Trump is the real technocrat

Donald Trump wears a business suit wherever he goes and makes lavish reference to his Ivy League education. He chose JD Vance as his running mate because the freshman senator had graduated Yale Law; at the time of writing the new President’s main interests are energy prices, diplomacy, and AI. 

Like Matthew Yglesias or Rishi Sunak, Donald Trump wishes that we could put some of the cultural guff aside for a minute and focus on secular problems. Watch any routine Trump rally and you’ll hear virtually nothing about distant elites or rural-urban divides. Nothing about America’s promise, American exceptionalism, American values in decline, or the need for America to live up to its founding ideals. Almost every speech Donald Trump has ever made has instead led with policy: the same four or five material grievances that he’s been hammering away at for his entire adult life. “We’re getting killed on trade.” “We’re getting killed at the border.” “We’re getting ripped off with NATO.” 

Few politicians have shown such dogged devotion to the brass tacks. Donald Trump put the abortion issue on ice, campaigned in the major cities, and dislikes the term Woke. The pre-2015 “Chamber of Commerce” GOP, which he replaced, had its own cultural agenda, one that had much more in common with “populism” as someone like Sohrab Ahmari now understands it. You had the peals for the Heartland against the cities, the jibes at book-learning, the opportunistic banjos. Donald Trump has partaken in none of this. He has never had himself filmed firing a gun, riding a horse, or wearing cowboy boots. When rival Ted Cruz called New York a liberal den, he rebuked him. Instead: trade, the border, energy, regulation. 

Since the mid-10s commentators have framed American politics as a technocracy and the inchoate moral opposition to it. They are right to. Donald Trump came into public life with a list of material problems to be solved, and has been opposed in this by a largely cultural politics of indignation and exhortations for America to rediscover its Traditional Values. Only one of these sides smacks of Glenn Beck, and it isn’t MAGA.

Opponents of Trumpism have long agonised over something like the following: isn’t it time we dropped the managerialist style a la Aaron Sorkin and tried to speak to people’s hearts, like MAGA does? This is begging the question. No rival of Trump has ever evinced any interest in managerialism, wonkery, policies of any kind. Everyone knew exactly what Trump would do if elected. Can you name a single material pledge from Clinton 2016, Biden 2020, Biden 2024, or Harris 2024? Mrs Harris briefly talked of price controls — that rarefied notion — but soon dropped it, instead running a campaign based largely around celebrity endorsements. 

Trumpism is an internally-consistent platform of domestic laissez-faire, tariffs, border control, and opportunism on the world stage

Take a look at Donald Trump’s website and you will see dozens of videos promoting “Agenda 47”, the official platform of his 2024 campaign. Each clip features the then-candidate Trump looking into the camera and rattling off details of planned legislation and executive actions. Collectively these videos run to around two-and-a-half hours — roughly the same length as The Fellowship of the Ring. There is simply nothing analogous to this from any of Trump’s anti-populist opponents, like Harris or Keir Starmer. Starmer’s first six months in power have been dominated by random culture war curios like the ceding of the Chagos Islands, a fiscally nugatory tax on farmers, and assisted dying; for this he is now set up as the “technocratic” rival to a man whose life was saved from an assassin’s bullet because he was gesturing towards a giant graph. Harris and Starmer didn’t have any graphs. 

Trumpism is an internally-consistent platform of domestic laissez-faire, tariffs, border control, and opportunism on the world stage. As others have said this is a variation on “McKinleyism”, or — in its more exalted moments, especially in its plans for a strengthened Presidency — Hamiltonianism. Time and again the anti-populists have been invited to propose any material alternative to this, time and again they have declined to do so. They couldn’t, because they never even bothered to work one out. Trump’s allies had twenty executive orders drawn up and ready to go on his first day in office; Keir Starmer arrived in Downing Street with “no plan”, has spent much of his premiership on trips abroad, and makes more lavish use of executive time than his American counterpart ever did. 

Trumpism has managed to combine … high wonkery … with demagogic attacks on the permanent state

People have found it convenient to imagine Trumpism as simply a formless whirl of grievance. Many have put themselves forward as the brains of MAGA — someone who could harness an inchoate popular movement towards a more sensible end. All have foundered, because what they were trying to co-opt was always much more coherent and put-together than their own ideas. Silicon Valley, the latest of the would-be svengalis, is still stuck on bargain-basement Ross Perotisms about the need to get “proper businesspeople” into government rather than bureaucrats. 

On both sides of the Atlantic there are now calls for a new developmentalism, a YIMBYism. We have one and it is called MAGA. Trumpism has managed to combine, in one political coalition, the high wonkery of AI investment with demagogic attacks on the permanent state. There is no contradiction here. The two are complementary. What really holds back the construction of things like data centres or housing in the western world is — as Keir Starmer has now acknowledged — the permitocracy of climate audit and judicial review. People like Starmer might wonder why the reality TV star figured this out first.