General
How Donald Trump Has Unconcealed Politics
How Donald Trump Has Unconcealed Politics
Trump has revealed politics not as an ideological struggle, but as an existential one.
By: Phillip Lede đť•Ź | 02/02/2025
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Donald Trump has remade American politics in his image, but more importantly, he has unmasked it for what it has always been. This shift has become undeniable during his second term. Emboldened by the persecution he endured during his four years of exile, he no longer seeks to treat Washington’s managerial organ but rather to amputate it entirely. Within days of being sworn in, Trump sent career bureaucrats—the longstanding officials who cycle from administration to administration—into complete turmoil.
In his first days in office, he pardoned 1,500 January 6th protesters charged under Biden’s DOJ, sacked nearly every Cabinet-level Inspector General, declassified the JFK, RFK, and MLK documents, urged 2 million government employees to resign immediately, and directed his DOJ to fire any and all officials involved in investigations against him or his supporters. Government websites have gone offline after he pulled the funding for USAID, NGOs, and attempted to halt all government grants and assistance.
The Trump administration’s attitude toward the federal bureaucracy is no longer reformist but openly hostile. No longer swamped with Bush era remnants and equipped with a generation of Republicans who do not remember a party without him, Trump possesses the tools to remake the administrative state in a way not seen since FDR.
In less than a decade, he has obliterated the petty politicking of bow-tied Republican Pharisees and replaced it with a practical politics that is open about its nature. The pageantry of the early 2000s—when lawmakers exchanged modest handshakes over polite disagreements—has vanished, exposing a personal and ruthless arena stripped of pretense. Some Americans long for that bygone civility, when parties’ largest disagreement rested on tax cuts or healthcare and politics was grounded in quaint policy debates rather than today’s bare-knuckle combat. Yet that earlier politics, emerging in the wake of 9/11, can hardly be called true politics at all—both parties were indistinguishable on the nation’s most consequential issues even as their constituents demanded change. One may recall McCain scolding a woman at his rally in 2008 for questioning Obama’s birthplace while insisting his opponent was merely a “decent family man” with whom he just “happened” to disagree—a clear illustration of the pervasive anti-politics of that era.
The GOP of this bipartisan period spurned its own revolutionaries, as the left embraced theirs. Reprimanded by Speaker McConnell and his allies, the Tea Party movement of the early 2010s, along with its prior stirrings in Perot’s 1992 Reform Party, had sputtered into irrelevance. Politics, for a prolonged period, consisted of Democratic victories against marriage, religious liberty, and America’s founding stock, met with principled exasperation from Republicans, who crossed their arms but refused to do anything about it. By 2015, this undercurrent, with nowhere else to escape, bubbled to the surface. It catalyzed in Trump, a man daring and brash enough to point out the emperor’s lack of clothes. Politics emerged in all its existential reality—a struggle between ancient régime and revolutionary vanguard—and in that moment, it ceased to be invisible.
The imperiled regime sought to undermine Trump at every turn, and after failing to remove him from office in two phony impeachments, it stole an election, raided his home, and buried him under a mountain of DOJ indictments. This profoundly unusual reaction affirmed Trump as a destabilizing figure by which the left sees its very existence threatened. Since his foray into politics, the rules-based order, where both Republicans and Democrats more or less facilitated America's entropic decline, has been torn apart at the seams. Before Trump, on matters of foreign policy, domestic security, protectionism, globalization, diplomacy, and immigration, there stood an immovable and implicit consensus. One could not question the unanimity on America’s backwards priorities until Trump served as the battering ram against the castle gates, exposing trade policy, unilateralism, democratic norms, and an independent press as toothless. He has revived politics in its essential nature—not as compromise but as conflict, not as neutrality but as aggression. The perception of politics as a neutral agora, to which its administrators are only mere servants, has been utterly discredited.
