For the MAGA-hat wearing, Breitbart-reading America-Firsters that facilitated Donald Trump’s rise, the first several months of his presidency came with a twinge of betrayal as one after another of the White House’s hardcore nationalists—Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka—were expelled from the administration, leaving Trump surrounded by a “globalist” cabal including H.R. McMaster, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Rex Tillerson, and Jared Kushner. “The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon lamented last summer in the wake of his ouster. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over.”
As the second year of the Trump presidency spins faster, however, Trump is now expunging his more moderate handlers. “I guess I would say at one point in year one, when Bannon left, when Gorka left, that created a narrative that the nationalists were being kicked out and Trump was moving towards more of an establishment framework,” said Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate truther turned jacobin leader of the Trumpist crowd. “Now, the pendulum’s swinging back in the other direction with the more establishment types being either kicked out, resigning, or leaving. Like Cohn, Powell, and Tillerson.” As my colleague Gabriel Sherman has reported, McMaster and Kushner may be next in Trump’s crosshairs.
But with the latest round of West Wing musical chairs, Trump seems to have upended the simple nationalists-versus-swamp-creatures morality play. “It just kind of speaks to the failure of this nationalist-versus-globalists dichotomy,” said David Reaboi, an Islamoskeptic Frank Gaffney-acolyte and the founder of the ultra-conservative Security Studies Group. “A lot of the people who use this terminology and approach it in this black-and-white way—I don’t think they know their ass from their elbow.” The intellectual uncertainty was highlighted by the generally ecstatic reception in MAGA-land to the news that Mike Pompeo, the hawkish, Harvard-bred director of the C.I.A., would be replacing Tillerson as secretary of state. “It’s the revenge of the nationalists,” Posobiec told me. “I wouldn’t say he’s like an America First guy,” he conceded, “but he was a Tea Party guy, and he’s definitely more of movement conservative.”
Bannon responded to Tillerson’s ouster by texting a reporter, “Come on dude!!! . . . end of the globalists !!!” But in a larger sense, Pompeo’s promotion is not really a win for either faction. Instead, as several sources explained, the reshuffle illustrates the premium Trump is putting on loyalty over ideology. “We’ve had problems with Tillerson for quite a while,” Reaboi said, adding that he and his colleagues had “soured” on Tillerson once he began negotiating with the Qataris and voicing opinions on the Iranian nuclear deal that contradicted Trump. “Frankly, I think [Trump’s] right. I think he deserves subordinates who will do their jobs.” Chris Buskirk, the editor-in-chief of the somber, Trump-inclined academic journal American Greatness, told me he is withholding judgment until he sees how Pompeo puts the president’s policies into action. “I will be watching to see who he fires just as much as who he hires. That will speak volumes about whether he is serious about a new era in foreign policy or if he will settle for more of the same. But for now, I am hopeful and think he represents a trade up.”
Rumors that Trump will follow up by firing McMaster as national security adviser, potentially replacing him with the ultra-hawkish John Bolton, provoked a similarly ambivalent response, with opinions split between the extremist, Trump-aligned foreign-policy interventionists, and the Breitbartian isolationists who have an outsize impact on the president’s political orientation. “He was undermining Trump,” seethed Judicial Watch’s Micah Morrison, referring to McMaster’s support of the Iran deal and reports that the former general had insulted Trump behind his back.” As for his potential replacement, who has called for preemptive strikes on both Iran and North Korea? “I don’t know that much about John Bolton, but I know that he was a good ambassador. I definitely think he would be a better replacement than what we have right now. Almost anything could be better than what we have right now.”
Even Mike Cernovich, the men’s-rights lifestyle guru turned MAGA journalist who launched a prolonged smear campaign against McMaster last summer, admitted that he couldn’t be sure where Bolton might fall on the nationalist-versus-globalist spectrum. “McMaster was more worried about Syria. Trump loyalists know Iran is bad, but don’t want a ground war,” he said pessimistically. “Flynn wanted to use special-ops tactics against them. McMaster only understands tanks and ground wars. Bolton? Who the fuck knows.”
The confusion over which way is up in Trumpworld is understandable, given the president’s own free-floating, grievance-driven view of the world. The anti-immigration extremist Jeff Sessions, after all, was considered a leading light of the Trump administration before he recused himself from the Russia investigation, which made him Public Enemy No. 1 within the West Wing. For Trump and the troll army that follows him online, and on Fox News, the primary qualification for acceptance in the personality cult is an endless capacity for sycophancy. The truth is, Reaboi said, MAGA world “couldn’t tell you the difference between John Bolton and H.R. McMaster, and John Kerry, philosophically or on points of policy.” In the end, its less about adhering to any policy than a tolerance for assuaging the tender ego of the petulant president. One day, one presumes, this round of MAGA-tinged newcomers is likely to follow their predecessors out of the building, too.
When I surveyed right-wing media sources on the possibility that Scott Pruitt might be appointed to take over from Sessions as attorney general, the E.P.A. administrator got the universal stamp of approval, notwithstanding his establishment resume and consummate lack of nationalist-populist credentials. “He believes in the president’s agenda, and has shown the courage and the savvy to implement it during his tenure at the E.P.A.,” said Buskirk, referring to Pruitt’s rollback of Obama-era regulations. If he has the president’s back when it comes to dumping pollutants in waterways and axing research into the effects of toxic chemicals on children’s health, why not on ending the Mueller investigation, too?
