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

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?

Here’s the part I don’t think gets said often enough: Democrats faced the same temptation. As corporate money and, increasingly, oligarch money started flowing harder into politics, that money didn’t only flow to Republicans. It was offered to Democrats too — and plenty of times, they took it.

I keep coming back to The Lord of the Rings as the clearest way I know to explain why that matters. The One Ring isn’t dangerous because evil people use it. It’s dangerous because it corrupts anyone who wields it, no matter how good their intentions are going in. That’s the whole point of the story: Gandalf won’t touch it. Galadriel won’t touch it, even when it’s placed directly in her hands and she can see exactly what she could do with that power. Boromir, a genuinely brave and well-meaning man, reaches for it anyway — convinced he can use it to save his people — and it breaks him. The lesson Tolkien keeps hammering home isn’t “bad people want power.” It’s “power itself is the trap, and good intentions are not an immunity.”

That’s the read I have on the Democratic Party’s relationship with corporate and oligarch money. The instinct to take it and use it “for good” — to fund the campaigns, to compete on the same financial terms Republicans have been operating on since the Powell Memo — is exactly the Boromir move. It feels reasonable in the moment. It even feels necessary. And it still corrupts, slowly, the same way it corrupted the other side: donors get access, access becomes influence, and influence quietly narrows what a party is willing to fight for on behalf of ordinary people versus what it’s willing to protect for the people writing checks.

If we actually want to reestablish a democracy — a republic that answers to people rather than to wealth — I don’t think the answer is figuring out how to wield that same ring more virtuously than the other side does. I think the answer is closer to Frodo’s actual task: carry it somewhere it can be destroyed, not somewhere it can be used. That means campaign finance reform with real teeth, it means public financing options, it means a party willing to walk away from money that comes with strings attached — even when walking away is costly in the short term. We already ran this experiment once, on the Republican side, and watched what four decades of taking that money did to a party’s priorities. Rereading that story and drawing the obvious lesson isn’t optional at this point. It’s the whole ballgame.

I learned this lesson myself, the hard way, a long time before I ever thought about it in political terms. Years ago, when I was CEO of a high-tech AI-based startup, I was raising capital from venture capitalists — and I succeeded in it. At one point I was at a VC gathering in New York City, standing in the lobby after giving a presentation, just talking with people, when one of the venture capitalists came up and asked what I was up to. I told him I was trying to sell a minority stake in the company — enough to raise the capital I needed, while retaining creative control so I could keep building the company the way I believed in.

He looked at me and said something I’ve never forgotten: I didn’t understand capital. If he owned a dollar of my company, he owned it — he controlled it. There was no such thing, he told me, as being a little bit owned. You can’t get a little pregnant. That’s just the nature of capitalism.

I’ve thought about that moment for years, and I think it’s the truest thing anyone ever told me about money and power. It doesn’t matter how small the stake looks on paper, or how confident you are that you’ll keep the pen in your own hand. Capital doesn’t do partial ownership in practice, whatever the cap table says. That’s exactly what the Ring is a metaphor for: you don’t get to hold a little bit of that power and stay yourself. The moment it’s in the building, it’s not a minority stake in your soul. It’s a claim on the whole thing. That’s as true for a party taking donor money as it was for me standing in that lobby.

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. On the Democratic side, others would argue that refusing all large donations unilaterally just cedes the financial playing field to the other side, and that the real fix is structural — public financing, disclosure laws — rather than one party’s unilateral restraint. Worth sitting with those counterarguments too, even if you land where I did.