Whereas the interim politics of a prior America upheld the veil of ideology, presenting a common aim and only competing paths to achieve it, it has been torn asunder by Trump. Not only have his ideas pervaded the mainstream, but so have his habits, for better or worse. His brash tendency towards ad hominem and personal attacks, from crude monikers to open threats towards foreign diplomats, while jarring to the ideological palette of Americans of eight years ago, has become a contemporary taste. Figures like MTG, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and even Ron DeSantis adopted his stylings, if not able to replicate it authentically. In 2022, Biden felt it necessary to dedicate a whole speech condemning “MAGA Republicans” complete with an ominous red backdrop in one of the starker moments of his presidency. American politics has never been more polarizing, and for good reason. The personal politics of Trumpism is strikingly obvious among his recent appointments, which span an unlikely spectrum from center-left Democrats like RFK Jr. to hardline immigration restrictionists like Stephen Miller. The coalition he has assembled defies any traditional taxonomy, bringing self-titled Christian conservatives Pete Hegseth alongside Silicon Valley technocrats like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, warhawks like Rubio alongside staunch non-interventionists like Gabbard. What binds this eclectic assemblage is not any sense of ideological coherence but rather a personal deference to Trump himself. Insofar as they prove willing to genuflect before the throne, he is flexible enough to allow them a spot in his palace. Trump’s heel turn on H-1B visas and rhetorical embrace of legal immigration, whether it will materialize into harmful policy during his second term or not, is a pernicious example of this flexibility; a willingness to negotiate even to the point of excess. However, the pardoning of his own supporters who stormed the Capitol in 2021 shows, in an encouraging sense, that he does recognize politics as an affair between allies, not a commitment to impersonal principles.
It is clear that Trump’s political egoism, where he is willing to reward loyalty no matter how immediate, has varied consequences, depending entirely on whoever has his ear—whether someone like Bannon or Kushner. Yet, that Trump has stripped away the pomp to reveal a Schmittian friend-enemy distinction at the beating heart of politics is a promising step. Trump’s strategy of bulldozing his political opposition through relentless and admittedly personal attack, with little appeal to moral maxims or calculated rebuttals, has opened the eyes of conservatives who previously conceived it as a game of grace over force. In politics, as Trump has demonstrated, one does not get points for manners but rather results; there is only winning and losing. After all, he who is the winner decides what constitutes etiquette. By reframing politics as a sport of association and coronating himself as the sovereign, Trump has forced American democracy into confrontation with itself. What can be understood as an existential struggle between the progressive left under Kamala has seen its conclusion with Trump as the survivor, who literally fought for his freedom at the ballot box.
With his unprecedented celebrity in American life, Trump has seized Biden and the progressives' mandate of popular legitimacy—a celebrity that Kamala's grasping stunts with Beyoncé, Cardi B, and Taylor Swift tried and failed to capture. The progressive left’s self-image as inevitable—the force to which the long arc of history bends—has been crushed by defeats in all three branches of government. Yet, crowned king of this new empire is Trump, who presides over a loyal dominion of supporters and lawmakers. Their allegiance is not to the law of the Constitution or the principles of federalism, but to a man who, through executive order, his pulpit and pardon, decides the exception at will. Consequently, his support implicitly undermines the liberal foundations upon which America was built. The left in hysterical fashion alleges that Trump's very existence threatens democracy. In this respect they are not wrong—his very presence lays bare the inherent contradictions in democratic governance.
America can no longer maintain the illusion that power is accountable to an unchanging center, checked and balanced. Instead, it must acknowledge that this center, too, is subject to power. Where this center has become visible to both sides, it must ultimately be filled by one. What has played out over the past decade is the struggle to occupy it. In resurrecting a loyalty not rooted in empty flags or originalist pipe dreams, but in a monarch, Trump has shaken the pluralistic, liberal experiment to its core. The cult-like fervor surrounding him, extending even into religious proclamation, cannot be contained by the neat rationalism of meager democratic norms.
