Contract with Conservatism: The Tea Party Past and Post-Trump Future

‍I. Introduction

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

Everything around Donald Trump invites apocalyptic interpretation. Supporters and critics alike describe his presidency as a rupture in the fabric of space and time: the moment American conservatism was either rescued from the abyss or Sparta-kicked over the edge. Trump himself has always encouraged this view: from his 2016 acceptance speech, in which he claimed, “I alone can fix it,” to his 2025 post on Truth Social, which said, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Sober analysis requires that we dispense with such polarizing extremes. Both the left and the right treat Trump’s rise as something without precedent in history. As incomparable as the president’s personality is, both accounts are wrong. To understand what Trump means for the future of conservatism, we must first understand what he meant to conservative voters in 2016.

The historical currents that Trump rode and channeled in 2016 were already visible in the decade before he descended the golden escalator. As we argued in First Things, the intellectual lineage of national conservatism had already been imported from Britain by the late 2000s. That strand of the story focusing on renewed conservative interest in fraternity and the ties that bind is assumed. What matters for our case here is the political and electoral pre-history: voters were not buying a new creed; they were hiring a change agent to deliver an existing one.

The decade preceding Trump’s ascent was marked by a widening gap between conservative promises and conservative governance. Medicare was expanded under President George W. Bush despite conservative objections. Federal spending rose under Republican trifectas rather than falling. Obamacare survived repeated Republican electoral victories and a Supreme Court challenge. By the time of the 2008-2009 bailouts, the base was furious. The party still championed limited government, free markets, social conservatism, and a strong national defense. Yet its actions did not match its words.

The Tea Party emerged in response to this failure to deliver. As Matthew Continetti has observed, it was “a manifestation of America’s ‘folk libertarianism,’” “noteworthy for its hostility to both the Democratic and the Republican parties.” Like the MAGA movement that came later, the Tea Party was cobbled together from “optimistic, forward-looking mainstream supply-siders and pessimistic, anti-institutional, conspiracy-minded extremists,” united by shared frustration. It demanded that the party do what it had long promised.

According to Continetti, the selection of Sarah Palin in 2008 “signified the arrival of populism at the highest levels of Republican politics”: “her combination of media stardom and anti-elitism made her an electric figure,” one who had “more in common with many Republican (and Democratic) voters than with either Democratic or Republican elites.” And yet, even after sweeping the House in 2010, the Tea Party produced little durable policy change.

Voters drew an understandable conclusion: The problem was not the program. The problem was the delivery mechanism.

Trump’s rise was the logical next step. Republican voters did not abandon fusionism in 2016. On the contrary, they chose a champion who would finally implement it, even if it meant disregarding the GOP’s traditional deference to the media, legislative etiquette, and personnel rituals. As Palin declared in her January 2016 endorsement speech, Trump was “beholden to no one but we the people… perfectly positioned to let you make America great again” and to put an end to the “GOP majorities handing Obama a blank check to fund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood and illegal immigration.”

It was a wager on Trump that would come to be sealed with a contract.

II. The Contract

“In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.” — Thomas Jefferson, Draft of Kentucky Resolutions

Most Republican primary voters were less bullish on Trump than Palin was, resulting in a protracted, highly competitive field in which then-candidate Trump ultimately received less than 45 percent of the base’s support. Republican voters were anxious about the untested businessman and the potential downside risks of his norm-shattering antics. They therefore required reassurance: a contract of sorts, sometimes tacit but often explicit. Under its terms, the disruptor would disrupt while the contract’s guardrails would keep him faithful to the program the voters had already endorsed.

The terms of that contract were epitomized in the president’s platform and personnel.

First, the platform. Phyllis Schlafly, conservative firebrand, scourge of the Equal Rights Amendment, and founder of Eagle Forum, was no stranger to the power of the party’s platform, adopted every four years at the Republican National Convention (from 1952 to her death in 2016, she attended every one). Ever since the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the Republican platform has articulated the party’s support for legal protections for the unborn.

“Platforms are important,” Schlafly explained to a skeptical interviewer. Far from an academic exercise trumped by the whims and private opinions of the Republican candidate, the “platform is the statement of what the party stands for.” Any candidate who rejects his party’s planks risks defeat, as Schlafly argued Bob Dole did in 1996 over the pro-life issue. By contrast, even a lukewarm pro-life candidate like George H. W. Bush could succeed by embracing it. Through long and faithful engagement with the platform committee, Schlafly believed her work helped transform a party once ambivalent about abortion into the standard-bearer of the pro-life movement.

