A look inside Trumpworld

If Donald Trump wins back the White House next week, adopt the brace position. His opponents will go berserk, inevitably, and try once again to put him in prison. Yet Trump allies might go even more crazy as they scramble for influence.

Trump claims to have learned from the mistakes of his first term. But what counts as a mistake depends on who you talk to. And it’s impossible to even guess at what a Trump Redux might mean without some sense of who he talks to these days — and who might shape and influence his agenda if he is elected.

The awkward truth — for insiders anyway — is that King Donald and his clan hide in plain sight. Political busybodies on both sides of the Atlantic are always trying to peek behind the gaudy curtain, desperate to decipher who’s up or down, in or out. But anyone with eyes to see can tell that, while Trumpism is about America First, for the Trumps family always takes priority.

For instance, it wasn’t some Svengali in the Trump campaign team who persuaded the Republican presidential nominee to do a series of long “bro-casts” with online male influencers, chewing the fat about wrestling, cryptocurrency and cocaine. It was Barron, the former president’s 6ft 9in, 18-year-old son, who listens to that stuff.

Barron was also the “visionary” behind World Liberty Financial, a curious new crypto-wheeze that Donald ceremoniously unveiled at his Mar-a-Lago home in September. Barron, a typical teenager, didn’t show up to the launch. It fell to Don Jr. and Eric, his older half-brothers, to do the legwork.

In 2016, Donald’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was the darling prince. Trump let his daughter Ivanka and Jared run large parts of his campaign. And after winning the White House, Donald made Ivanka a key adviser and put Kushner in charge of bringing peace to the Holy Land, among other side hustles.

This year, Jared has been largely out of the picture. Ivanka, it’s said, has fallen out of love with politics. It’s now Don Jr., the firstborn, who drives the Make America Great Again agenda. When, for instance, countless influential Republican figures tried to pressure Trump to ditch J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential choice, Don Jr. and the media star Tucker Carlson persuaded him to stay true.

Eric, for his part, runs the Trump Organization business. His wife Lara is co-chair of the Republican National Committee, which gives the Trumps a grip on the party’s command structures and spending.

Meanwhile, Queen Melania, Donald’s sphinx-like third wife, is the subject of the most salacious palace intrigue. “He needs to make sure he doesn’t upset her,” says one insider, pointedly. “She provides access to Barron, among other things.” Trumpologists are quick to note Mrs. Trump’s appearances or absences on the campaign trail. Again, though, you don’t need special access or intelligence to understand the drama. The world could witness the couple’s awkward embrace on stage at the mega-rally in Madison Square Garden in New York on Sunday.

Outside of its dynastic inner core, Trumpworld is made up of various overlapping networks of plutocrats, loyalists and opportunists. Almost all of them could be seen vying for attention at the Madison Square event, which doubled up as a sort of Wrestle-Mania showdown for status in the Trumpist future. It’s no coincidence that Hulk Hogan, the former WWF superstar, was there, making his second big appearance on a Trump stage since the Republican National Convention in late August.

The Trump show, similar to wrestling, is fake and real at the same time. It’s down to the stars to perform and embarrass themselves. And it’s up to us, the plebs, to decide how willing we are to suspend our disbelief — or laugh.

This year, the biggest billionaire, weighing in at $274 billion, is Elon Musk, owner of X/Twitter, and suddenly the Trump campaign’s most powerful surrogate. He’s already been appointed as head of the Department of Government Efficiency in the next Trump administration. (The acronym, DOGE, is a play on Musk’s favorite crypto meme-coin. Elon is all about making the online bros lol.) On stage on Sunday, Musk promised Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, that he would shave $2 trillion out of the proposed Biden-Harris budget. The crowd roared.

In recent days, Musk has thrown himself and his wallet at Team Trump’s efforts in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. “He’s had a massive impact on the get-out-the-vote push, which was virtually nonexistent over the summer,” says another Trumpworld source. It’s not just Musk’s impossibly deep pockets and abundant energy that have enabled Team Trump to compete with Kamala Harris’s extremely well-funded campaign. His very public journey – broadcast at regular intervals on X/Twitter — from Trump-sceptic to superfan has opened up many other freethinkers to the possibilities of Trumpism. He plays a similar role in this to Robert F. Kennedy, the environmentalist, vaccine sceptic and former presidential candidate who is now the other Trump transition co-chair.

