Trump, Personalism, and US Administrative Capacity

Abstract

Donald Trump represents an extraordinary degree of personalism in American politics, especially given the traditional power and capacity of the Republican Party and American democracy. A lesson Trump drew from his first term in office is that he needed to better institutionalize mechanisms of personal loyalty to deal with perceived betrayals by both political appointees and career officials. Out of office, Trump supporters continued this project, seeking to restructure governing institutions around personalist criteria centered on loyalty. This process has a series of effects on American institutions: (a) elevating conspiracist messaging where Trump plays a central role, such as QAnon or claims about the 2020 election; (b) promoting anti-statism, particularly toward public institutions, framing them as corrupt in a way that undermines public trust; and (c) mainstreaming new strategies for governing, such as converting career civil servants with tenure protections into at-will political appointees who can be purged.