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An oil pump jack on the Great Plains, southeastern Wyoming. | Marli Miller/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images During his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump had a pointed tagline for his energy policy: “Drill, baby, drill.” That statement is emblematic of where Trump is poised to focus his efforts in a second term: He’s pledged US “energy dominance” and everything from “new pipelines” to “new refiners” that amp up fossil fuel production.  This approach marks a stark shift from the Biden administration’s and puts the US’s emphasis more heavily on producing oil and gas than on attempting a transition to clean energy sources. In addition to touting the need to boost fossil fuels, Trump has disparaged subsidies for clean energy investments and called for “terminat[ing]” the funds that were allocated for those subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. His stance ignores the role that burning fossil fuels has played in climate change and could cause considerable harm to US efforts to address the issue.  Several of his nominations are indicative of these goals. He’s chosen oil industry executive Chris Wright — a fracking evangelist — to head up the Department of Energy. He’s named North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum — who connected Trump to oil executive donors during the campaign — as the lead for the Interior Department and as an “energy czar.” He’s also tapped former Rep. Lee Zeldin — who’s emphasized his commitment to deregulation — as his chief of the Environmental Protection Agency.  There’s only so much the administration can control, however. Although Trump can take notable steps to try to increase fossil fuel production, actual upticks in oil and gas extraction will depend heavily on the private sector and the economics of the industry.  Still, while Trump faces some constraints, he has significant policy levers he can pull to encourage production of fossil fuels. Wright, Burgum, and Zeldin have also signaled they’re prepared to execute on the president-elect’s vision, including changes to drilling on public lands and speedier permitting for oil and gas projects.  “President Trump and his energy team — Mr. Burgum, Mr. Wright, Mr. Zeldin — can go to considerable lengths to make expanded production attractive and relatively easy,” Barry Rabe, a University of Michigan environmental policy professor, told Vox.  How Trump could increase fossil fuel production Trump has two key avenues he can utilize to boost fossil fuel production. One, he can open up more public lands and waters for exploration, development, and extraction. Two, he can ease the regulatory processes that govern fossil fuel work. Trump could offer more oil and gas leases on public lands As President, Trump will oversee the Interior Department, which includes the Bureau of Land Management as well as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, both of which manage a substantial fraction of the country’s public lands and waters. He’ll also oversee the Agriculture Department, which contains the Forest Service, another body that has oversight of some public lands.  The Bureaus of Land Management and Ocean Energy Management, as well as the Forest Service, are the three main entities that issue oil and gas leases on public spaces. These leases effectively allow fossil fuel companies to rent parcels of public land from the federal government so they can extract resources from these areas. Once land is designated as available for lease, leases are typically auctioned off to the highest bidder. Those bureaus, and the Forest Service, have major discretion to determine if more leases can be issued and where. But the president can issue an executive order instructing them to prioritize the subject: Trump could call on agencies to make identifying suitable public lands a top agenda item, for example.  “If you have an administration that says we want everything that could be leased to be leased, there’s a lot of discretion to be able to do that,” says Stan Meiburg, the executive director of the Center for Environment and Sustainability at Wake Forest University.  Trump’s first term, during which he also made moves to expand the acreage of public lands available for oil and gas drilling, is likely a sign of what’s to come. Per a study from Science, he mounted one of the largest reductions in protected public lands in history, rolling back the acreage of Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to allow for additional oil and gas exploration in these places. Data from the Bureau of Land Management shows that there was an increase in total acres offered for oil and gas leases during Trump’s first term compared to President Barack Obama’s second term and Biden’s current term.  Though Trump could again expand the number of leases available, it’s important to note that won’t necessarily translate to more production. Leases are subject to environmental rules. That means new leases could well be challenged in court for potential violations of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, or other federal laws.  