How Trump has transformed the Republican Party

Former President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election warrants a re-evaluation of where the conservative movement stands — Stanford scholars and students said — to determine whether the Republican Party is still synonymous with traditional conservative values.

In addition to winning the Electoral College, Trump currently leads the popular vote by nearly five million, giving him the potential to be the first Republican candidate to win the popular vote in the past 20 years. The GOP maintained its majority in the Senate and secured a number of gains in the House of Representatives. The share of young Black male voters for Trump doubled in the 2024 election from 2020, and about half of Latino men voted for Harris — less than the 60% that voted for Biden in 2020.

The modern conservative movement was first defined by William F. Buckley in his magazine, the National Review, in 1955. Then-U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater, a Republican from Arizona, further shaped the movement in the 1960s.

Pedro Regalado, an assistant professor of history, said the “real revolution” in the conservative party came two decades later under President Ronald Reagan, who cemented the supply-side economic principles of tax cuts and deregulation as paramount domestic policy goals. Anti-abortion policies and reduced government spending were among the Reagan administration’s top-line priorities.

According to Peter Berkowitz, former Director of Policy Planning in the first Trump administration and a current Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the conservative movement emerged in response to the liberal domestic policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and as a bulwark against the spread of Soviet communism. The movement, Berkowitz said, was characterized by its early proponents as a fight against collectivism at home and abroad.

“Elements of Trump’s sensibility fit very well with the movement that Buckley effectively founded and which enjoyed culmination in Reagan,” Berkowitz said.

But in the view of Aradshar Chaddar ’27, president of Stanford Democrats, the movement has been shaped more recently by populist politics that have given some politicians, including Trump, a near cult-like following.

“Trump was able to get to this point because he had this whole media machinery owing to Roger Ailes, the founding father of Fox News,” Chaddar said.

The question of whether today’s Republican Party is still the primary vehicle for the conservative movement is a contentious one. Scholars are considering whether Trumpism represents a shift away from conservative principles or if it has managed to bring together different strands of conservatism under the Make America Great Again (MAGA) umbrella.

Berkowitz points to some Trump policies which he said are scripted from the traditional Republican playbook, including his 2017 executive orders to reduce federal regulation of the economy and cut taxes.

But Regalado said that the Republican party is experiencing a fracturing of the political right unseen in past election cycles.

He said the Cheney family is a prime example — a Republican Party dynasty that has broken with Trump and characterized him as a threat to democracy. Regalado said Trump has departed from conservative stances on foreign policy, not only on the question of tariffs — which Trump favors — but also regarding his comfort with authoritarian leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

“Many Republicans believe the enemies are China and Russia and Trump has called [Chinese President] Xi Jinping brilliant, which is very antithetical to conservative principles,” Regalado said.

He said Trump’s behavior is contradictory to how Reagan would have conducted himself. Regarding Trump’s staunch anti-immigration stance, Regalado noted that while Reagan often spoke about restoring America’s greatness, he gave amnesty to undocumented immigrants in 1986.

Chaddar believes shifts in conservative views toward immigration issues can be attributed to increasing globalization and a rise in global conflict in the past five years. 

“Countries cannot remain homogenous anymore and that scares strongholds that have always preserved their strength by maintaining their influence,” Chaddar said. “This has influenced Trump to say, ‘Put America first.’”

The pre-Buckley split within the conservative movement concerned the divide between traditionalists and libertarians. The movement seems now to be re-litigating an old dispute between the two, Berkowitz said.

He points to Buckley’s assertion in the National Review that traditionalists and libertarians need one another because each supplies something that the other lacks — libertarians are focused on keeping government in check, while traditionalists focus on enforcing social mores.

While Reagan and Buckley brought the two schools of thought together, Berkowitz said, the two streams have not been united since the presidency of George W. Bush.

“A traditionalist might say we’d prefer Trump, with all of his obvious flaws, to a progressive ideology run wild,” he said. “A traditionalist would not say that Trump epitomizes a statesman, but they might say, ‘Look, we live in a world where schools teach that there are a multiplicity of sexes, that gender rules are inherently fluid, public schools are disposed not to tell parents when they declare that their child wants to change sexes.’”

While it is difficult to make predictions, Berkowitz said much of the political right’s future will depend on Trump’s cabinet appointments.

Berkowitz believes the second Trump administration could be “Reaganite” in regards to a “conservative internationalist” engagement in global affairs, although Trump supporters would like his second administration to focus less on foreign policy.

Stanford College Republicans President Elsa Johnson ’27 said that the 2024 election has changed the rhetoric around Trump. 

“A lot of people during the 2016 election would never ever admit they were voting for Trump, and now, a lot more people feel empowered to speak out about their views,” she said.

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