As the 2016 primary progressed and Schlafly became convinced that “Trump alone had a path to a first-round victory at the Republican convention,” the two arranged a meeting. In March 2016, Schlafly privately “asked him to promise to support the platform.” When he did, Schlafly prepared to throw her weight behind Trump, a decision that was still controversial at that point in the primary, including with members of her own organization (many of whom supported Ted Cruz). A month later, some Eagle Forum board members, including her family, attempted to oust Schlafly and her chosen successor, Ed Martin, leading to lawsuits and a fractured organization. Even with Trump’s platform commitments in place, many in the movement remained unconvinced.

Next came the matter of personnel. In early May, Trump cleared the campaign field of the two remaining candidates, Ted Cruz and John Kasich. Yet the path to nomination at the convention was anything but certain, and there was acute anxiety about the future of the Supreme Court following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death earlier that year. In another attempt to bind the disruptor to the traditional conservative agenda, leading figures at the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation compiled a list of potential nominees to replace Scalia. Many critics were pleasantly surprised when, on May 18, the Trump campaign announced its support for that list. Even so, some conservatives remained uncertain whether they “should trust Mr. Trump to follow through on what he says he will do,” as the Ethics & Public Policy Center’s Ed Whelan put it at the time.

Then came the selection of the vice president. In mid-May, Trump’s advisors presented the presumptive nominee with a list of sixteen names, including primary opponents such as Chris Christie and John Kasich, tested Republican governors, and surprising choices such as Condoleezza Rice, all clearly meant to reassure hawkish voters. Potential candidates were asked whether they had “any interest in being the most powerful vice president in history” and were purportedly promised significant influence over domestic and foreign policy. In the end, Trump selected Mike Pence, a movement conservative governor with strong evangelical and fiscal credentials, as his running mate.

Even after the surprise general election victory, President-elect Donald Trump continued to honor the contract by staffing his administration with reputable Republicans. The president filled his first cabinet with conservative figures such as Rick Perry, Nikki Haley, Jeff Sessions, Tom Price, John Kelly, Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, and Elaine Chao. With continued input from Heritage and the Federalist Society, three Supreme Court justices and more than two hundred lower-court judges were selected from the originalist short list.

In these ways, Trump’s first term largely honored the contract. He disrupted the status quo while operating within the boundaries set by voters, and the conservative agenda advanced in line with their wishes.  

III. The Breaking

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
Are full of passionate intensity.”
— William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

The disruption was never going to come without consequence. A wrecking ball that clears the way for a house you want to build is still a wrecking ball, a tool that can just as easily leave you homeless.

By the time the second Trump administration took office in 2025, the guardrails of the original contract had clearly eroded. More importantly, Trump was no longer simply challenging the institutions that had frustrated conservative goals; he was beginning, in key respects, to move away from the traditional conservative agenda those voters had expected him to pursue.

The party platform, the product of decades of work by conservatives like Schlafly, was gutted of its longstanding commitments to life, deficit reduction, and welfare reform. The vice presidency, once a reassurance to the movement, was no longer held by a figure rooted in the fusionist tradition but by one whose instincts run through the online populist right. The Federalist Society’s role in judicial selection was publicly downgraded, and the president attacked one of its former leaders by name. And whereas the 2017 cabinet had been drawn largely from the conventional conservative bench, the 2025 cabinet was disproportionately composed of its critics.

These developments reflected a broader shift within the coalition that unfolded during and in response to the Biden years. The online populist right did not emerge in a vacuum. It was radicalized by four years of lawfare, ideological overreach within federal agencies, and what its adherents perceive as a systematic effort to push conservatives out of the country’s most important institutions. Whatever one thinks of that narrative, its political effect is clear: it has produced a faction that no longer trusts traditional conservatism (“what has conservatism ever conserved?”) and is increasingly willing to replace it with its own agenda.

That agenda is not one program but three, arrayed in open tension with each other and with the contract voters signed in 2016.

The first fault line runs through foreign policy. The isolationist right, visibly ascendant through much of 2024 and early 2025, is now being challenged by a recovering internationalist wing under the second Trump administration. But the results have been mixed. In Venezuela, the isolationists watched helplessly as the United States military flew in and extradited Nicolás Maduro without a single American life lost. In Iran, it initially looked like isolationists were in retreat as Operation Rising Lion and Operation Epic Fury leveled Iran’s navy, nukes, and much of the regime. Today, it is the internationalists who are on the back foot as President Trump appears intent on pushing forward with a JCPOA-style ceasefire agreement that would allow the regime to grow back in strength, even after the loss of more than a dozen American soldiers’ lives.

The second runs through culture and moral order. The online right’s brief flirtation with a kind of barstool libertinism, anti-woke as license rather than as discipline, has collided with a reassertion of evangelical and socially conservative priorities. The pro-life movement is growing frustrated with delays and half-measures, including the FDA’s stalled review of Mifepristone. At the same time, the administration has reclassified marijuana and is signaling similar openness to reclassifying psychedelics and other questionable drugs as therapeutic treatments. These moves have drawn pushback from congressional conservatives, including otherwise populist officials like Josh Hawley, suggesting that this is not a marginal disagreement.