Another factor could limit production too: corporate interest. Companies may not be interested in these new leases since many of the parcels might not be home to fossil fuels. And businesses could also lease the land but fail to utilize it.  The White House could make expanding production easier for the private sector The second avenue Trump could pursue is rolling back regulations to make fossil fuel production easier and faster for the private sector. Much of this will involve undoing policies the Biden administration put in place — like the pause on permits for liquefied natural gas exports — and expediting federal approvals for oil- and gas-related projects.  Trump could use the executive branch’s authority to rescind certain proposals. For other rules, the White House could need Congress’s help. By utilizing what’s known as the Congressional Review Act, Congress has the ability to roll back rules that agencies have recently put in place. In other cases, it might need to pass new legislation: The EPA has just begun imposing a methane fee on oil and gas companies, and because that fee was included in the Inflation Reduction Act, it would need an act of Congress to undo. Under it, these businesses must curb their methane emissions or suffer a financial penalty.  Repealing policies like the methane fee and the natural gas export permit pause would curb the restrictions oil and gas companies currently face, creating more opportunities to export products abroad and making fossil fuel production less costly.  Another area where both the administration and Congress have power to ease regulation is on the issue of permitting reform. Currently, any oil and gas project — such as building a new pipeline — must go through many layers of approval by federal agencies like the EPA. (Many clean energy infrastructure projects also need to go through this process.) For these projects, companies have to obtain a hefty number of permits, slowing their ability to execute on these plans.  The Biden administration managed to outstrip the pace at which the Trump administration issued permits for drilling on public lands. Under Trump, federal agencies could try to further streamline such approvals, says Mark Squillace, a University of Colorado-Boulder Law School professor and former staffer at the Interior Department. “We certainly could see some efforts to pull back on environmental standards, to make it easier to permit different kinds of facilities,” Squillace told Vox.  Trump could also take executive action to direct agencies to cut as many unnecessary steps as possible and to simplify their processes. More expansive permitting reforms, like policies that put firm limits on the time needed for legal challenges and federal approvals of a project, would need the backing of Congress, however, and have had bipartisan support in the past. The combination of loosening restrictions currently placed on oil and gas companies and making new projects easier to pursue all tie back to Trump’s pledge to “slash the red tape” on the industry.  As is the case with expanding access to public lands, it’s not clear that these policy changes will result in more fossil fuel production since much of that will depend on how private companies respond. Trump can make production a little easier, but the market for fossil fuels is also a factor During the Biden administration, the US produced more oil and gas than any country in the world. Companies’ incentives to increase production will depend on whether they think it’s financially sound for them. As more countries — including the US — have invested in clean energy sources, there is more competition in the market, which could factor in to whether businesses see it as a smart move to dial up their fossil fuel output if given the chance. “As we watch a movement toward more solar and wind development, there is less demand for the oil and gas products that we’ve been producing,” says Squillace.  Though the administration has stressed that it’s all-in on fossil fuels, it’s not evident that it can turn away from clean energy investments to the degree that Trump has urged. Defunding the subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, would prompt legal challenges, short of an actual repeal by Congress.  The administration could well take some contradictory stances, too. Although Trump has long denigrated energy sources like offshore wind and subsidies for electric vehicles, his allies include Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who’s the head of an EV company. 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When you hear that thousands of writers have signed a petition, you can already guess what they are calling for: What other than boycotting Israel could generate such enthusiasm among the literati?A staggering 6,000 writers and publishing professionals have signed a letter to address “the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century.” They are calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. The letter says that these institutions have played a crucial role in “normalizing … injustices” and that cooperating with them harms Palestinians—the implication being that withholding cooperation will help Palestinians. Signatories include some of the best writers alive. If you like to read, chances are a favorite of yours is on here. Among the best-known are the novelists Percival Everett, Sally Rooney, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Annie Ernaux. Some of my own favorites include the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews, and the British critic Owen Hatherley.