Donald Trump's Fake Makeover
Republicans, in a blind panic about the midterms, are pretending to course correct.
OOPS!
That’s the subtext of just about every communication from Trump administration officials to the broader GOP these days.
They do not confess openly to error—the White House has only one zero-tolerance policy, and it’s against admitting error—but they do convey “oops.”
And the oopses don’t pertain to small-ball or easily correctable mistakes. They pertain to cornerstones of Donald Trump’s agenda. Trump seems to have imagined that he could race a 30-year reich into existence through sheer force of will: demoralizing and repressing opposition, galvanizing foot soldiers with medieval policy spoils accompanied by lurid propaganda, and, through sheer momentum, bring along those caught in the middle.
They now seem to be tacking back a subtler approach. Not just because they think they’ll get a second chance at authoritarian breakthrough, but because the nature of their conduct over the past 14 months has rendered the whole project politically toxic.
What they seem to want, in other words, is to freeze their progress in place, dialing back the braggadocio, in the hope that voters sense the atmospheric differences between March 2025 and March 2026 and assume the worst is behind them.
In other words, they are hoping to salvage power through a change in rhetorical emphasis, without substantively backtracking. Their dog-and-pony approach is clearest in two realms of policy that held Trump’s coalition together: immigration and wellness pseudoscience. MAGA and MAHA.
The Trump administration has stopped using the phrase “mass deportation,” without drawing down its mass-deportation regime or dismantling its mass-deportation machinery. It has silenced or driven out its most vocal vaccine conspiracy theorists, without undoing the damage those people already did to U.S. public health.
It’s revealing, insofar as it suggests awareness within the Trump political operation that these aspects of the agenda lose voters. But you can tell the reversals are superficial, because the leading kooks and fanatics who hate vaccines and thrilled to mass deportation have not turned on the administration. They may not be happy, but they aren’t exactly sad either.
THE DOGS THAT DIDN’T BARK
When George H.W. Bush reneged on his pledge not to levy any new taxes, it ignited a big, fateful rebellion among Republicans on Capitol Hill—one that prefigured the Gingrich revolution just a few years later.
Likewise, when Bill Clinton marked the end of “the era of big government” by enacting welfare reform, prominent members of his administration resigned.
"I have devoted the last 30-plus years to doing whatever I could to help reduce poverty in America," wrote Peter Edelman, an assistant health secretary and personal friend to Clinton, in his letter of resignation. "I believe the recently enacted welfare bill goes in the opposite direction."
Another high ranking official, Wendell Primus, who also resigned, said “to remain would be to disown all the analysis my office has produced regarding the impact of the bill.”
Fast forward to 2026.