Republicans' affinity for Trump is clearly not rooted in ideological policy but in their perception of him as a political messiah—someone to rescue them from an untouchable class of smooth-talking statesmen who have betrayed them. Whatever defects or moral failings Trump may exhibit, the staunchest religious conservatives are willing to excuse because they see him as onside. With Trump, it is not that transactional politics has been defeated, but that it has been liberated from the dimly lit corridors of power. Trump has openly embraced a form of shrewd deal-making throughout this election cycle—one that, though arguably necessary, he has never tried to hide. Trump reversed his position on banning TikTok, a motion he initially supported, after Jeff Yass, a prominent investor in the platform’s parent company, ByteDance, contributed $46 million to his campaign. Tech oligarchs willing to donate to Trump’s campaign were placed ahead of his Cabinet nominees at his inauguration, with Musk even receiving his own federal department. Even at a seemingly trivial level, he practices this transaction. Just a week ago, Trump signed a memorandum urging the recognition of South Carolina’s Lumbee tribe, securing federal benefits for them after winning 63% of their vote. The corruption of petty bureaucrats has been replaced by the open quid pro quo of Trumpism—an art of public spectacle and influence for public display.
Trump’s foreign policy, unabashed in its criticism of NATO and Westphalian sovereignty, is a further extension of his unconcealed politics. He does not suggest that America ought to occupy Greenland or Canada or recapture the Panama Canal to disseminate the precepts of democracy, but simply because it is good for the United States. His justification is starkly self-interested: these states have resources that America needs, whether strategic or economic. As economically dependent and militarily vulnerable entities under the influence of the United States—the still-dominant hegemon—they possess little true jurisdiction. Trump has no problem with making the concealed suzerainty of these states to America explicit. He recognizes that international law is held at the mercy of American power, rather than the other way around. Those who can enforce the law, decide it. As seen with Israel’s war against the civilian population of Gaza, no number of UN condemnations or ICC arrest warrants have slowed them. Trump recognizes impartial and international law as false insofar as it is unenforceable.
That America benefits from levying tariffs on other countries—even at her own supposed allies, like Mexico, Canada, and the EU, to exert leverage—takes precedence over convention or stability. His use of tariffs to compel Colombia, Mexico, and others, which need America more than it needs them, to reabsorb migrants has been effective for this reason. Trump realizes that if America doesn’t exert herself in a projection of interest, unshackled by faux moralizing concerns, she will effectively cede her perch to another more ambitious power, whether China or Russia. Trump does not pretend America operates under imperatives different from foreign powers—unlike many of his predecessors, from Bush to Obama.
Under realist conditions, American intervention must now question whether it truly serves the interests of its own nation or instead caters to foreign powers. That both cannot be equally served is the realist conceit that spurs Trump to withdraw from Syria and strip funding from Ukraine but float war with the Mexican cartels and manifest destiny in North America. By drawing the divisions of friend and enemy on the international stage—not in moral but pragmatic terms—America may remember herself, for without this political assertion she ceases to exist.
Trump may not be have intended to catalyze an American political consciousness, but he has done so nonetheless. It seems that a figure from outside the political establishment was necessary to pull politics back from the business world and into the public sphere. Trump, though not a traditional politician, grasps the essence of politics by instinct rather than deliberate reflection. Regardless of the policy successes or failures that may define his present administration, his greatest contribution lies in unmasking politics—both domestically and internationally—as a particularist phenomenon shaped by the enmity between friend and enemy. This perennial division, found at the heart of any political matter, is illustrated in Trump’s actions just as much as it is in Carl Schmitt’s writings.
Trump, as an icon of revolutionary politics in his own right, has sown seeds of doubt in the American political consciousness—doubt certain to bloom in the emergence of a citizenry no longer bewitched by the presumptions of liberal democracy. Insofar as Republicans have become conscious of politics not as an individual but team sport, a clash of us versus them, they are free to advocate their interests, whether racial, tribal, and religious before an imaginary tolerance. Where Trump exposed America’s regime of tolerance, a regime that, when threatened, resorts to every measure of intolerance, he has weakened it beyond repair. It has lost its legitimacy. While bemoaned by some, a loss of faith in institutional neutrality, a fixed center, offers hope for an honest politics that was overthrown by the secular clerics of the Enlightenment. And yet one may hope that beleaguered illiberal Americans, now conscious of the political, may seek the means to institutionalize their governance, to not suffer in grace. In a renewed political consciousness, the opportunity arises not for a plutocracy masquerading as popular rule, but for a transparent state—one capable of executing the true will of its citizenry in public view. For all his faults, Trump harkens a shift back to this pre-modern conception of the state—a politics of impure authenticity over pure deception.
