The debate over the direction of the Republican party is laden with contradictions and absurdities. There are former Republicans like Liz and Dick Cheney, Tim Miller, Bill Kristol, and Michael Hayden who were either part of or supported the administrations of former Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. For them, these were the glory days of the GOP, and then as soon as Trump took over the party in 2016, they fled to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, finding a home for their ideas of polite imperialism, or as Max Boot called it, “benevolent empire” Though they were welcomed and embraced by the Democrats and their lackeys in the media, there are many who see Trump’s takeover of the GOP as inevitable, given their view that the party has long been rife with conspiracism and racism.
Further, there are some in the Democratic party who have reluctantly admitted that perhaps they got Trump and his appeal wrong, and that their party platform failed to recapture working class, young, male, and ethnic minority voters who voted for Trump. David Brooks wrote an article in the New York Times positing that maybe Bernie Sanders was correct in his assessment of the Democratic party’s failings, citing the “diploma divide”, which refers to the split between college educated and non-college educated voters in how they vote.[i]
There was a brief time when the Democratic party appeared to be grappling with its treatment of the working class. Sanders has repeatedly criticized America’s ruling class, during both his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns and as a member of the Senate, but he capitulates to the party machinery every time. He submitted to Clinton during the 2016 campaign, calling her his friend, that he too, was sick of hearing about her emails. He did the same with Joe Biden in 2020, saying that they are friends, and then he went on to endorse Biden against Trump. Sanders is a performer, he rails against the establishment, and then behind the scenes he happily serves it. He is a champagne socialist. He may have written a best-selling book titled It’s OK To Be Angry About Capitalism, but he owns three homes and has a net worth of $2 million.[ii] Sanders has defended this, claiming that they are just “middle class houses” For him, money provides security, not social status. Apparently, you need three homes for security.[iii]
Sanders is always cited as a rabid defender of the working classes, especially now that Trump is in power.[iv] This is comical as he is not only a member of the oligarchy, but also a willing submissive to the permanent regime. He has had ample opportunity to match his words with action, but he chose to stay in the machine. When approached about running as third party candidate in the 2016 election, he said that he “doesn’t want to end up like Ralph Nader”, and when his supporters walked out the Democratic convention, he did not go with them.[v] In that moment, they should have realized that he is not a serious threat to the Washington establishment. Sanders and other Democrats who pretend to support the working and displaced classes when Trump and the GOP are in power are the best the party has to offer, false hope dressed up as radical alternative populism.
Actions speak louder than words, and all Sanders and his ilk have to offer are words. After the 2024 election, he put out a statement on the results, lambasting the Democratic party for turning away from the working class, and he said that “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,”, and that “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.” [vi]Again, he astutely identifies the problem, but shows no signs of acting on it, Sanders fervently endorsed Biden and then Kamala Harris, and he will inevitably endorse the Democratic nominee in the 2028 election, no matter who it is and what their platform is. Iin his reaction to the results of the election, Sanders is projecting. He is power hungry and concerned only with enriching himself, just like the Clintons, the Obamas, and the rest of the parasitic politicians in Washington, Republican and Democratic. At 83, he should have resigned from the Senate years ago, and yet, he is still there. He is a useless phony. The Democratic party is a useless party. They focus on political correctness, identity characteristics, moderating social media content, and attaining support from the so-called good billionaires.
The Democratic party is in shambles, and their leadership is in a state of denial, and the Republican party is fragmented and split on key issues, especially on the definition of America First. The conservative elite have rejoiced at Trump’s enactment of ‘peace through strength’, and a turn away from the ‘isolationism’ that he ran and won on in 2016, however, as we see with the uproar over Trump’s refusal to release the Jeffery Epstein files that he promised he would expose during his 2024 campaign, there is a portion of the MAGA movement that is dissatisfied with Trump.[vii] At the latest TPUSA event, organized by conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, a speech from Tucker Carlson in which he scorned the Trump regime for not publishing the Epstein files and Epstein’s ties to Israeli intelligence was met with applause.[viii] There was a similar reaction to hearing Dave Smith debate Josh Hammer, where Smith criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza and when asked if Israel is a US ally, he said “No,”, and then explained that it is Israel that has pushed for the US to entrench itself in the Middle East, deposing governments and fueling insurgencies.[ix] Where Trump was initially met with boos when he lambasted Bush’s foreign policy in the infamous 2016 debate in South Carolina, Carlson and Smith were met with cheers. There is evidently a hunger for what Trump promised.