The third runs through the economy. The administration’s embrace of tariffs and its desire to micromanage industrial policy is a clear departure from the free-market commitments that defined the fusionist consensus. These policies have not only divided the conservative coalition but also failed to deliver the results promised. The Supreme Court’s ruling against the use of IEEPA to impose broad-based tariffs, along with bipartisan votes in Congress to reclaim trade authority, reflects growing unease even among those otherwise inclined to support the administration. Proposals such as the bailout of Spirit Airlines underscore how far the New Right has drifted from conservatism’s longstanding economic instincts. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, generally a supporter of the president’s trade policies, criticized the proposal thus: “If Spirit’s creditors or other potential investors don’t think they can run it profitably coming out of its second bankruptcy in under two years, I doubt the US Government can either.”

Indeed, the drift appears to be accelerating. In recent months, the administration has proposed creating a new 50-year mortgage to make housing more affordable, imposing price controls on prescription drugs, and placing new restrictions on credit card interest rates. These proposals have more in common with Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren than Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek.

In each instance, the result is not a coherent alternative to the contract voters endorsed in 2016, but a widening chasm between the factions of the Right. The question is not whether conservatism will return to its pre-2016 form. It is whether it will remain anchored in any durable set of principles whatsoever.

Here, the obvious objection arises that any effort to recover the old synthesis amounts to nostalgia: a refusal to accept that the party has already moved on. But that objection misunderstands the nature of the tradition it seeks to dismiss.

G. K. Chesterton’s formulation remains the clearest answer. Tradition, he wrote, means “giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

The populist insurgents of the present often claim their legitimacy from their responsiveness to the passions and priorities of the hour. But a “conservatism” that recognizes no authority beyond the present moment is not conservative at all; it is, by definition, progressive.

The traditional right’s reawakening, then, is not an attempt to turn back the clock. It is an effort to restore a balance that honors the movement’s accumulated wisdom: the Founders on ordered liberty, Burke on inheritance and community, and the fusionists on the indispensable alliance of liberty and virtue.

The movement is not choosing between past and future. It is choosing between a democracy that counts its dead and an oligarchy that does not. “Each age finds its own language for an eternal meaning” (Whittaker Chambers), but “the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living” (T. S. Eliot). As Ronald Reagan put it in 1977, “The principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind.” The task he described remains the same: not to reinvent conservatism, but to demonstrate that its principles still work.

IV. The Loss of Substance

“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” — H. L. Mencken, Prejudices, Second Series

The contract Republican voters signed in 2016 was not just about style or temperament. It was also about substance. Voters believed that limited government, free markets, traditional values, and a strong national defense were not merely inherited commitments but the actual answers to the questions that made the Trump candidacy necessary in the first place.

Beginning with COVID and continuing through Biden’s term, American families were squeezed. Inflation skyrocketed, and affordability plummeted. Credit tightened. Housing costs surged. Common sense came under a withering assault from elite cultural institutions on all sides.

Trump’s diagnostic instincts are often correct. But the administration’s prescriptions in the second term have been wildly unpredictable and often off base.

Consider the tariff regime. The premise that decades of trade hollowed out American industry and depressed wages in communities that depended on it contains a certain insight. But the policy response has produced predictable results. Roughly 900,000 jobs have been lost in the year since the administration’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement. Economists across the conservative spectrum warned that broad-based tariffs would function as a tax on working-class consumption and a shock to domestic manufacturers reliant on imported inputs. The data now bears out that warning.

Consider the push for price controls on credit card interest rates. The underlying concern is understandable: rates in the high twenties can trap households that take on more debt than they should. But a federal cap will not make credit cheaper for those borrowers. It will make credit unavailable. The marginal borrowers most dependent on revolving credit will be pushed toward riskier, more expensive products, such as payday loans and informal lenders, or toward no credit at all. The very people the policy is meant to help will be left with fewer and worse options.

Consider the drive to impose price controls on pharmaceuticals. The politics are obvious: 81 percent of Americans favor “getting tough on Big Pharma.” But the economics are unchanged by the polling. Price controls do not reduce the costs of developing new treatments; they transfer those costs onto future research or discourage it altogether. A policy that is popular today but reduces the number of new therapies tomorrow is not a victory. It is a delayed cost paid by the next generation of Americans.

Trump’s idea of a 50-year mortgage follows the same pattern. The problem (young families priced out of homeownership) is real. But stretching a mortgage payment schedule would do nothing to address underlying issues such as lack of supply, inflated prices, and elevated interest rates. Monthly payments would drop only marginally, while total interest paid would rise dramatically. The result would not be broader ownership, but longer dependence and the creation of a permanent debtor class.

In each case, the pattern is the same: a real problem, correctly identified, followed by a policy that either fails to solve it or makes it worse. That pattern should be familiar, because it is the same one that has defined the modern left.

