Imagining a Post-Trump America Where Populism Magically Disappears
There’s a certain kind of conservative, often credentialed and overconfident, who clings to the belief that Trump’s departure from the ballot magically resets the board. They imagine the movement snapping back to a tidy, small-government ethos — as if the last decade were a loud, unruly detour rather than the story itself. Sarah Isgur’s recent conversation with David Leonhardt of the New York Times is a clear example of this instinct: a hope that the base doesn’t really want what it overwhelmingly chose, twice, and might suddenly return to the Church of Limited Government once the orange comet leaves the sky.
But that vision isn’t merely naïve. It’s a profound misunderstanding of what happened, why it happened, and why “returning to normal” is not only impossible but undesirable for the voters who reshaped the Right. And the harder truth is this: Even if Trump vanished tomorrow, even if a Republican restoration or a Democratic technocrat took the wheel, small government is not coming back. The country that once believed in it no longer exists. Big Tech is now a fourth branch of government. Wall Street has more influence over national life than most federal agencies. Surveillance is baked into everything from smartphones to school boards. The alphabet agencies didn’t shrink under Trump, Biden, or Obama. They metastasized. The state grew teeth, and it will not file them down because a few pundits find them unseemly.
On paper, Isgur is the model Republican insider: Texas-raised, Federalist Society, Romney campaigns, a stint at Trump’s Justice Department, now safely parked at The Dispatch and chatting with the New York Times. In public, she packages herself as the tough, no-nonsense “don’t tell me what to do” girl — the conservative who rolls her eyes at both parties, swears by the Constitution, and insists she has no real home in today’s GOP. In practice, it’s a neat trick. She talks like a rebel, lives like a Washington regular, and spends most of her time translating the Right for people who already decided they don’t like it.
Isgur speaks with the confidence of someone who thinks the great conservative error was letting Trump crash the cocktail party, rather than asking what caused half the country to kick down the door in the first place. She longs for a world where Congress is back in the driver’s seat, agencies shrink, presidents behave, and the Founders nod approvingly from Mount Rushmore. It’s a pleasant fantasy, like imagining the kids will stop fighting because you’ve counted to three… for the 47th time.
The Reagan–Romney–Ryan consensus didn’t collapse because Americans suddenly forgot the beauty of balanced budgets or federalism. It collapsed because it stopped speaking to real people, real problems, and real pain. And while Isgur talks about structure — process, constitutional purity, separation of powers — voters were talking about something else entirely: wages, borders, factories, fentanyl, culture, and a country that felt like it was slipping through their fingers. No amount of constitutional craftsmanship fixes a kitchen where the fridge is empty and the neighborhood has changed beyond recognition.
The strict conservative mistake is believing that Trump distorted the movement. In reality, he revealed it. He didn’t invent the grievances. He merely voiced them in a manner that resonated with tens of millions of Americans. And Isgur’s notion that post-Trump conservatism can be rebuilt on small-government nostalgia ignores a simple truth. Yes, some conservatives still want a slimmer state. Who doesn’t?
But what most Americans want, especially the working class the Right now claims, goes far beyond tax cuts and tidy org charts. They want a government that actually fights for them. One that protects their jobs, their towns, their borders, their kids, and their culture.
This is where the disconnect becomes almost comic. Isgur warns that presidents wielding executive power are dangerous. Voters warn that Congress wielding no power is useless. She envisions a renaissance of local politics. Voters can barely name their mayor but can absolutely name the factory that closed. She urges people to put down their phones and talk to neighbors, as if the national crisis were caused by poor manners instead of hollowed-out towns, disappearing jobs, drug overdoses, and a culture carved up by corporations and algorithms. It’s the kind of advice that sounds wise only to people whose neighborhoods never fell into a black hole.
Plenty on the Right, not only the Left, keep insisting Trump was an error message, when he was the software update. They think America drifted away from them by accident. In reality, America drifted because the old ideology failed to address the world people actually live in. Globalization gutted communities. China rose. Wars dragged on. Wages stagnated. Universities radicalized. Corporations went woke. And the GOP’s answer, year after year, was a PowerPoint on marginal tax rates.
Trumpism was the first major Republican recalibration toward material reality. Voters didn’t want a philosopher-king. They wanted someone who saw the same decay they saw. They wanted borders that meant something, elections they trusted, jobs that paid bills, leaders who didn’t treat them like rubes. They wanted someone who didn’t run for cover when the media barked. Someone who didn’t apologize for existing.
Isgur’s structural concerns aren’t wrong. They’re just incomplete. A sturdier constitutional spine won’t save a nation whose arms and legs are giving out. And her belief that America can “return” to something calmer is like saying a marriage is thriving because the dishes are clean, even as both spouses quietly pack suitcases.
Populism wasn’t a detour from conservatism, but conservatism remembering who built the country. Not donors. Not think tanks. The people who actually get their hands dirty for a living.
This is why a post-Trump conservatism cannot revolve around shrinking the state. It must revolve around strengthening the nation. It must be muscular, not managerial; grounded, not nostalgic; rooted in ordinary lives, not law school seminars. If the Right refuses to build that future, a new movement will.
Isgur jokes that maybe she should pitch her vision to The Rock. That’s the problem in miniature — a belief that the issue is messaging, not meaning. Conservatives didn’t lose the old gospel because of a bad messenger. They lost it because the country changed, and the gospel didn’t.
Conservatives can accept that. Or they can keep rambling to sympathetic hosts while the nation shrugs and moves on.
READ MORE by John Mac Ghlionn:
Train Dreams: An Elegy for the Men Who Built America
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