Capitalist Disorganization Has Enabled Trump’s Dominance
The GOP is now a hegemonic force in US politics. But much of that dominance is predicated on Donald Trump’s personal rule, itself made possible by internal GOP weakness and business elites’ political disorganization.
President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol on March 4, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Vivek Chibber
When Donald Trump entered the fray of the 2016 Republican Party primary, he was not a candidate that most of the business class wanted. Yet despite this opposition, Trump was able to defeat the GOP establishment and ultimately capture the presidency. He soon established a level of personal dominance over the party unseen in US political history. Now he is back in the White House, attempting to implement a wildly ambitious trade agenda that — if financial markets are any indication — capital has no truck with.
For a recent episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Catalyst editor Vivek Chibber discussed the historic evolution of the Republican Party with Jacobin contributor Paul Heideman. Heideman is the author of “Trump’s Takeover of the Republicans” in the latest edition of Catalyst as well as a forthcoming book on the history of the contemporary GOP. Chibber and Heideman talked about how business disorganization and Republican Party weakness made possible Trump’s unprecedented takeover of the party and what that might mean for his presidency and for the GOP’s future.
Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and published by Jacobin. Subscribe to Jacobin Radio to listen to all of our podcasts here.
Let’s discuss your analysis of how Trump came to power and the irony that the Republicans, who have traditionally been the party of business, yielded a candidate who most of the business community was, and perhaps continues to be, very unhappy with.
While the Republican Party has been historically the party of business, Trump was a candidate that initially, even in 2016, none of the business community really wanted, and all the way up to 2024, there was at best a kind of lukewarm enthusiasm for him. To put the question sharply: Here’s the party of business, and yet it had a candidate foisted upon them that none of them actually wanted. How could this happen?
To understand this, it’s useful to look at what came before Trump and think about, first, the presidency of George W. Bush, and then the nomination of Mitt Romney in 2012, who were prototypical candidates of American capital. American capital couldn’t have asked for better champions than these.
Of course, the Bush presidency ended in catastrophe and in the near ruin of the Republican Party after the 2006 midterms, and Mitt Romney lost. So part of what happened in the party is that these establishment currents were discredited in a couple of different ways in the decade or so preceding Trump’s first election in 2016. This opened the door in the party for a series of new [currents] that, rather than kind of relying on consensual, almost-unanimous support from the American capitalist class, instead pursued much more confrontational approaches. They were driven by much smaller slivers of capital who had been pushing for a much more aggressive war on the welfare state than someone like George W. Bush wanted and more confrontational approaches to the Democrats and so on.
This hothoused within the party an atmosphere of contention, rhetorical extremism, and anti-liberalism that allowed Trump to come in — both by making his kind of rhetoric the de facto rhetoric of the party, as well as creating this civil war between the establishment and this [newer] wing, which Trump himself in some ways sidestepped in 2016 during his first election. In the wake of these defeats of the Barack Obama era, the party was in a state of division that allowed Trump to come from a place that neither faction was actually looking at and take it over.
This is specific to the party and the internal disorganization of the party. But we’re still stuck with the question, which is why doesn’t the American capitalist class — we can call it the donor class — have more of a disciplining effect on the party, on getting them to get their act together to unite behind a candidate? One of the points you make in the article is that a longer-term phenomenon behind the disintegration of the party has been the political disintegration of the business community itself.
These divisions within the party themselves reflect larger political divisions within the capitalist class about the appropriate strategy to try to secure their interests. The American capitalist class has always been more disorganized than the capitalist class in various European countries that have much stronger labor movements, which in turn promote much more class solidarity among the ruling class.
Business is typically disorganized politically. But in Europe and in the United States, the main factor that got business to unite was the fact that labor had united in unions and in labor parties, and that forced business to get its political act together. What happened in the United States is, in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, business is very united and well organized because labor is pretty well organized. But ironically, once it pushes back the labor movement in the ’70s and ’80s, business loses the leitmotif, as it were, to keep themselves organized, and business associations start splintering.