Supporters of the emerging post-liberal right argue that this record vindicates a different conclusion. Thinkers like Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari, and Yoram Hazony contend that the market is itself the solvent of fraternity; that the state must build what markets cannot; that the tariff regime, price controls, and debt-extension schemes are features rather than bugs of a corrective politics designed to restore a sense of stability and purpose that markets, left to themselves, have eroded.

This argument deserves a serious answer. The answer is that state-directed belonging is not belonging at all. The original fusionist, Frank Meyer, reminds us that “no man can act morally unless he is free to choose good from evil.”

What the post-liberal right proposes, in policy substance, is what the American left has tried and failed to produce for half a century: an engineered fraternity, delivered through subsidy and price administration, that the recipients receive rather than build themselves by choice. What the post-liberal right would build is an equality of diminished opportunity, locking Americans into a depressing economic stasis.

As Robert Nisbet and countless others before and after him have argued, the institutions that actually produce belonging (families, churches, neighborhoods, local businesses, and voluntary associations) are not constructed by the state. They depend on citizens who are free to act, build, and take responsibility for their communities.

The 2016 contract was about substance, not merely style. Voters hired Trump to deliver on the traditional conservative agenda politicians had promised but failed to deliver, not to abandon that agenda for a domestic industrial policy whose lineage runs through left-wing state-sponsored corporatism. Conservatives must show, in concrete terms, how free market principles produce better outcomes than the alternatives now being offered.

V. What Comes Next

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” — Alan Kay

If the second-term administration’s policies fail to address the problems Trump correctly identified, the task of a constructive post-Trump conservatism is straightforward: to offer solutions that actually work and to explain them in the same clear, concrete terms the administration has used to propose its own.

Abstraction is the enemy here. The weakness of the traditional conservative in the Trump era was not that his ideas were wrong, but that they were too often untethered from daily life. Voters do not experience “free markets” or “limited government.” They experience the cost of housing, the price of groceries and gasoline, the quality of their schools and roads, the friendliness of their neighbors, the stability of their jobs, and the safety of their streets and schools. A conservatism that cannot connect its principles to desired outcomes on those issues will continue to lose ground to whoever offers a more immediate and convincing answer.

On housing, the answer is to increase supply, not to subsidize demand. The primary reason first-time buyers struggle is not that mortgage terms are too short, but that there are too few homes in the places where jobs are plentiful. Local land-use rules and regulatory barriers have made it difficult or impossible to build at the scale the country requires. Working with states and cities to reform those constraints would do far more to lower costs than any attempt to subsidize demand or stretch out loan terms. A 50-year mortgage will not make housing more affordable. Building more housing will.

On credit, the answer is competition, not price controls. High interest rates are a symptom of a consolidated industry with significant pricing power. Policies that increase competition and reduce barriers to entry can lower the cost of credit without rationing it. A price cap tells borrowers that credit is too expensive. Competition makes it cheaper.

On trade, the answer is capacity. The concern that the United States has lost ground in critical industries is well-founded. But broad tariffs that raise prices and disrupt supply chains are a blunt instrument. A more effective approach would focus on targeted deregulation in areas tied to national resilience (semiconductor fabrication, shipbuilding, critical minerals processing). Building capacity, not destroying demand, must be the goal.

On community and belonging, the answer is civil society. Fraternity in the durable sense is produced by free association: congregations, fraternal orders, neighborhood schools, small businesses, the institutions through which Americans have historically known who they are and to whom they owe something. A conservative agenda worthy of the 2016 contract does not engineer those institutions from Washington. It removes the obstacles (tax, regulatory, and cultural) that have made their maintenance harder than it should be.

None of this is new. That is precisely the point. The movement need not reinvent conservatism. It needs to deliver on the deal voters thought they were making: fusionist priorities achieved through the massive disruption of the status quo.

With the reset button having been used, the question is what to build. Trump is laying the predicate for what could be a resurgence of limited-government, free-market conservatism, but only if those who hold those commitments are willing to make them concrete answers to the questions voters are asking, rather than rehearsed slogans.

The stakes of that question are underestimated at both ends of the coalition. If the Republican Party fails to offer working families a workable program, it will lose those families to a Democratic Party that has already decided to offer them belonging-through-subsidy: a mistake that, in its own way, mirrors the administration’s recent turn toward policy solutions that promise more than they can deliver.

There is no third party waiting in the wings. The task, then, is the one conservatism has always faced when its principles are tested: to prove, in practice, that they work. The contract voters believed they were signing in 2016 has not been voided, but it has been breached. What post-Trump conservatism owes the American people is not a new deal but the old one, finally delivered.

Tim Chapman is the president of Advancing American Freedom.

John Shelton is the vice president of policy at Advancing American Freedom.