Instead of taking on the deep state/permanent regime, Trump has become a part of it though he is not a member, he is a useful idiot, and the conservative elite is in for a rude awakening when enough of the MAGA movement breaks from Trump and there is a significant split in the GOP over American empire. The disillusionment with Trump that we are seeing that he is responding to with hostility, referring to those still talking about Epstein as “weaklings”, goes far beyond the issue of Epstein and even mass deportations.[x] People are screaming for radical change and Trump promised a revolution, however, he has chosen to serve oligarchs instead of the people. Any silver linings of a second Trump term have evaporated. NATO will continue to exist in full force. Mass deportations will not be carried out as exceptions have been made for workers in certain industries, like agriculture and hospitality.[xi] The US will continue to send weapons to Ukraine and Israel, and rather than release the files or notorious client list of Jeffrey Epstein, Trump and his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, have concluded that there is no more to the Epstein story. Trump is expressing frustration with his supporters who are not letting the Epstein story die or fade away. This could be an opportunity for Trump’s opposition to make pitch to disillusioned voters; however, they have nothing to offer. The illiberal liberal class will revel in the fragmentation of MAGA, and they will emerge victorious, as despite The promise of Trump, US foreign policy has remained the same, as has domestic policy. The illiberal liberal class may never admit this, but Trump’s betrayal of his political movement is a boon for them, as the overhaul they worried about has not happened. Trump may be gutting various government departments, but the underlying policy has not changed. The ruling class only weeps over Trump’s triumph because he makes empire and the violative policy done in service to it abysmal, not because he enacts atrocious and destructive policies. The Republican party seems to be returning to how it operated in the days of Bush, only with a different set of backers and thought leaders. Trump’s betrayal, though not surprising, is still bitterly disappointing.
Both major political parties in the US, or, as they are more aptly called, both factions of the uniparty in Washington, are not concerned with the lower classes, not even the middle class. They rant about climate change, and how citizens should manage with less or go without while they fly around in private jets, sipping champagne. They rail against the dangers of China while they depend on them for rare earth minerals and cheap goods. Importantly, they promise that once we are rid of the cancerous Trump, all will be fixed and over time, the American republic can be mended. Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again. However, the system that Trump is destroying is the very system that led to his triumph in 2016, and it is the same system that drove Obama to the White House in 2008, the Tea Party movement in 2010, and the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. People are furious, as they see a government that claims to be fighting for them, but in action, it does the complete opposite, looting the US treasury to funnel arms from the weapons manufacturers to places like Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. This is why the denial over the alleged uniqueness of Trump’s constitutional violations is so dangerous, as where many are concerned about ‘normalizing Trump’, there is a far more insidious implication in pretending that he is an aberration, a blight, a stain that we just need to cleanse. This implication suggests that a figure like Trump and his overt disregard for US law and the constitution, the key tenets of the imperial presidency, is unheard of, and that all his predecessors venerated the constitution. Anyone with a shred of integrity can read and see that this is not the case. Even in the case of the Bush regime, where at the time of his reign, he was despised by liberals and leftists, and he and Dick Cheney were reviled for their role in the Iraq war and later the Great Recession at the end of Bush’s second term, his depravity has been seemingly memory holed. It’s as if extraordinary rendition and torture, creating a surveillance state, starting two Middle East quagmires, and myriad other horrible acts are not so bad, at least, relative to Trump and the horrors of Alligator Alcatraz, his efforts to end birthright citizenship, and his torching of USAID. It is true that much of what Trump has done is egregious, but to act like it, together with the Supreme Court rulings that have, in the minds of ‘legal experts’, greatly expanded the executive branch’s power, are an abnormality is magical thinking.