Yeah. An underappreciated fruit of the [Ronald] Reagan presidency is the disorganization of the American capitalist class. It got so much of what it wanted that business organizations like the Chamber of Commerce started having trouble convincing people to join, because they were already getting everything that they wanted. There was no need for this organization to secure additional goodies for them.
You see then, over the course of the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s, organizations like the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce — which, if you go back to the 1970s when the Roundtable was formed, were really charting out a long-term path for American capitalism over the next half-century, that’s the kind of vision they had — by the 2000s, their animating issues are things like stopping shareholder lawsuits. Right? It’s about defending the most narrow prerogatives of corporate management at the expense of any broader vision of how to shape capitalism.
This political splintering of the class made it so the kind of capitalist collective action that could have possibly stopped Donald Trump was nowhere to be seen. You had individual capitalists working to stop him but very little of any kind of concerted action.
The party itself didn’t just become more fractious and more combative internally in a steady process. There was also a turning point with the Newt Gingrich era in 1994, when it actually became easier for individual businesses and corporations to colonize parts of the party and take over a certain fraction of its legislators, which would have been harder in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.
Absolutely. Today we often think about money in politics through the lens of Citizens United and Supreme Court decisions like that. But Newt Gingrich pioneered a new way of collecting money in politics, and hence a new role for money in American politics, by essentially requiring all Republican congressmembers to fundraise for the party and to redistribute money to one another within the party. Whereas previously, party leadership was often achieved through wheeling-and-dealing within the party, now under Gingrich, party leadership, committee assignments, and that kind of thing became dependent on who could raise the most money. So there was a much more direct subservience of politicians to their donors, without the intermediary of the party institution in the same way.
So you get this interesting phenomenon where the business community is splintering politically because it doesn’t have those agencies like the business associations, the Business Roundtable, and the Committee for Economic Development, which gave them a unified view. And at the same time, the Gingrich revolution makes it easier for those fractured and splintered businesses to colonize parts of the party. Do you see these as independent processes?
I would say that the fracturing of the party is downstream from the fracturing of the class, and the changes that Gingrich made to campaign finance and congressional finance made all of that hit in a much more unmediated way.
An example would be the Koch brothers. Perhaps it would have been harder, in the 1980s and ’90s, for an extreme element like them to have the influence in the Republican Party that they did in the 2000s.
Yeah, and particularly when you consider that many of the things that they were pushing were really opposed by the Republican Party leadership. John Boehner did not want the party to go into these government shutdown fights with the Obama administration; that was really pushed by the wing of the party that was allied with the Koch brothers. So there was a real battle going on, and the ability to set up an independent power base in the party like that is absolutely a fruit of the transformed campaign finance environment.
One symptom of that has been that the Republican Party, for the last sixteen years or so, has essentially been the party that doesn’t have a positive agenda. Its entire life has been about stopping any positive legislation from the other side, and that’s what you would expect from a party that’s essentially and deeply splintered.
Exactly, and the Republicans have been MIA in providing anything like a longer-term vision for American capitalism. It’s a purely reactive politics because that’s the only thing that can generate much consensus in the party. Anything else, there’s one part of the party that’s against it, and so they can’t articulate anything like that.
That makes the Trump phenomenon today even more interesting. One of the things that’s remarkable is how Trump has been able to, at least so far, bring the entire party to heel and get them to line up behind whatever issues and whatever legislation he’s proposing. So how do we square that circle: that the party’s been taken over and essentially divided up behind different segments of the business class, and at the same time, it seems to be lining up en masse behind Trump? Do you think that he’s actually managed to overcome all these divisions, or would you say this is more of a temporary phenomenon?
What Trump has done with the Republican Party is totally unprecedented in American history. There’s never been a president — not Abraham Lincoln, not [Franklin D. Roosevelt] — who controlled his party the way Trump controls the Republican Party. The level of obedience and loyalty that he commands is unprecedented. It’s a level of personalist rule that we have not seen in American politics previously.
