wrong about Trump’s unserviceability. Nothing that happened between 2017 and 2021 suggests that Trump would be able to competently execute the sort of swift and total fascist coup Yarvin envisions.

But Yarvin’s work is still important for understanding how far a second Trump term might go.

Here is a person who is openly musing about destroying democracy and who has built up a fan base among people like Vance and Anton in Trump’s immediate orbit because of this work. You can hear echoes of his generalized contempt for democracy in the litany of actual antidemocratic policies being contemplated in a second Trump term.

Harvey Mansfield, student of manliness

No discussion of intellectual influences on Trump’s second term is complete without a discussion of gender. It’s a topic that, as Vance’s pronouncements about “childless cat ladies” illustrate, has become increasingly central to the modern right’s ideology — and one where the right is rapidly evolving in a more radical direction.

And when it comes to gender politics, few on the right command the intellectual influence of Harvey Manfield — a nonagenarian political theorist who recently retired from Harvard. 

During his 61-year tenure at America’s most famous college, Mansfield became a conservative institution unto himself: a beachhead in enemy-occupied territory, an Ivy Leaguer who has been mentor to some of the movement’s leading lights. His former graduate students include Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), leading pro-Trump intellectual Charles Kesler, and the famous Never Trump writer Bill Kristol.

Mansfield, an erudite Tocqueville scholar, disdains Trump — describing him as a demagogue and a vulgarian. Yet in a recent interview, Mansfield said he voted for said vulgarian in 2020 “with many misgivings” (Mansfield adds that he “crossed [Trump] off [his] list entirely” after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot).

He has offered striking praise of Trump in one area: gender. Trump, he said in one interview, was “really the first American politician” to win office via “a display of manliness and an attack on political correctness.” He beat Hillary Clinton, per Mansfield, because American elections are “tests of manliness” — and “it’s difficult for a woman to do that in a graceful way, and to maintain her femininity.”

Mansfield’s 2006 book Manliness attacks what he sees as the end goal of modern feminism —  a “gender-neutral society” — as willful denial of reality. Enduring inequalities, like women’s disproportionate share of home labor, reflect not discrimination but rather the essential influence of “manliness” on men.

Manliness, in his account, is a kind of self-reliant commanding decisiveness — a willingness to blaze a risky path and lead others along it. While women can be manly — Mansfield cites Margaret Thatcher as an example — they generally are not. For Mansfield, “common sense” stereotypes about men and women are mostly true and validated by the evidence.

“Women still rather like housework, changing diapers, and manly men. The capacities and inclinations of the sexes do not differ exactly or universally, but they do seem to differ,” he writes. 

Mansfield here is giving voice to a bedrock conservative belief that the gender binary is an essential component of human nature. Men are generally one way and women are generally another; this, for conservatives, is an eternal truth about humanity that liberals deny at their peril.

This idea doesn’t just shape the way that conservatives think about feminism: It is also central to the way they approach trans issues. So much of conservative rhetoric on the topic is about insisting on the illegitimacy of trans identity and being infuriated that they are now “expected to call a man a woman” because trans people complicated the division between what Mansfield calls the enduring “capacities and inclinations of the sexes.”

If we want to understand how a second Trump term will approach hot-button issues surrounding gender, there are few clearer animating spirits than Mansfield-style insistence on the truth of the gender binary — and anger at the ways in which “gender-neutral society” devalues traditional manliness.

Christopher Caldwell, the ethnic majoritarian

Christopher Caldwell is perhaps the most highbrow right-wing populist in American media today. A New York Times opinion contributor with a literary profile — he is, among other things, on the editorial committee of a prominent French intellectual journal — few have been as successful at bringing Trump-friendly arguments to liberalism’s salons.

Overall, Caldwell’s oeuvre is the mirror image of Yarvin’s. While Yarvin advances an openly antidemocratic rule by an elite minority, Caldwell has built an argument for unfettered majority rule.

In his most recent book, The Age of Entitlement, Caldwell argues that the 1964 Civil Rights Act is responsible for much of what right-wing Americans find baleful about American culture today (such as “wokeness”). He writes that white people “fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”

This idea, that America is now a society that formally discriminates against white people, is a major influence on the Trumpist right today. Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar and leading adviser, has founded a law firm — America First Legal — that has dedicated much of its efforts to filing suits alleging anti-white discrimination. If elected, a Trump administration would almost certainly attempt to revamp civil rights law to center this alleged scourge.