[Read: The cowardice of open letters]Predictably, the letter has led to a backlash. Almost 1,000 writers issued a counter-letter. They include the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright David Mamet, the essayist Adam Gopnik, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, and the Nobel laureate Herta Müller. My favorite signatory on this one is another Nobel laureate, the fiery left-wing feminist Austrian Elfriede Jelinek, known for her 1983 masterpiece The Piano Teacher. I am as horrified as anyone by Israel’s brutal and criminal war in Gaza and its decades-long regime of occupation. As a writer, my primary solidarity is with the dozens of journalists killed in the conflict in the past year, the majority of whom were Palestinian. But I also have no doubt as to which side of this literary civil war I am on.I’ve never joined a cultural boycott of any country—not Israel, not Russia, and not Iran, my own country of birth. The latter informs my outlook on the issue.I grew up in one of the most culturally isolated countries on Earth. Our case was of course very different from Israel’s. Iran’s isolation was partly the doing of its own government, which banned foreign cultural products that violated its religious and political strictures—meaning most of them. Cinemas hardly ever showed newly released foreign films (rare exceptions included Michael Moore’s Sicko and Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile). The censors constrained what foreign literature Iranian publishers could translate and publish.But our isolation also owed to the international sanctions on Iran that made any financial exchange with foreign entities into a potentially criminal affair. For example, we might have accessed banned foreign literature by ordering copies in original languages from abroad—except that this was not so easy in a country that had no credit cards, partly because international banks faced legal penalties for transacting with anybody inside it. When I was a teenager, my mom once helped me order a copy of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation through Amazon, using a prepaid card we went to some trouble to obtain from Dubai. The ordering process was labyrinthine, and even then, the book took six months to arrive. (My Palestinian friends in the occupied West Bank tell me of similar travails, because their post is sometimes held by Israel for months.) In 2002, Iran’s clandestine nuclear program was exposed, and the United States imposed a progression of sanctions that effectively blocked even this circuitous route. Today, many such simple exchanges between Iran and Western countries are close to impossible.Some opponents of the Iranian regime abroad have reinforced Iran’s isolation by equating cultural exchange with an unwanted “normalization” of the regime. They have protested the inclusion of Iranian films at festivals and the travel of Western cultural figures to Iran. I left Iran in 2008, but I have never supported such efforts, because I saw for myself how cultural isolation served Iran’s oppressors. Many of us in Iranian society wanted nothing more than to find allies, counterparts, and inspiration abroad, and our regime wanted nothing less for us. Boycotting the country simply advanced the cause of our adversaries—namely, to cut the Iranian population off from influences that could bolster its courage and expand the reach of its solidarity.That the Iranian people yearned for such contact was evident to those Western thinkers who did manage to visit. Jürgen Habermas, Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Ignatieff, and Richard Rorty were among those who traveled to Iran and were treated like pop stars, filling meeting halls and taking part in enthusiastic exchanges with Iranians. Sadly these visits have dwindled in recent years, not just because of the regime's restrictions, but also because sanctions make any such exchange a tremendous hassle and a potential violation of U.S. law. (Foreign visitors also fear coming, because of the regime’s grim track record of taking Western citizens hostage.) That Iranians can still enjoy a good deal of foreign literature in Persian translation owes entirely to the courage and persistence of Iranian publishers, many of whom have tangled with both the censors, who determine what is permissible, and the sanctions, which make dealings with publishers around the world difficult.When I hear of boycotts on Israeli writers, I think of those Israeli writers who have been published in Persian translation regardless of these obstacles. I ask myself who would benefit if fewer Iranians could read Amos Oz’s enchanting fairy tale, Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest, rendered in Persian by the Marxist poet Shahrouz Rashid. The book tells of two children in an unnamed village who decide, against the advice of their parents, to seek out a demon that has taken all