In his first days in office, he pardoned 1,500 January 6th protesters charged under Biden’s DOJ, sacked nearly every Cabinet-level Inspector General, declassified the JFK, RFK, and MLK documents, urged 2 million government employees to resign immediately, and directed his DOJ to fire any and all officials involved in investigations against him or his supporters. Government websites have gone offline after he pulled the funding for USAID, NGOs, and attempted to halt all government grants and assistance.
The Trump administration’s attitude toward the federal bureaucracy is no longer reformist but openly hostile. No longer swamped with Bush era remnants and equipped with a generation of Republicans who do not remember a party without him, Trump possesses the tools to remake the administrative state in a way not seen since FDR.
In less than a decade, he has obliterated the petty politicking of bow-tied Republican Pharisees and replaced it with a practical politics that is open about its nature. The pageantry of the early 2000s—when lawmakers exchanged modest handshakes over polite disagreements—has vanished, exposing a personal and ruthless arena stripped of pretense. Some Americans long for that bygone civility, when parties’ largest disagreement rested on tax cuts or healthcare and politics was grounded in quaint policy debates rather than today’s bare-knuckle combat. Yet that earlier politics, emerging in the wake of 9/11, can hardly be called true politics at all—both parties were indistinguishable on the nation’s most consequential issues even as their constituents demanded change. One may recall McCain scolding a woman at his rally in 2008 for questioning Obama’s birthplace while insisting his opponent was merely a “decent family man” with whom he just “happened” to disagree—a clear illustration of the pervasive anti-politics of that era.
The GOP of this bipartisan period spurned its own revolutionaries, as the left embraced theirs. Reprimanded by Speaker McConnell and his allies, the Tea Party movement of the early 2010s, along with its prior stirrings in Perot’s 1992 Reform Party, had sputtered into irrelevance. Politics, for a prolonged period, consisted of Democratic victories against marriage, religious liberty, and America’s founding stock, met with principled exasperation from Republicans, who crossed their arms but refused to do anything about it. By 2015, this undercurrent, with nowhere else to escape, bubbled to the surface. It catalyzed in Trump, a man daring and brash enough to point out the emperor’s lack of clothes. Politics emerged in all its existential reality—a struggle between ancient régime and revolutionary vanguard—and in that moment, it ceased to be invisible.
The imperiled regime sought to undermine Trump at every turn, and after failing to remove him from office in two phony impeachments, it stole an election, raided his home, and buried him under a mountain of DOJ indictments. This profoundly unusual reaction affirmed Trump as a destabilizing figure by which the left sees its very existence threatened. Since his foray into politics, the rules-based order, where both Republicans and Democrats more or less facilitated America's entropic decline, has been torn apart at the seams. Before Trump, on matters of foreign policy, domestic security, protectionism, globalization, diplomacy, and immigration, there stood an immovable and implicit consensus. One could not question the unanimity on America’s backwards priorities until Trump served as the battering ram against the castle gates, exposing trade policy, unilateralism, democratic norms, and an independent press as toothless. He has revived politics in its essential nature—not as compromise but as conflict, not as neutrality but as aggression. The perception of politics as a neutral agora, to which its administrators are only mere servants, has been utterly discredited.