As I noted in my first essay in this series, the issue the illiberal liberal class has with the flurry of constitutional violations that started in January 20th is not the violations themselves, it’s who is committing them. The silence on law breaking among the opposition when it is their party in power was an issue during the Obama regime. As Gene Healy argues, for liberals who spat bile at Bush and his supporters transformed as soon as Obama was elected and proceeded to govern in the same way, and he writes that “Red Team/Blue Team partisanship so clouds our vision that many of us only fear the executive unbound when the scepter and crown pass to the “other team.”[xii] This partisanship has morphed into a Manichean view that if the ‘other team’ is given power, it will result in the end of America and a victory for the ‘axis of evil’. This is why there are so few who oppose constitutional violations by any president, not just their guy. Healy goes on to write that “Conservatives who defended every excess of the Bush administration now rail against Obama’s Imperial Presidency, and liberals who considered the Bush era one long descent into the dark night of fascism seem blithely indifferent to the present Oval Office occupant’s multiplying executive power grabs.”[xiii] This hypocrisy is even worse now, as it goes beyond the silence of Democrats and Republicans when their party is in power. We see a bitter denial across the illiberal liberal class about what allowed for Trump’s political success and his abuse of executive authority. They refuse to see this as an inevitable next step from what they either actively defended or outright ignored for years. Trump’s time in office is usually isolated from any historical context, and when it is given context, it is in the context of an increasingly deranged GOP, as I mentioned in my previous essay. There may be dangers in ‘normalizing Trump’, however, there is an even graver danger in normalizing what gave rise to Trump.
Conclusion
In February, Trump posted on Truth Social that “He who saves his country violates no laws.”[xiv] This echoes comments that Richard Nixon made in an interview David Frost, where he said “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal. Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the nation.”[xv], and yet, as we see with the Democratic party, they have used many shady and antidemocratic methods to defeat Trump, from the years long Russiagate hoax, the conspiracy theory that refuses to die, even as Trump scolds Vladimir Putin and threatens new sanctions and tariffs on Russia, to trying to ban him from ballots in the 2024 election. For the illiberal liberal class, all actions are acceptable or necessary in the name of stopping Trump and his political movement. The divide we see now differs from the split Healy describes in a significant way though, and that is in the split itself. Instead of red and blue, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, there is a split rooted in class interests. This transcends the traditional class lines established by Marxist thinkers like Karl Marx and E.P. Thompson. There is a lower class, which I call the displaced class, who are alienated from a rapidly changing world that is still underpinned by neoliberalism. Rather than listen to the concerns of the displaced class, the illiberal liberal class ignores or degrades them, and this created a vacuum for Trump to channel this rage and secure the White House twice.
Trump and his gang of rogues, the illiberal class, serve the same masters as the illiberal liberal class but make no attempt to mask it. The intrusion of the broligarchs, a reptilian elite, cold blooded, gaunt, and radically inhumane, will not be stopped by the illiberal liberal class. They will be, and they are, embraced by the illiberal class. Those who are outraged by Trump’s rampant violations of US law and the constitution are not wrong, but for most of them, it is not solely a problem with the violations themselves, it is because it is Trump doing it. They are content with figures like Obama and Bush, even as they flagrantly abused their authority. Their eternal denial of this reality imperils us all.
[i] Brooks, David. “The ‘Diploma Divide’ and the 2024 Election.” The New York Times, November 16, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/16/opinion/educated-2024-election.html.
[ii] Sanders, Bernie. It’s OK to Be Angry about Capitalism. Crown, 2023.
[iii] Lex Clips, Lex Fridman, and Bernie Sanders. “Bernie Sanders on Having 3 Houses and Being Worth $2 Million | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips.” YouTube, October 27, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miWJinIlMjc.
[iv] Conley, Julia. “Amid Trump Attacks on Education, Sanders to Hold Town Hall on Teacher Pay Crisis | Common Dreams.” Common Dreams, July 22, 2025. https://www.commondreams.org/news/average-pay-of-teacher. and Marcetic, Branko. “Democrats Appear Paralyzed. Bernie Sanders Is Not.” Jacobin.com, 2025. https://jacobin.com/2025/02/trump-democrats-opposition-bernie-sanders.
[v] Hedges, Chris. “Bernie Sanders’ Phantom Movement – Truthdig.” Truthdig, February 15, 2016. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/bernie-sanders-phantom-movement/.
[vi] Bolton, Alexander. “Sanders: Democratic Party ‘Has Abandoned Working Class People.’” The Hill, November 6, 2024. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4977546-bernie-sanders-democrats-working-class/.
[vii] Crisp, Elizabeth. “63 Percent Disapprove of Trump Administration Handling of Epstein Files: Poll.” The Hill, July 16, 2025. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5404420-trump-administration-epstein-probe-poll/.
[viii] MAGNO NEWS, and Tucker Carlson. “🇺🇸 Tucker Carlson’s Full Speech at SAS 2025 by Turning Point USA in Tampa, Florida.” YouTube, July 12, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irnX4TMruIY.