the animals away. Some critics saw this story as an allusion to the Holocaust. I remember discussing it with friends in Tehran and finding within it our own meanings and references. We dreamed of meeting Oz, who died in 2018, and of sharing our interpretations with him. What good is served by severing such cross-cultural exchange?Some supporters of boycotts will address these concerns by saying that their means are selective, that they punish only those writers or other artists who are linked, financially or ideologically, with states engaged in objectionable behavior, and that doing so has a track record of success in changing state behavior. But the question of which artists to tar as complicit with their governments’ policies is not a simple one, and boycotts are a blunt instrument at best.For instance, the writers’ petition explicitly calls for sanctioning only those Israeli cultural institutions that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights” or “have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.” Any Israeli cultural institution that has had to rely on state funding, in any form or at any point, could conceivably fall afoul of this criterion. Perhaps this explains why LitHub, the outlet that first published the letter, has done away with niceties and simply headlined it as a “pledge to boycott Israeli cultural institutions,” as have most other outlets.[Read: When writers silence writers]Since it was founded in 2005, the Palestinian-led movement for boycotts, sanctions, and divestment (BDS) against Israel has shown that it likes to paint with a broad brush, censuring organizations that promote contact between Palestinians and Israelis on the grounds that they “normalize” Israel: In the past, BDS has boycotted the Arab-Jewish orchestra started by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said; one of its most recent targets was Standing Together, a courageous group of anti-war Israeli citizens, both Jewish and Palestinian, whose leaders and members have faced arrest in their long fight against Israel’s occupation. A similar zeal seems to animate those who have promoted a boycott of Russian culture following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Many of those who advocate cultural sanctions point to South Africa as the shining example of boycott success. As is often the case with politicized appeals to history, the purpose here is to draw a strong moral injunction: Who could possibly stand on the side of the apartheid regime, which was triumphantly brought down in the 1990s and replaced by a multiracial democracy? But the history of the boycott movement against South Africa is more complicated than those analogizing it commonly acknowledge.Started in 1959 following a call by the African National Congress, the movement encompassed pledges not to work with South African universities or publishers and not to perform in South African venues. Several major U.S. publishers refused to provide books to South African libraries. The boycott’s proponents included not only fiery left-wingers but liberal doyens, such as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the American Library Association (ALA), which refused to work with any publisher that traded with South Africa. In 1980, the United Nations General Assembly voted to back the boycott and asked member states to “prevent all cultural, academic, sports, and other exchanges with the racist regime of South Africa.” When apartheid finally collapsed in the 1990s, Nelson Mandela proudly proclaimed the return of his country to the international community.But for all that they may have achieved, the boycotts were far from uncontroversial, even among opponents of apartheid. Many South African trade unions and social movements were in favor of them, but the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the main workers’ organization that helped bring down the regime, was concerned that divestment could lead to the loss of jobs and pensions. Parts of that group embraced selective boycotts instead of a blanket ban.Sanctions were even more contested in the art world. In 1975, Khabi Mngoma, the legendary principal of Johannesburg’s African Music and Drama Association (AMDA), which had produced stars such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, visited New York to campaign against the boycott movement. “We feel isolated inside South Africa,” he told The New York Times, “and we also feel isolated by the outside world.”Mngoma was especially incensed that Black Americans were boycotting his country. “The students in our school, for example, would gain tremendously simply by being exposed in seminars and other classes to the expertise of black American artists,” he said. “By staying away, blacks here do us a great disservice.” But the zealots of the boycott movement didn’t listen to the likes of Mngoma. In 1972, Muhammad Ali was scheduled to compete in South Africa, but a vociferous campaign dissuaded him from doing so.Mngoma believed that engagement could be more constructive than sanction. On an earlier trip to New York, in 1968, he met with theater personalities and tried to persuade them to perform in South Africa instead of boycotting; they could tax white audiences