Whereas the interim politics of a prior America upheld the veil of ideology, presenting a common aim and only competing paths to achieve it, it has been torn asunder by Trump. Not only have his ideas pervaded the mainstream, but so have his habits, for better or worse. His brash tendency towards ad hominem and personal attacks, from crude monikers to open threats towards foreign diplomats, while jarring to the ideological palette of Americans of eight years ago, has become a contemporary taste. Figures like MTG, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and even Ron DeSantis adopted his stylings, if not able to replicate it authentically. In 2022, Biden felt it necessary to dedicate a whole speech condemning “MAGA Republicans” complete with an ominous red backdrop in one of the starker moments of his presidency. American politics has never been more polarizing, and for good reason. The personal politics of Trumpism is strikingly obvious among his recent appointments, which span an unlikely spectrum from center-left Democrats like RFK Jr. to hardline immigration restrictionists like Stephen Miller. The coalition he has assembled defies any traditional taxonomy, bringing self-titled Christian conservatives Pete Hegseth alongside Silicon Valley technocrats like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, warhawks like Rubio alongside staunch non-interventionists like Gabbard. What binds this eclectic assemblage is not any sense of ideological coherence but rather a personal deference to Trump himself. Insofar as they prove willing to genuflect before the throne, he is flexible enough to allow them a spot in his palace. Trump’s heel turn on H-1B visas and rhetorical embrace of legal immigration, whether it will materialize into harmful policy during his second term or not, is a pernicious example of this flexibility; a willingness to negotiate even to the point of excess. However, the pardoning of his own supporters who stormed the Capitol in 2021 shows, in an encouraging sense, that he does recognize politics as an affair between allies, not a commitment to impersonal principles.
It is clear that Trump’s political egoism, where he is willing to reward loyalty no matter how immediate, has varied consequences, depending entirely on whoever has his ear—whether someone like Bannon or Kushner. Yet, that Trump has stripped away the pomp to reveal a Schmittian friend-enemy distinction at the beating heart of politics is a promising step. Trump’s strategy of bulldozing his political opposition through relentless and admittedly personal attack, with little appeal to moral maxims or calculated rebuttals, has opened the eyes of conservatives who previously conceived it as a game of grace over force. In politics, as Trump has demonstrated, one does not get points for manners but rather results; there is only winning and losing. After all, he who is the winner decides what constitutes etiquette. By reframing politics as a sport of association and coronating himself as the sovereign, Trump has forced American democracy into confrontation with itself. What can be understood as an existential struggle between the progressive left under Kamala has seen its conclusion with Trump as the survivor, who literally fought for his freedom at the ballot box.
With his unprecedented celebrity in American life, Trump has seized Biden and the progressives' mandate of popular legitimacy—a celebrity that Kamala's grasping stunts with Beyoncé, Cardi B, and Taylor Swift tried and failed to capture. The progressive left’s self-image as inevitable—the force to which the long arc of history bends—has been crushed by defeats in all three branches of government. Yet, crowned king of this new empire is Trump, who presides over a loyal dominion of supporters and lawmakers. Their allegiance is not to the law of the Constitution or the principles of federalism, but to a man who, through executive order, his pulpit and pardon, decides the exception at will. Consequently, his support implicitly undermines the liberal foundations upon which America was built. The left in hysterical fashion alleges that Trump's very existence threatens democracy. In this respect they are not wrong—his very presence lays bare the inherent contradictions in democratic governance.
America can no longer maintain the illusion that power is accountable to an unchanging center, checked and balanced. Instead, it must acknowledge that this center, too, is subject to power. Where this center has become visible to both sides, it must ultimately be filled by one. What has played out over the past decade is the struggle to occupy it. In resurrecting a loyalty not rooted in empty flags or originalist pipe dreams, but in a monarch, Trump has shaken the pluralistic, liberal experiment to its core. The cult-like fervor surrounding him, extending even into religious proclamation, cannot be contained by the neat rationalism of meager democratic norms.
Republicans' affinity for Trump is clearly not rooted in ideological policy but in their perception of him as a political messiah—someone to rescue them from an untouchable class of smooth-talking statesmen who have betrayed them. Whatever defects or moral failings Trump may exhibit, the staunchest religious conservatives are willing to excuse because they see him as onside. With Trump, it is not that transactional politics has been defeated, but that it has been liberated from the dimly lit corridors of power. Trump has openly embraced a form of shrewd deal-making throughout this election cycle—one that, though arguably necessary, he has never tried to hide. Trump reversed his position on banning TikTok, a motion he initially supported, after Jeff Yass, a prominent investor in the platform’s parent company, ByteDance, contributed $46 million to his campaign. Tech oligarchs willing to donate to Trump’s campaign were placed ahead of his Cabinet nominees at his inauguration, with Musk even receiving his own federal department. Even at a seemingly trivial level, he practices this transaction. Just a week ago, Trump signed a memorandum urging the recognition of South Carolina’s Lumbee tribe, securing federal benefits for them after winning 63% of their vote. The corruption of petty bureaucrats has been replaced by the open quid pro quo of Trumpism—an art of public spectacle and influence for public display.
