AS DONALD TRUMP walked into the Mar-a-Lago ballroom where he was about to announce his 2024 run for president, the words “Do you hear the people sing, singing a song of angry men?” boomed over the loudspeakers. Whether or not their politics match those of the protagonists of Les Misérables, the musical from which that song originates, angry men and women have indeed formed the backbone of the Trump political phenomenon over the last seven years.
Today, the question on many minds is whether those still loyal to the former president will be enough to return him to the White House for a second nonconsecutive term—or whether Republican primary voters may finally be ready to try their luck with someone else.
As onlookers try to deduce where the GOP and the country are heading, they may find value in reviewing the journey that led to this point. How did the Republican Party get from Ronald Reagan—a man who read F.A. Hayek and Frédéric Bastiat and who spoke of America as a welcoming “city on a hill”—to the nativism, protectionism, and populism of Trump?
From the moment he launched his first campaign in 2015, pundits and politicos were staggered both by Trump’s behavior and by voters’ enthusiastic response to it. “Conservatives believed in the magic of a free market unconstrained by government interference, while Trump openly tried to pressure and coerce private companies to act as he thought they should,” writes editor Gerald F. Seib in a recent book. “Conservatives believe in limited executive power; Trump envisioned himself as a president with wide latitude to