and channel the money to Black theater. That strategy had some successes. The Broadway musicals Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof were performed in South Africa and contributed tens of thousands of dollars in royalties to AMDA. Later, the American playwright Arthur Miller agreed to stage his plays in South Africa, but only for desegregated audiences. The singer Paul Simon recorded his Graceland album in South Africa in 1986, insisting on the importance of working with Black artists in the country. A year later, he headlined an enormous anti-apartheid concert in Zimbabwe with Makeba and Masekela. That same year, boycott proponents picketed his concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall and denounced him.Just how important a role the boycotts played in ending apartheid is disputed. Mattie C. Webb, a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at Yale, tells me they were significant, “but they were only one factor in a broader movement that also included internal social movements against apartheid. The sanctions themselves were limited, and frankly came rather late in the broader struggle against apartheid.” Lior Sternfeld, an Israeli American historian of Iran at Penn State, put a finer point on this, telling me: “I have tried in vain to find any empirical evidence that the boycott movement helped topple the South African regime.”Sternfeld has taken an interest in the question because of his work involving Israel and Iran. He is a critic of Israeli policy—both the occupation and the conduct of the war in Gaza—and he makes no brief for Israeli universities, which he says have tried “to get cozy with the government.” He does favor some sanctions—for example, kicking Israel out of the FIFA World Cup and other sporting events, as has been done to Russia. But he believes that cultural boycotts will primarily hurt Israeli intellectuals, who are already demonized by their government.“I have always believed that activism is about engagement, whereas BDS is articulated as a call for disengagement,” he told me. “I oppose the boycotts because it is important to have some sort of a bridge to Israeli intelligentsia.”Sternfeld’s position, like mine, is informed by observing the results of sanctions against Iran. He points specifically to How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, a book published earlier this year by four Iranian American scholars, which argues that isolation has had adverse effects on Iran’s political culture and has counterproductively strengthened the regime’s repressive apparatus. The Iranian scholar Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, an outspoken opponent of the sanctions on Iran, has raised questions about boycotting Israel for similar reasons, to the ire of some on the left.Lately Iran and Israel have found themselves ever more dangerously at odds, and the lack of people-to-people contact between the two countries doesn’t help. That’s one reason Sternfeld accepted a surprising overture in September: The Iranian mission to the United Nations invited him to attend an interfaith meeting with President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. This encounter made Pezeshkian the first post-revolutionary Iranian president to knowingly and openly meet with an Israeli citizen. Iranian hard-liners attacked him for it relentlessly. As for Sternfeld, some critics of the Iranian regime in the United States denounced him for taking the meeting, even as hard-liners in Tehran called him a Zionist infiltrator.Iran bans its citizens from visiting Israel, but numerous Iranian writers and artists in exile have traveled to the country anyway in recent years. Their visits have helped show Israelis, used to hearing of the “Iranian threat” from their government, a more human side of the country.The filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf was a guest of honor at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2013. Makhmalbaf was once an Islamist revolutionary; he spent four and a half years in prison before the 1979 revolution. But he went through a remarkable metamorphosis in the 1990s, becoming an anti-regime dissident and winding up in exile in Paris.“I am one of the ambassadors for Iranian art to Israel, and my message was of peace and friendship,” he told The Guardian of his trip at the time. “When I flew to Israel last week, I felt like a man flying to another planet, like a man flying to the moon.” Makhmalbaf criticized the logic of boycotters, saying, “If I make a film in Iran, and you come to my country to watch it, does it mean you confirm dictatorship in Iran and you have no respect for political prisoners in Iran?” he asked rhetorically of his critics. “If you go to the US, does it mean you confirm their attack on Afghanistan and Iraq?"Orly Cohen, a Tehran-born scholar who has lived in Israel most of her life, has helped organize the trips of several Iranian artists to the country. Now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Haifa, she has also translated the work of Iranian poets into Hebrew.“In the Israeli news, all Israelis hear of Iran is war,” she told me by phone. “They don’t know about Iran’s culture and how much beautiful art is made in the country today.”