Factions

Trump supporters are not all of the same mind, although for now they mostly agree on disassembling the government. If we can identify the potential fracture lines, we can devise wedge strategies.

There are a number of ways to split up Trump’s support. None falls neatly into defining factions, although there are some pre-existing groups that are represented. The people in them, however, often belong to more than one group. What all of them share is a deep sense of aggrievement.

The most active now, in the person of Elon Musk and his hand-picked techies, is the Silicon Valley billionaire club. They find Trump’s tax plans to their advantage. They dislike their more liberal employees, according to several recent analyses, and project that across the workforce. They feel unappreciated for the glorious new things they have inflicted on society, like AI. They believe that their technical expertise makes them capable of running the country.

Members of evangelical churches have supported Trump as a bloc. Trump has promised them that they will be able to peer into and dictate others’ sex lives. From an early stance of promise them anything and collect their votes, he has gone to a more vocal and obvious performance of public prayer offered by others and having their hands laid on him in a performance of blessing.

Trump’s base of what have been called populist supporters still exists. They include the petit bourgeoisie and are descended from the Tea Party. They are influenced by themes that have been with the far right for a long time: fluoridation of water and other health misinformation, the idea that the government is working against their interests, that we need manly men and submissive women, and so on. Seth Cotlar is a good person to follow for this history.

Wall Street overlaps with both Silicon Valley and the base.

I would also list Trump as a faction himself, and perhaps include the people closest to him who manage his moods. In his first term, that would have been Ivanka and Hope Hicks, for example, and this time around may well be Susie Wiles. But Trump is at the center. His rapid pivots create chaos, where he is comfortable. His on-again off-again tariffs are a part of the chaos machine. His management style is to pit his underlings against each other in competition for his good will. That competition might create wedge points.

What makes the coalition stable is what might be called shared hatreds. Project 2025 has rationalized many of these hatreds into the program that is broadly being followed in wrecking the government. The one positive goal, in the sense of a program to be enacted rather than destroyed, is more tax cuts that will preferentially go to the already wealthy. Removing regulations of all kinds, along with shrinking the government, is part of the negative program. White cishet male supremacy is a major shared hatred toward everyone else.

White supremacy (to shorten the name down) has taken a prominent place in the administration’s actions. They often call it anti-DEI, but the extent to which they want to erase words alone is striking.

Along with the words, they remove depictions of women and people of color. They are attacking NIH and NSF grants with the same control-f vigor. They seem to believe that the words themselves, even in isolation or other contexts, have power to inflict the evils of DEI. Applying white supremacy across the board is consistent with the goals of all the groups in the coalition.

The destruction being inflicted by Elon Musk’s minions is the most visible administration action now. Whatever Musk’s motivations, the actions are broadly consistent with Project 2025: remove “liberals” (this seems to mean any civil servants who don’t agree with Project 2025) and replace them with loyalists. But the Musk boys’ inability to understand government has turned that project into a slashing of those easiest to slash: probationary employees. No loyalty test has been applied, just action to show action. This, so far, seems to coincide closely enough with the goals of the other groups to unify them.

Something that occurred to me as I read Project 2025, though, was that if you remove enough of the people who know how to make the system work, you have two problems: finding enough loyalists to replace them and finding a way for them to learn how to make the system work. If trimming down the numbers of government employees is a goal, then the first problem shrinks: you don’t need as many people. But it will exacerbate the second problem if people no longer can make the system work. We have not yet reached that point.

There are several potential faultlines, including that inability to make government work after the purge. The evangelicals have been quiet since the inauguration, but their hopes of imposing their views on sexuality on the broader population may be at odds with the more libertarian preferences of the Silicon Valley and Wall Street groups. To the extent that these views suppress women and those of non-binary genders, though, there seems to be a solidarity across groups.

Russell Vought, of Project 2025, is reported to be in agreement with Musk, even though the Project 2025 program was designed to move more slowly to avoid legal attacks. This week, the number of lawsuits against the administration exceeded 100, so that could be a potential split.

Now that cabinet officers have been confirmed, they have an interest in running their own domains of the government without Muskian disruption. This week, Trump said that they are the deciders about firings, but we’ll see how that works out. As to the potential for a clash between the two big egos, Trump and Musk continue to need each other too much for a break to come soon. Trump envies and admires Musk’s money and has said that he would be happy to share the actual work of the presidency. Musk enjoys creating disruption and making employees unhappy, which Vought has said is one of his goals. What might cause a rupture would be when one of the lawsuits seeking to determine who is responsible for Musk’s wilding spree points a finger at Musk or Trump.

Another throughline is a willingness to believe conspiracy theories and other nonsense counter to reality. Catastrophism – for the evangelicals, the Apocalypse; for Silicon Valley, artificial general intelligence – is a throughline. Hypermasculinity is another. Any of these could provide a split as proponents go to far toward an extreme, but none are in sight now.

There are no obvious splits likely to open up soon. We can’t wait for the coaltion to falter on its own.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner