Does Donald Trump mean anything? The question could be asked about the president’s promises, which he usually fails to keep, and his podium remarks, which are devoted to free association. But for conservative politicians, policy makers, and intellectuals, the question has a wider bearing. Since 2016, the right has been trying to figure out what Trump means as a political phenomenon. Presidents are transformative when they stand for an idea: Ronald Reagan was personally popular, but what made him historic was the reorientation of American politics toward Reaganism, an assertive brand of small-government, big-stick conservatism. Trump has certainly been transformative, so it stands to reason that there is such a thing as Trumpism.
Like pornography, we feel that we know Trumpism when we see it, yet after a decade, it’s still remarkably hard to define. That blurriness has been an opportunity for political entrepreneurs who have tried, one after another, to shape Trumpism in the image of their own ideological beliefs. The bidders have included economic nationalists such as Senator Josh Hawley and the economist Oren Cass, who saw Trump shifting the GOP away from free trade and corporate interests; “America First” isolationists such as J. D. Vance and Tucker Carlson, who wanted to put an end to U.S. military adventures, especially in the Middle East; anti-“woke” crusaders such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the education activist Christopher Rufo, who saw a chance to get rid of affirmative action and DEI; and Christian nationalists such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the pastor he invited to give a sermon at the Pentagon, Doug Wilson, who rejects all of the works of modern secular society, including women’s right to vote.
Trump delivered something for each of these groups: tariffs for the economic populists, Ivy League lawsuits for the anti-wokers, a weakened NATO for the America Firsters. But every version of Trumpism has eventually foundered on the rock of its namesake. Just as Karl Marx insisted that he was not a Marxist, so Trump has never been a Trumpist—the former because no one understood his theories of politics as well as he did himself; the latter because he has never had a theory of politics. Trump has a few consistent political instincts—above all, protectionism and hostility toward immigration and immigrants—but he has never felt bound by the principles of Trumpism, however defined. Saying “America First” doesn’t mean he won’t start a war in Iran; saying he is pro-worker doesn’t mean he won’t pump crypto and tech stocks.
[Read: The end of Stephen Miller’s recusals]
Events can’t be explained until they’re over, when they turn into history. So it’s only now, as Trumpism seems to be fading as a political force, that its true meaning can be seen clearly. The winner in the fight to define it is the last Trumpist standing: Stephen Miller, the new White House chief of staff. Miller has been there from the beginning, and he is now presiding over the end. He embraced the Gӧtterdӓmmerung atmosphere in the remarks he made on Friday, after his appointment was announced: “Let me tell you, if it wasn’t for President Trump, the United States of America would not exist right now.” He concluded by addressing the savior of the country directly: “I pledge to you, Mr. President, my absolute loyalty, my unwavering commitment, and my total devotion to your success and the success of this country.”
This brief statement encapsulates the two principles of Trumpism as Miller has been formulating it for the past decade, as Trump’s speechwriter and surrogate. The first is that America is engaged in a life-and-death battle with a dangerous enemy. For Miller, the most important enemy has always been nonwhite immigrants, whom he has loathed since the beginning of his political career and even before. (In high school, one classmate recalled, Miller would go around telling Latino students to speak English.) As deputy chief of staff in the second Trump administration, Miller presided over the expansion of ICE and the use of aggressive deportation tactics, including snatching people off the street.
He justified these policies by casting people who want to live in the United States as enemies of the United States, agents of existential destruction. Miller has said that “we are being conquered” by immigrants and that “this country doesn’t have a future if we don’t end birthright citizenship.” In May, he suggested that immigration justifies suspending habeas corpus, which the Constitution allows “in cases of rebellion or invasion.”
Miller’s second guiding principle is that Trump is the only person who can defeat the enemy, so our survival as a country, and even as individuals, depends on obeying him. This saving power does not belong to America or to the presidency as an office, but to Trump personally. As a longtime White House official, Miller must once have taken the oath of office required of all federal employees, which begins, “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” But the oath he imposed on himself last week was not to a system of government; it was “absolute loyalty” to the ruler.