Of course, Caldwell hardly invented the idea of “reverse discrimination.” But he did break new ground in explicitly linking the problem to the very idea of federal civil rights protections itself, suggesting (albeit not outright owning) a radical remedy to the problem.

This is especially important in light of his praise for elected authoritarians abroad.

In my book The Reactionary Spirit, I looked at three examples of foreign heads of state who have taken a hammer to the democracies they govern: Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, and Narendra Modi in India. In each case, the evidence of their antidemocratic bent is damning, ranging from systematic attacks on the freedom of the press to attempts to undermine the independence of election administration officials and the judiciary.

Caldwell has written essays defending each of these leaders from charges of authoritarianism. His work reads like prestige feature journalism but is weak on the merits — ignoring contradictory evidence to the point of dishonesty.

What Caldwell seems to admire in these leaders is their ability to turn visions of right-wing ethnonationalist government into reality. He describes them (often misleadingly) as the voices of the true majority, fighting a decadent left that had been imposing its will on an unwilling populace for too long.

This core commitment to ethnic majoritarianism is what links his work on foreign governments to his critique of the Civil Rights Act — and what makes Caldwell so important for understanding a second Trump term. He is hostile to civil rights law, and friendly to foreign ethnonationalists, because he believes that there is something fundamentally undemocratic about the enterprise of legally protecting minority rights.

“We … like to pretend that protecting minorities always means protecting them against abuse and persecution by majorities. Sometimes it does. But just as often it means claiming prerogatives for minorities against the innocent preferences of democratic majorities,” he writes in his essay on Modi.

This spells out, perhaps more clearly than Caldwell intended, the vision of “democracy” that animates Trumpism: The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.

Elbridge Colby, the China hawk

Since World War II, American foreign policy has centered around maintaining its core alliances in Europe. We all know that Donald Trump has little interest in keeping those in good shape. But what would a more Trumpy alternative look like?

Elbridge Colby, one of the brightest young(er) lights of the GOP foreign policy establishment, has a clear answer: Put fighting China at the top of the to-do list.

In his 2021 book The Strategy of Denial, Colby argues that the rise of China has fundamentally changed the nature of international politics. Because of China’s extraordinary size and rapidly advancing armed forces, it poses a geostrategic threat to the United States unlike that of any state in recent memory. Were China to fully displace America as the dominant power in East Asia, Colby writes, it would be a dire threat to “Americans’ security, freedom, and prosperity.”

In his view, Beijing aspires to attain dominance by exerting effective control over nearby states — beginning with Taiwan but expanding outward from there. The only way to stop China from doing so is to invest massive amounts of resources in the region, enough to prevent it from believing that it has a chance of simply running over its neighbors with relative ease.

Colby’s “strategy of denial” depends on America being selective. In his view, China is so strong that the US must scale down its commitments elsewhere in order to concentrate all attention where it really matters.

“Its first, overriding priority must be an effective defense of allies in Asia against China,” he writes. And, as such, “the United States should seek to have European states assume the greater role in NATO.”

This worldview has made Colby into one of the most articulate skeptics about America’s ongoing commitment to Ukraine. Every dollar the United States spends on helping the Ukrainian war effort is a dollar less for helping Taiwan prepare to fight a Chinese invasion. We need to avoid “getting bogged down in Europe,” as he put it in a Fox News appearance, and begin pivoting to Taiwan.

Colby has real pull in the GOP: He served in Trump’s first-term Department of Defense and, per Politico, currently has Vance’s ear. And his worldview is consistent with Trump’s on more than just Europe.

One of the great misapprehensions about the former president is that he is an isolationist or even a critic of American empire. Neither is true: Trump used force aggressively during his first term, but did so less in the name of “protecting democracy” or other such lofty goals than in favor of American interests narrowly construed. In service of this vision, his administration oversaw bombings in Iraq and Syria that killed thousands of civilians.

The Trumpian critique has never been that America should voluntarily weaken its military or retreat from the world. Rather, it’s that the United States should focus on its own interests, eschewing any of this “rules-based order” nonsense in favor of taking what’s ours. 

In that general sense, Trump and Colby are a perfect fit. But it’s less clear whether Trump shares Colby’s assessment of China as a military threat. 

As much as he loves to complain about Chinese trade practices, Trump has also repeatedly expressed admiration for President Xi Jinping — an admiration the Chinese have built up through aggressive flattery. So while Colby’s ideas are almost certain to play some role in shaping a second Trump term, there is a real question over whether they’ll play a dominant one.