[Read: Iranian dissidents don’t want war with Israel–but they can’t stop it]Cohen translated a book of poems by Mehdi Mousavi, known in Iran as the “father of postmodern poetry,” and facilitated his visit to Israel last year for its publication. He was the subject of a cover story in Haaretz, and he struck up a relationship with a well-known Iraqi-born poet, Ronny Someck. “He was seen as a bridge of friendship,” Cohen told me. “For the first time,” she said of Mousavi’s Israeli audience, “they saw Iran through Iranian, not Israeli, eyes.”Cohen also helped organize an exhibition about Iranian feminist movements at Jerusalem’s Museum of Islamic Art. Israeli feminists took an interest, but what surprised Cohen more was the feedback from religious Jews, some of whom were inspired by the example of Iranian women standing up to religious repression.Boycotts preclude such experiences and connections. In the years since 2005, when the Palestinian movement adopted BDS, the tenuous links that once allowed Israeli and Palestinian scholars and artists to be in contact have been cut one after another. Israeli peace activists used to travel frequently to the West Bank and speak at events there. But in 2014, Amira Hass, Haaretz’s correspondent in Ramallah and a vociferous critic of the Israeli occupation, was kicked out of an event at Bir Zeit University by two professors.Some boycotters do seem concerned about punishing people like Hass, hence the guidelines that carve out ostensible exceptions for those who are critical of the policies of the boycotted state. But I don’t see how any freedom-loving writer can embrace such a position. What distinguishes us from authoritarians and censors if we impose ideological litmus tests to decide which writers can present their work at festivals—if we ask them to declare their opposition to a political regime before they are allowed to speak?This world is full of walls that divide peoples, and of regimes that impose ideological purity tests on writers. If writers are to use our collective powers, it should not be to add to them.

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Donald Trump with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on October 23, 2024, in Duluth, Georgia. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images There is not one contradiction at the heart of the incoming Trump administration’s political project. There are two. The first centers on economic policy — or, more fundamentally, the role of government itself. One camp, exemplified by Elon Musk and traditional big business, sees Trumpism as a celebration of individual greatness and unfettered capitalism. The second camp, including economic nationalists and RFK Jr.’s crunchy hippy types, believes Trumpism has a mandate to try to transform American society, including by attacking the practices of large corporations that do not fit their nationalist vision. The second centers on foreign policy — or, more fundamentally, the purpose of America in the world. One camp, exemplified by Secretary of State pick Marco Rubio, sees the United States as the world’s rightful leader, one that has not only a right but an obligation to assert its will across the globe. Another camp, exemplified by Secretary of Defense pick Pete Hegseth, sees the United States as a more ordinary country whose interests are served by being less involved in other countries’ issues like the Ukraine war, but being more violently involved when core American interests are at stake. Of course, there are areas of overlap between these groups. Both sides of the role-of-government divide believe that America will be well-served by a mass deportation campaign; both sides of the foreign policy divide support aggressively confronting China and waging a global war on jihadist groups like ISIS. Yet these overlaps are limited and partial points of convergence between deeply divided ideological currents. The real connective tissue between the various Trump 2.0 factions is disdain for the cultural left and the “deep state” in Washington. The anti-left culture war has become, more or less, the central ideological principle of the modern Republican Party. On the campaign trail, it’s easy for Trump’s diverse set of allies to join together based on this shared animosity. But when governing, the administration will be forced to make choices in areas where its leaders disagree at a fundamental level, leading not only to internal conflict but potentially even policy chaos. The Trump coalition’s contradictions, explained Every administration has its internal disagreements. Typically, however, those disputes take place within a relatively narrow band: The political party they hail from is mostly clear on what it stands for and why. The Biden administration, for example, has generally agreed on a more redistributionist economic policy, even if certain policy issues, like how large the post-Covid stimulus should be, were subjects of major internal debate. The Trump-dominated GOP, by contrast, is ideologically adrift. Its nominal ideology is Trumpism, but Trumpism has little in the way of a defined ideological core. Its core tenets, total personal fealty to Trump and a generalized illiberal nationalism, are flexible, admitting of a wide band of different policy visions on a host of different issues. In the first Trump administration, the main fight was over just how much deference Trumpist impulses deserved. You had Trump in the Oval Office, but he was surrounded by establishment figures like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and chief of staff John Kelly, who saw their job as curbing his worst impulses. In the second Trump administration, the situation will be very different. The Mattis and Kelly types have either been purged from the party or forced to bend the knee. The question now is not whether Trumpism is leading the party, but what Trumpism actually stands for.  