That said, I don’t think it’s true that Trump has articulated a hegemonic vision for the party going forward in the way that Ronald Reagan did. Reagan’s vision shaped the Republican Party for the next twenty, twenty-five years after his presidency, and I don’t think Trump has articulated anything similar.
If you look at something like trade, where Trump has been extremely successful in getting a party that ten years ago was more or less monolithically free trade behind his various protectionist measures — it’s hard for me to see that kind of unanimity surviving Trump’s term because there’s a ton of Republican legislators, people like Rand Paul, who continue to be free traders, but who know that the cost of opposing Trump is too high to make it worth it on this issue.
So whoever Trump’s successor is, whether it’s J. D. Vance or Don Jr, I think there’s little chance of them being able to maintain that kind of unanimity. Trump does have some unique political gifts, but they are allowing him to paper over the conflicts in the party rather than truly subsuming them into a new political vision.
On the question of Trump’s relationship to the business class, the big defection within the class over to Trump seems to be in the tech sector. We know that there are very prominent personalities within that wing of the business community that actively funded him: Elon Musk, of course, but also Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and people around them.
Certainly they were behind Trump coming to power. But once he’s in power, we see all this reporting on how wide swaths of the business community bent the knee to him and are at least willing to give him a chance.
If your analysis is right, they’re essentially giving him some rope in which he has to prove his worth to them. And if that happens, maybe you have a more enduring alliance, a new alliance or a rekindling of the alliance, between the Republican Party and significant sections of business. But it can also go south really fast. If it doesn’t work out, you could see a reemergence of that splintering.
Yes, and what we’ve seen since the election with people like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and these various newspaper owners all engaging in the most sycophantic displays toward Trump is itself indicative of the mode of business disorganization that I’ve been describing. Because they’re not coming together as a collective; they’re all going to Trump as individuals and saying, “Let’s make a deal” — all this individual dealmaking rather than any kind of collective presenting Trump with an agenda for business or anything like that. That’s exactly what’s not happening here.
What we’ve seen is itself a symptom of business disorganization. And what you’ve said about rope is exactly right. If we continue to see the stock market tanking, it’s very unlikely that you’re going to see these firms sticking with the administration. They want their profits to go back up.
Two points on this: One is that, in the first Trump administration, what placated the business class was his tax reform. Now he’s once again promising a cut to corporate taxes, but it’s probably not going to be of the same magnitude as we saw the first time. The second is, all the other parts of the tax law are mostly going to be a continuation of what he gave them the first time, which means the bang for the buck, the actual explosiveness of the income gains for business, is going to be much less.
You add to that not just the volatility of the stock market, but also how the uncertainty from his policy retreats and advances is creating a pretty dangerous environment for investment. Within about a year, when you combine the stock market, the investment effects, and the tax law not doing too much, patience could run out very quickly.
The fact that he’s not carrying out any kind of business agenda but really going out on his own and then soliciting business support after the fact only adds to that dynamic. Business doesn’t feel like this is its guy in the way that it did with someone like George W. Bush.
Or with Reagan, of course. There is a nontrivial possibility that he builds a coalition around himself of businesses if this agenda actually manages to take anchor, if the tariffs bring enough businesses around him who are benefiting from it, that it overcomes all the uncertainty and the losers from the tariffs. But it’s a very difficult road he’s chosen, and it’s very possible, even likely perhaps, that by 2026 we see this whole thing falling apart.
It’s a huge gamble, and it’s a gamble at a moment when this gamble has maybe less likelihood of succeeding than any time in the past few decades.
It’s possible he’s actually weakening the party in the longer run. In the article, you make this very interesting distinction, drawing on some political science literature, of party builders versus party predators. What’s the distinction, and where does Trump fall on that divide?
The distinction comes from a political scientist named Daniel Galvin, who has observed that in the post–World War II era, presidents have tended to take one of two stances toward their party. After their election, either they’ve really worked to build and strengthen the party and to set it up for future success, or they’ve tended to see the party with suspicion and to cannibalize it in various ways.
