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This week’s National Conservative Conference in Washington, D.C., laid bare the battle for the GOP’s post-Trump soul. As President Donald Trump’s run as the main character of American politics — extended by four years dominating the spotlight while out of power — nears its end, the Republican Party braces for a clash over free markets, global leadership, and the definition of American identity.
For the past decade, Trump’s unifying presence has held together a fractious GOP coalition made of America First populists, traditional conservatives, social and religious conservatives, free-traders, fair-traders, Elon Musk libertarians, Tucker Carlson isolationists, and Lindsey Graham interventionists. No successor is guaranteed to unite these factions.
NOT ALL CONSERVATIVES AGREE WITH TRUMP ON FLAG BURNING ORDER
And early signs suggest deepening divides.
Economics
The NatCon conference this week spotlighted the ascendant nationalist wing of the GOP, featuring speakers who issued direct rebukes to traditional economic conservatism.
While the latter champions free markets, deregulation, and global trade as the engines of prosperity, the NatCon wing views these policies as the primary cause of America’s economic decline. The nation’s economic identity, it believes, should not be consumer-driven efficiency, but a “production economy” that prioritizes domestic manufacturing, strong supply chains, and good-paying jobs for American workers — even if it means embracing tariffs and industrial policy that would have once been anathema to Republicans.
Ronald Reagan, a hero of traditional conservatives, held that government was not the solution but the problem. NatCons, however, eagerly embrace a muscular state and its power to engineer the economy and shape the culture.
The clash between these camps is not merely over the size of government, but over its very purpose: Should the state be a hands-off guardian of free enterprise, or an active shaper of the economy to serve what it considers the national interest?
Trump has embraced elements of both visions, with tax cuts and deregulation on one hand and tariffs and using the power of his office to force companies into bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S on the other.
Will his successor be able to replicate this delicate balancing act? Will future economic conditions even make this approach viable?
Foreign Policy
The differences in foreign policy are even more stark. On one end, traditional conservatives advocate an active role in world affairs to blunt China‘s ascendence and stall the breakdown of global order. Meanwhile, NatCon isolationists reject global alliances and advocate strategic disengagement.
Trump has managed to please both camps just enough to fend off revolt. His swift and devastating military strikes in Yemen, Iran, and most recently off the coast of Venezuela, advanced American interests while avoiding prolonged entanglement.
But the fragile GOP foreign policy coalition shows signs of crumbling as Trump’s second term advances. NatCon condemnation of the Iran nuclear facilities strike reached a fevered pitch, with many prominent voices accusing Trump of a “bait-and-switch” on foreign policy by aligning with the interventionists after campaigning as an isolationist (though neither accusation is strictly true).
Podcaster Charlie Kirk reflected on the Iran strike’s effects on the GOP on Megyn Kelly’s podcast in June, saying, “There is no greater divide on the American Right than foreign policy. And I was really worried that this was going to bring it to a very unpleasant moment.”
Trump’s continued support of Israel and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine further alienates the NatCon faction. Speaking at the conference this week, Curt Mills, editor and executive director of The American Conservative, asked, “Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s liabilities? Why are we in the national conservative bloc, broadly speaking, why do we laugh out of the room this argument when it’s advanced by Volodymyr Zelensky, but are slavish hypocrites for Benjamin Netanyahu? Why should we accept America First — asterisk Israel? And the answer is, we shouldn’t.”
He went on to advance Steve Bannon’s proposition that “regime change” in Israel might be necessary.
Harsh sentiments among NatCons toward Israel are common these days, especially from the younger generation. A recent Pew Research poll found that 50% of Republicans under 50 had a negative view of Israel, while only 23% of Republicans over 50 had a negative view of the Jewish state. The generation gap was on full display at the conference this week, with younger participants in “question-and-answer” sessions showing a disdain for Israel, while older Republicans showed support.
Meanwhile, the traditional conservative bloc remains as united behind Israel as ever. In particular, Republican leaders in the Senate show no signs of wavering as the war in Gaza lurches into its second year. Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, often says that the U.S. must “stand shoulder to shoulder, back-to-back, with no daylight with Israel,” posting in June that, “The United States will always stand with Israel.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), likewise, believes that “American policy should be to provide unequivocal military and diplomatic support to our Israeli allies to fully ensure their security.”
The pro-Israel faction represented by these and other Republican congressional leaders, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, remains the dominant force within the GOP. A July Gallup poll finds that a full 71% of Republican voters support Israel’s military action in Gaza, while 67% hold a favorable view of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But the NatCon disdain for foreign entanglements, especially concerning Israel, appears to be crescendoing.
What is an American?
If economics and foreign policy threaten to divide the post-Trump Republican coalition, the NatCon’s rejection of America as a “creedal nation” has the potential to cleave it in two. Vice President JD Vance, the party’s presumed presidential favorite for 2028, regularly defines America as “not just an idea, but a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”
And while this sounds innocuous and true enough, the practical implications of this definition of American identity carry the potential to reshape the GOP’s core identity in ways that are difficult to predict and possibly at sharp odds with the broader American electorate.
The notion that America is fundamentally a “creedal nation,” favored by traditional conservatives, is rooted in the Declaration of Independence and its universal principles: that all are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and that the nation is bound together by these ideas. In this view, the American ideal is open to anyone regardless of background — so long as they subscribe to the nation’s core tenets of liberty and self-governance.
This view was supported robustly by both Reagan and the original Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who, while speaking to a group of immigrants in 1858, said, “If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none … but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence … and then they feel that moral sentiment … they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that declaration, and so they are.”
Lincoln’s conception has long been the dominant view of American identity across the political spectrum.
But Vance and the NatCons, motivated by the belief that the cultural bonds that once held America together — the family, communities, religion, and shared norms — are in a state of decay, seek to upend this. They argue that the “creedal nation” has proven insufficiently unifying, leading to a fragmented society where different groups have little in common. This decline, in their view, must be restored through a reassertion of a shared identity and a common culture with an emphasis on heritage.
Speaking at the Claremont Institute in early July, Vance gave a nod to the notion that ancestry plays a role in this new vision of American identity, saying of liberals who are American citizens, “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America.”
The line was scrubbed out of the speech’s transcript in the Claremont Institute’s publication, The American Mind.
But it’s easy enough to find the notion echoed throughout the NatCon sphere. Yoram Hazony, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation and considered a founder of the NatCon movement, explicitly endorses Vance’s contention that ancestry is key to American identity.
“By a nation,” he writes in a recent book, “we mean a number of tribes with a shared heritage, usually including a common language, law, or religious tradition, and a past history of joining together.”
In recent weeks, key NatCon thinkers and social media influencers, from Matt Walsh to Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) to Claremont President Ryan P. Williams, have simultaneously posed the question “What is an American” to their audiences. Responses from self-identified “heritage Americans” range from outwardly ethno-nationalist to more subtle but still fringe ideas about what makes a “real” American.
The GOP’s internal debate over American identity reveals a party beginning to redefine itself as its unifying figure departs. Its outcome will not simply determine the party’s policy platform but its fundamental character.
WILL THE RISE OF THE ILLIBERAL RIGHT SINK THE POST-TRUMP GOP?
Will a leader emerge who can inspire enough loyalty from each faction to maintain the party’s national strength? Will it shed its past devotion to free markets and Israel? Will it prioritize “heritage” over shared values?
At present, these are all open questions.