I Finally Figured Out Why the Republicans Aren’t Stopping Trump

I kept waiting for the moment it would happen. The moment enough Republican senators, enough House members, enough party elders would look at what was unfolding and say: enough. I kept assuming that moment was coming, because surely — surely — a party built on ideas about liberty and limited government wouldn’t actually let one man bend it entirely to his will.

I don’t think that anymore. And once I stopped assuming good faith, the last several decades of American politics finally made sense to me as a single, coherent story, rather than a series of disconnected shocks.

The pattern goes back further than most of us were taught to notice — back before Reagan, to a 1971 memo written by a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell (soon to be a Supreme Court justice) at the request of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memo argued, in plain terms, that American business was losing the war of ideas — losing to consumer advocates, to labor, to a rising generation skeptical of unchecked corporate power — and that business needed to organize, fund, and coordinate a long-term counteroffensive: think tanks, media, campus programs, the courts.

That memo became a blueprint. Over the following decades, a genuinely well-funded infrastructure grew up around it — think tanks, legal societies, model-legislation shops, media operations — all aimed at one underlying goal: shift power away from organized labor and the broad middle class, and toward capital.

By the time Reagan took office, the groundwork had been laid. The PATCO strike in 1981, where Reagan fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, sent an unmistakable signal to every union in the country about where the new administration stood. Tax rates on top earners fell sharply. Deregulation accelerated. And union density — the percentage of American workers in a union — began a decline that has never really reversed, from roughly a third of the workforce in the 1950s to about 10% today.

None of that happened by accident. It happened because it was, in a very real sense, the plan.

What ties this to Trump, in my view, is that the donor class that built this machine was never actually loyal to democratic norms, or to decency, or even really to conservatism as a philosophy. It was loyal to outcomes: lower taxes on capital, weaker regulation, weaker labor power, favorable judges. Trump delivered all four — historic tax cuts skewed toward the top, a wave of business-friendly deregulation, and a federal judiciary reshaped for a generation.

That, I think, is the actual reason the guardrails haven’t held. It isn’t that Republican leadership doesn’t see the authoritarian drift. It’s that the same donor apparatus built since the Powell Memo has decided the drift is an acceptable price for the deliverables. The unions were broken decades ago. The judges are seated. The tax cuts are banked. Why would the architects of that project spend their remaining capital defending a set of democratic norms that were never really the point?

I think I resisted this conclusion for years because it’s uncomfortable to believe your political opponents aren’t simply wrong — mistaken, shortsighted, reacting to fear — but are, in a meaningful number of cases, executing a long-term strategy they were never going to abandon just because it started producing an authoritarian byproduct. It’s easier to believe in good-faith disagreement. It’s harder, and I think more honest, to recognize a movement that decided fifty years ago what it wanted and has simply adjusted its tactics — including, apparently, tolerating Trump — to keep getting it.

A note on the other side of this: plenty of thoughtful people dispute this framing. Some historians argue the “Powell Memo as master plan” narrative overstates coordination and understates how much of this was several separate movements — free-market economists, evangelical mobilization, anti-communist hawks — that converged more by shared interest than by design. Others argue Republican reluctance to break with Trump has less to do with donor priorities and more to do with primary-voter loyalty and fear of a MAGA-aligned base that could end a career with one bad headline. And plenty of conservatives would reject the “control of the rich and powerful” framing outright, arguing deregulation and tax policy were good-faith bets on growth, not a scheme against ordinary people. Worth sitting with those counterarguments too, even if you land where I did.