Richard Nixon, for example, with CREEP — the Committee to Reelect the President, which played such a big role in Watergate — part of the point of that was to allow Nixon to circumvent the existing Republican Party and be able to do what he wanted without party oversight. That’s the move of a party predator. You’re saying to donors, “Don’t donate to the Republican Party. Donate to the Committee to Reelect the President.”
Trump has taken party predation to a new level. In the 2024 election, Trump was charging other candidates to use his image in their materials. These other candidates need money to win elections, and Donald Trump is saying, “You’ve got to pay the protection money to me if you want to use my image.” An extraordinary move that, again, is unprecedented. And if you look even more broadly than Trump’s individual moves, if you look at fundraising in the 2024 election, the Republican Party has never been more dependent on a smaller group of donors than it was in 2024.
Part of Trump’s power, and that of some of the MAGA loyalists around him, has come from small donations. They’ve been able to circumvent having to rely on the segments of capital that are not very happy with them, that would like to see a more traditional Republican agenda.
So there’s this idea that one of the reasons the power of capital has been reduced inside the party is that candidates can go around them and go to small donors. But in fact, Trump has had oceans of big money flowing into his coffers. The interesting point you’re making is that, while the amount of big money is still gigantic, it’s based on a very small segment of the capitalist class. So, Trump may not represent the class as a whole, but he represents a kind of maverick wing of the class.
Yes, exactly right. We saw the small-donor phenomenon rising under Barack Obama, and it’s what allowed Obama to out-fundraise Mitt Romney in 2012, even though Romney had the bulk of capitalist support. But the other part of this is: capitalists, because of campaign finance law, can’t directly fund a party or a candidate to their heart’s delight. They have to go through super PACs, which are technically outside of the party, legally independent of the party.
All of this weakens the party as an institution even further. So Trump might have oceans of money from Elon Musk through a super PAC, but the Republican Party’s not seeing that money. They’re not controlling that money. There’s no collective decision-making going on over how to use that money. And so, in that sense as well, Trump is weakening the party as an institution.
The irony here is that if you look at the landscape of bourgeois parties in the world today, both of the American parties have always been weak. They’ve never had the kind of centralized institutions that other parties have had for candidate selection or for generating a platform; the platforms themselves are meaningless because they have no way of enforcing them.
What’s happened is that a historically weak party like the Republican Party has actually become politically weaker even while it’s yielded a candidate that seems to be riding the crest of a united, coherent political organization. The organization itself hasn’t built up any new institutions of unity. The only thing keeping it together is terror and fear.
Trump’s personalism here is in many ways a substitute for the existence of a party institution, a party apparatus. If you look at the nineteenth century when American parties were considerably more organizationally vital than they are today, you saw very little of this kind of personalism. The guy who was nominated didn’t really matter — it was all about the party.
Today it’s the opposite: the party doesn’t matter nearly as much as the person. Given that Donald Trump’s term limited, that’s a problem for the Republicans going forward.
When you look across the aisle to the Democratic Party, it’s the same. The party is splintered, and there’s no ideological coherence. But it also lacks even that individual that the Republicans have. In a winner-take-all system, the electorate might be turned off by the Trump phenomenon, but they need a viable alternative. And when they look over to the Democrats, what do they find? A splintered party that doesn’t even have that momentarily unifying agenda. Right now, the Democrats are utterly in the wilderness.
Yeah, they’re floundering right now. For the Left, that’s a moment of opportunity for providing an alternative to Trumpism because the establishment has failed today even more profoundly than in 2016.
If Trump has not managed to rebuild the Republican Party or even provide it with a coherent ideology the way Reagan did, two questions emerge. One is, could the Trump agenda as a whole, which is still very chaotic, emerge as a new political economy around tariffs, around reshoring, around having a strong executive with something of a weak distributive leaning — because he’s promising, at least right now, not to touch Medicare and Medicaid. Is it possible that some kind of candidate-based economic nationalism of this kind could become a new template that ideologically unites the Republican Party?