[ix] Charlie Kirk, Dave Smith, and Josh Hammer. “FULL Josh Hammer vs Dave Smith Debate on Israel.” YouTube, July 13, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-ng95XlQb4.
[x] Holmes, Oliver. “Trump Calls Epstein Conspiracy a ‘Hoax’ and Turns on Maga ‘Weaklings.’” the Guardian. The Guardian, July 17, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/16/donald-trump-dismisses-inquiry-into-jeffrey-epstein-as-boring.
[xi] Aleaziz, Hamed, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. “Trump Shifts Deportation Focus, Pausing Raids on Farms, Hotels and Eateries.” The New York Times, June 14, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/us/politics/trump-ice-raids-farms-hotels.html.
[xii] Healy, Gene. “But He’s Our Imperial President!” Cato Institute, 2025. https://www.cato.org/commentary/hes-our-imperial-president.
[xiii] Healy. “But He’s Our Imperial President!”
[xiv] Scheppele, Kim Lane. “Trump’s Counter-Constitution.” Verfassungsblog, February 21, 2025. https://doi.org/10.59704/ee3b0ca2d243fd42.
[xv] Bailey, Jeremy, David Frost, and Richard Nixon. “Transcript of David Frost’s Interview with Richard Nixon.” Teaching American History, 1977. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/transcript-of-david-frosts-interview-with-richard-nixon/.
References
Aleaziz, Hamed, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. “Trump Shifts Deportation Focus, Pausing Raids on Farms, Hotels and Eateries.” The New York Times, June 14, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/us/politics/trump-ice-raids-farms-hotels.html.
Bailey, Jeremy, David Frost, and Richard Nixon. “Transcript of David Frost’s Interview with Richard Nixon.” Teaching American History, 1977. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/transcript-of-david-frosts-interview-with-richard-nixon/.
Brooks, David. “The ‘Diploma Divide’ and the 2024 Election.” The New York Times, November 16, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/16/opinion/educated-2024-election.html.
Bolton, Alexander. “Sanders: Democratic Party ‘Has Abandoned Working Class People.’” The Hill, November 6, 2024. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4977546-bernie-sanders-democrats-working-class/.
Charlie Kirk, Dave Smith, and Josh Hammer. “FULL Josh Hammer vs Dave Smith Debate on Israel.” YouTube, July 13, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-ng95XlQb4.
Conley, Julia. “Amid Trump Attacks on Education, Sanders to Hold Town Hall on Teacher Pay Crisis | Common Dreams.” Common Dreams, July 22, 2025. https://www.commondreams.org/news/average-pay-of-teacher.
Crisp, Elizabeth. “63 Percent Disapprove of Trump Administration Handling of Epstein Files: Poll.” The Hill, July 16, 2025. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5404420-trump-administration-epstein-probe-poll/.
Healy, Gene. “But He’s Our Imperial President!” Cato Institute, 2025. https://www.cato.org/commentary/hes-our-imperial-president.
Hedges, Chris. “Bernie Sanders’ Phantom Movement – Truthdig.” Truthdig, February 15, 2016. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/bernie-sanders-phantom-movement/.
Holmes, Oliver. “Trump Calls Epstein Conspiracy a ‘Hoax’ and Turns on Maga ‘Weaklings.’” the Guardian. The Guardian, July 17, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/16/donald-trump-dismisses-inquiry-into-jeffrey-epstein-as-boring.
Lex Clips, Lex Fridman, and Bernie Sanders. “Bernie Sanders on Having 3 Houses and Being Worth $2 Million | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips.” YouTube, October 27, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miWJinIlMjc.
MAGNO NEWS, and Tucker Carlson. “🇺🇸 Tucker Carlson’s Full Speech at SAS 2025 by Turning Point USA in Tampa, Florida.” YouTube, July 12, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irnX4TMruIY.
Marcetic, Branko. “Democrats Appear Paralyzed. Bernie Sanders Is Not.” Jacobin.com, 2025. https://jacobin.com/2025/02/trump-democrats-opposition-bernie-sanders.
Sanders, Bernie. It’s OK to Be Angry about Capitalism. Crown, 2023.
Scheppele, Kim Lane. “Trump’s Counter-Constitution.” Verfassungsblog, February 21, 2025. https://doi.org/10.59704/ee3b0ca2d243fd42.
Not Without Incident: Questioning Big Brother's Platitudes 
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