Trump’s foreign policy, unabashed in its criticism of NATO and Westphalian sovereignty, is a further extension of his unconcealed politics. He does not suggest that America ought to occupy Greenland or Canada or recapture the Panama Canal to disseminate the precepts of democracy, but simply because it is good for the United States. His justification is starkly self-interested: these states have resources that America needs, whether strategic or economic. As economically dependent and militarily vulnerable entities under the influence of the United States—the still-dominant hegemon—they possess little true jurisdiction. Trump has no problem with making the concealed suzerainty of these states to America explicit. He recognizes that international law is held at the mercy of American power, rather than the other way around. Those who can enforce the law, decide it. As seen with Israel’s war against the civilian population of Gaza, no number of UN condemnations or ICC arrest warrants have slowed them. Trump recognizes impartial and international law as false insofar as it is unenforceable.
That America benefits from levying tariffs on other countries—even at her own supposed allies, like Mexico, Canada, and the EU, to exert leverage—takes precedence over convention or stability. His use of tariffs to compel Colombia, Mexico, and others, which need America more than it needs them, to reabsorb migrants has been effective for this reason. Trump realizes that if America doesn’t exert herself in a projection of interest, unshackled by faux moralizing concerns, she will effectively cede her perch to another more ambitious power, whether China or Russia. Trump does not pretend America operates under imperatives different from foreign powers—unlike many of his predecessors, from Bush to Obama.
Under realist conditions, American intervention must now question whether it truly serves the interests of its own nation or instead caters to foreign powers. That both cannot be equally served is the realist conceit that spurs Trump to withdraw from Syria and strip funding from Ukraine but float war with the Mexican cartels and manifest destiny in North America. By drawing the divisions of friend and enemy on the international stage—not in moral but pragmatic terms—America may remember herself, for without this political assertion she ceases to exist.
Trump may not be have intended to catalyze an American political consciousness, but he has done so nonetheless. It seems that a figure from outside the political establishment was necessary to pull politics back from the business world and into the public sphere. Trump, though not a traditional politician, grasps the essence of politics by instinct rather than deliberate reflection. Regardless of the policy successes or failures that may define his present administration, his greatest contribution lies in unmasking politics—both domestically and internationally—as a particularist phenomenon shaped by the enmity between friend and enemy. This perennial division, found at the heart of any political matter, is illustrated in Trump’s actions just as much as it is in Carl Schmitt’s writings.
Trump, as an icon of revolutionary politics in his own right, has sown seeds of doubt in the American political consciousness—doubt certain to bloom in the emergence of a citizenry no longer bewitched by the presumptions of liberal democracy. Insofar as Republicans have become conscious of politics not as an individual but team sport, a clash of us versus them, they are free to advocate their interests, whether racial, tribal, and religious before an imaginary tolerance. Where Trump exposed America’s regime of tolerance, a regime that, when threatened, resorts to every measure of intolerance, he has weakened it beyond repair. It has lost its legitimacy. While bemoaned by some, a loss of faith in institutional neutrality, a fixed center, offers hope for an honest politics that was overthrown by the secular clerics of the Enlightenment. And yet one may hope that beleaguered illiberal Americans, now conscious of the political, may seek the means to institutionalize their governance, to not suffer in grace. In a renewed political consciousness, the opportunity arises not for a plutocracy masquerading as popular rule, but for a transparent state—one capable of executing the true will of its citizenry in public view. For all his faults, Trump harkens a shift back to this pre-modern conception of the state—a politics of impure authenticity over pure deception.