This kind of vow is foreign to American law and tradition, although it has plenty of precedent in dictatorships. Specifically, Miller’s understanding of politics—as an existential struggle in which the sovereign has unlimited power to command—resembles the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist. In his influential 1932 book, The Concept of the Political, written at the height of the political crisis in Weimar Germany, Schmitt set out a simple, powerful argument: The only thing that matters in politics, the very definition of the political, is the distinction between friend and enemy.
In peaceful, liberal societies, the true nature of politics is disguised, according to Schmitt, because we tend to cast political disagreements as determining whether policies are right or wrong, profitable or unprofitable, legal or illegal. But in moments of crisis, we are reminded that “the substance of the political” is “concrete antagonism” between two groups of people—friends and enemies, my side and the other side. When the opposing sides are two countries, this antagonism takes the form of war; when they are two groups within the same country, it becomes civil war. The concepts of friend and enemy “receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing,” Schmitt wrote. “War is the existential negation of the enemy.” The following year, Schmitt would help put this theory into practice by joining the Nazi Party and drafting legal justifications for its seizure of power.
Since 2016, Miller’s public statements, and the speeches by Trump that he wrote and oversaw, have relentlessly insisted on a similar concept of the political. For Miller, Trumpism means distinguishing friend from enemy and submitting to the leader in a moment of existential danger. This language can be heard in Trump’s 2016 Republican National Convention speech, in which he claimed, “I alone can fix it”; in his first inaugural address, in which he decried “American carnage”; and in his speech on the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, in which he told the crowd, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
The tone of crisis and combat is still sharper in the speeches that Miller delivers himself. Perhaps the most disturbing example came at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, in September 2025. With Trump in the audience, Miller declared, “We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion.” He went on to promise total victory in the coming battle: “The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened.”
[Read: A chief of staff who ‘will crack skulls’]
What made this speech an especially good example of Schmittian politics is that Miller did not actually say who “our enemies” were, or how they were responsible for the actions of Kirk’s accused killer, Tyler Robinson. The sovereign power to identify friend and enemy is not constrained by things such as truth and justice, which Schmitt explicitly said belong to other areas of life, not to the political realm. The enemy, Schmitt wrote, can be defined as anyone who “intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence.” This is how Miller talks about not only immigrants but also domestic political opponents. In a July 2026 speech, he railed against “the leftist,” vowing to be “completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”
Miller has risen in the administration, while others have left or been driven out, because his interpretation of Trumpism comes closest to the president’s own instincts. Trump has always demanded loyalty and never forgets a grudge; from a distance, that looks like a distinction between friend and enemy. But Miller’s attempt to translate Trumpism into action is doomed to failure, for the same reason as all of the previous attempts: It misreads a character trait as a political principle.
To Miller, the concept of the political is deadly serious. He believes in the existential struggle and rejoices in the negation of the enemy. But that kind of seriousness is alien to Trump, whose popularity comes in large part from his levity. It would never occur to a Trumpist to sweet-talk and joke around with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who represents everything Trumpism is supposed to regard as dangerous. But Trump himself enjoys it because, in doing so, he shows that he is superior even to the friend-enemy distinction.
This is true even when it comes to the issue that both Miller and Trump have been most passionate about—immigration. Just days after appointing Miller chief of staff, Trump offhandedly told 60 Minutes that his administration’s immigration policy—the policy Miller devised, the crowning expression of his Trumpist beliefs—“might be too tough.” For years, Trump has been telling the public that undocumented immigrants are murderers, child abusers, and MS-13 gangsters. Now, as if he were considering the subject for the first time, he observed that much of the public thinks immigrants are actually good for America, “if they’re good people working in a landscaping company, or working in a hotel, or doing something, right? And in some cases, paying taxes.” If Miller was watching, he must have been thinking the same thing as so many people who have believed in and depended on Donald Trump: With friends like these, who needs enemies?
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