One way to think about the divides on this question is which part of the classic “make America great again” slogan the various camps emphasize: America or greatness. When it comes to domestic policy, the “greatness” side includes folks like Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and traditional Republican business elites. They see the attack on “the deep state” as, in part, a war on government red tape that stands in the way of progress, innovation, and the entrepreneurial spirit. Trump, for them, is proof that one man can change the world if left to his own devices. They aim to unleash similar spirits across the country and, non-coincidentally, advance their own business interests in the process.  The “America” camp, by contrast, is more inclined to emphasize collective solutions to America’s collective problems. The chief advocates of mass deportations and across-the-board tariffs, like Steven Miller and Peter Navarro, are almost by definition not free marketeers. JD Vance aims to rebuild America along more conservative Christian lines, including by curbing the power of secular big business when he believes it threatens the organic unity of American society properly conceived. RFK Jr. and the “make American healthy again” movement see the war on government not as a campaign to shrink government per se, but rather to redirect its energies toward the problems they think really matter (vaccines, fluoridated water, and other such crank health concerns). The foreign policy divide falls along similar lines. People like Rubio and national security adviser pick Michael Waltz fall on the “greatness” side. They believe that the United States is destined to lead the world and ought to work to ensure that it remains safely atop the global power hierarchy. Challengers to the existing American-led order like Russia and especially China must be aggressively confronted, and hostile dictatorships like Iran must be brought in line by force if necessary. The American continents must be dominated, Monroe-doctrine style, advocating a far more aggressive policy toward Latin American leftist dictatorships like Venezuela and Cuba (as Rubio did in Trump’s first term). The other camp, including Hegseth and director of national intelligence pick Tulsi Gabbard, espouses a kind of narrower nationalism. Though they believe in American military strength, they care far less about aggressively protecting the existing political order. If Russia wishes to seize part of Ukraine, they suggest, that’s not really an American concern. The United States should instead be preoccupied with killing its enemies, advancing its narrowly construed interests, and protecting its border — up to and including launching a war in Mexico to battle drug cartels and human traffickers. I don’t mean to say that these camps are fundamentally opposed. They are part of the same administration and share many of their boss’s core insights and enemies. They all agree to “make America great again” as a slogan but disagree on which parts of it to emphasize. In practice, this might lead to a whole host of predictable and significant conflicts inside the administration. When RFK Jr. moves to put new regulatory barriers in the way of pharmaceutical research, will Big Pharma and biotech executive Vivek Ramaswamy try to stop him? When billionaires suggest financing the extension of Trump tax cuts by cutting the social safety net, will Christian populist JD Vance stand up for the meek? When Marco Rubio pushes for regime change in Venezuela, will alleged anti-imperialist Tulsi Gabbard try to make him back off? None of these conflicts are hypothetical. Each is eminently predictable based on what the personalities involved have done in the past and promise to do in the future. If left unresolved, they threaten to create a kind of policy incoherence, with different aspects of the US government working at direct odds with each other, depending on who they answer to.  If and when Trump steps in to resolve them, will he do so consistently? Will he say one thing publicly and do another privately, as so often happened in his first term? Or will the resolution so consistently favor one group over another that we can finally start saying Trumpism has a little more meat on its ideological bones? There is only one honest answer: We don’t know. But we can be sure the stakes are high for the Republican Party, the country, and most likely the entire world. This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.

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