I’m skeptical. We’re thinking about a massive reorientation of the American political economy. It’s helpful to think back to something like the Volcker shock, when the Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker massively raised interest rates, starting in 1979 and going into the early ’80s, which was also an attempt to really change the direction of American capitalism. It caused massive economic hardship, huge deindustrialization, with the unemployment rate going up above 10 percent in many places. But [Jimmy] Carter and then Reagan were able to hang on to that because the capitalist class in the United States was absolutely united around the need to bring down interest rates to bring down inflation in the long term.
And to break the back of the labor movement, which the Volcker shock was very important in doing.
Capital had been organizing for something like that for years beforehand, and it stuck to it. If you read congressional hearings in the early ’80s, capital is saying, “We don’t have a problem with high interest rates. We want inflation to be broken.”
Today, to reorient the American economy in a similar way would require, I think, a similar level of economic pain. But there’s no united capitalist class with the discipline to steer that process. Instead, you’re likely to get defectors in all kinds of ways. Trump so far has said that he’s ignoring the stock market. His PR flacks are saying things like, “Trump is making stocks cheap enough for ordinary Americans to buy.”
We’ll see how long that lasts. It took half a decade for the Volcker shock to accomplish its goal of breaking the back of labor and changing the inflation situation. I’m really skeptical that Trump can stay the path in light of grim economic news quarter after quarter in the same way precisely because he doesn’t have anything like a united class behind him pushing for this kind of reorientation of the political economy.
I agree with this. And it’s not just that you had the capitalist class united behind a program of economic dislocation, high interest rates, and austerity. Both parties were united around it as well. The Democrats put up what looked like a fight, but they weren’t fighting — don’t forget it was Carter who brought in Volcker, and it was Carter who said we need to tighten our belts and get ready for some hard times.
This is not true today. The Democrats are not behind this tariff agenda, and if it turns out that the midterm elections weaken Trump’s hold, you’re probably going to see a lot of Republican defections, and you will absolutely see the Democrats go on the warpath. Then it’ll just come down to whether or not he can hold enough of an economic coalition behind him to keep his presidency solvent, and that economic coalition will be based on the tech sector, which is the people he’s brought in. It seems to me unlikely that, one, he’ll be able to keep them with him, and two, that even if he does, it’ll be enough to keep the administration floating on the political-economic agenda.
You have to add to that the actual way these tariffs have been carried out. Say you are a business owner who is set to benefit from these tariffs in some way. Can you actually plan that, a year from now, any of these tariffs will still be in place? It’s not at all clear. The chaos of the implementation has made it so that even his would-be beneficiaries can’t consolidate themselves or start planning as if this reshaping of the political economy is actually going to take place. Because who knows? In two months, maybe these tariffs won’t even be there.
Suppose it’s a one-term administration. Now Trump will have one term, but suppose J. D. Vance, as his heir apparent, loses; suppose even that the congressional midterm elections give the House back to the Democrats. Trump is bringing about or is trying to bring about a lot of changes in increasing the power of the executive, in insulating it from congressional oversight, in weakening the neutrality of the judiciary.
The question is, how much of this will the Democrats actually reverse? Because one of the things he’s doing is giving the future Democratic president a lot more power, not just over these other bodies, but over the American population. Noam Chomsky once said that any state or power center that gets more power is not going to give it back, even if the people holding the offices change.
It’s one of the things that the Left needs to worry about — don’t look at a future Republican defeat as a panacea, because while the damage they’re doing to centers of power might be reversed because those people can defend themselves, the damage they’re doing to democratic norms and to the citizens’ ability to participate might have a ratchet effect.
Yeah, absolutely. If you look at examples from history, every time Republicans aggrandize the executive, Democrats just take it over in the next administration. Under Joe Biden, Democrats had the ability to take away executive power over tariffs, the kind that Trump is exercising now, and they didn’t use it. Everyone knew if Trump was elected, he was going to abuse it in ways that cause all of this economic chaos and pain, and they didn’t do it. That says something about exactly the dynamic you’re describing.