Voters have doubts that Donald, who has already been president for four years, will revolutionize American government. Yet millions are willing to believe in Musk, who runs Tesla, the biggest electric car company in the world, and SpaceX, the most advanced spacecraft manufacturer on the planet. And RFK, as scion of the rival Democratic party’s most legendary dynasty, brings his own post-partisan stardust. He was a major act on Sunday and promised “to go wild on health.”

Kennedy’s fellow co-chair Lutnick is a billionaire all by himself. He is being lined up as Trump’s next treasury secretary. He and Musk are proposing a giant bonfire of government red-tape when Trump takes back control.

Such slash-happy rhetoric delights fiscal conservatives and most voters. But others recall the chaos of the first Trump administration and worry about history repeating itself. It’s easy to talk about slaying the federal leviathan outside of government — much, much harder to do within.

The MAGA ultras, such as Steve Bannon or Corey Lewandowski, like to say that Trump’s greatest mistake when he became president in 2017 was to believe that, since he had a democratic mandate, he could work with Washington. He therefore trusted the establishment, which despised him and stymied him at every turn. Next time, they say, he’ll know better. “The president got burned, especially on something like immigration,” says one insider. “This time, things will work differently and with knowledge of how the tricks of Washington can work against him.” Rather than wasting a lot of time trying to persuade Congress to pay for a border wall, for instance, Trump and his exciting new gang of allies will override the usual systems to make sure the job is completed.

The details as to how exactly they will do this are always left unclear. Yet the loyalists are confident they are in charge of the Trump 2.0 project. It’s said that Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner and former adviser to the president, might serve as Trump’s next chief of staff, a position that could, in theory, give him enough power to implement Trump’s plans for the mass deportation of millions of illegal immigrants. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Indian-American entrepreneur turned ardent Trumpist, might provide cover as secretary of homeland security.

Again, though, what happens when MAGA’s dreams rub up against political reality? Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation project to staff federal agencies with thousands of MAGA enforcers, was mostly just a scare story for Democrats. The Trump campaign publicly distanced itself from the plan after it became a Harris-Biden talking point. But what is the actual plan?

More honest voices on America’s radical right acknowledge that Trump’s tendency to compromise may well end up ruining their hopes. And the more hardcore conservatives tend to distrust Elon, RFK and the other MAGA-come-latelys.

Perhaps the most obvious litmus test for America Firsters will be who Trump chooses to be his next attorney general. The mission is clear: overhaul the Department of Justice, enforce Trump’s controversial “election integrity” initiatives, and tackle the “deep-state” forces who waged the multifaceted lawfare campaign against Trump that culminated in four criminal indictments against Donald and put Bannon, among others, in jail. Yet loyalists fear that Donald, once in Washington, will fold again and appoint another treacherous establishment figure.

The battles within Trumpworld have always been between the money, the true believers and the political professionals. We’ve already seen these tensions playing on the electoral trail in 2024. Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, Trump’s experienced campaign managers, have taken a lot of credit for running the most disciplined Republican presidential push in more than a decade. Over the summer, however, Lewandowski raised the alarm within Trumpworld about the misallocation of campaign funds and it’s understood that LaCivita and Wiles would steer clear of any incoming administration.

For British observers, the most pressing area of concern will be Trump’s foreign policy appointments. One of his biggest donors, and a regular at the top table in Mar-a-Lago, is Miriam Adelson, the widow of Sheldon. She is a billionairess and a forceful voice for Israel in Republican circles. If she had her way, Trump would elevate a neoconservative darling such as Nikki Haley or Marco Rubio to secretary of state and ramp up America’s hostility towards Iran. Fighting against that influence are more dovish figures such as Don Jr., Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic presidential candidate, who is another big character on the Trump Mania Tour this year.

The doves are thought to have successfully frozen out Mike Pompeo, Trump’s former secretary of state, from any prominent role. Yet it’s thought that Richard Grenell, Trump’s former ambassador to Germany, could play a key part in deciding what a Trump-led America does in eastern Europe.

Hawkish voices continue to push Trump to be far more aggressive towards Russia over Ukraine, and are therefore scrambling to stop Elbridge Colby from becoming Trump’s national security adviser. Colby is a realist who regards Xi Jinping as a far more immediate threat to American primacy than Vladimir Putin, which makes him persona non grata in Atlanticist circles. Yet that in itself makes him popular among the loyalists who feel their time has come around again. Another source jokes: “Trust me, the people who David Cameron might have felt comfortable with are not going to be there.”

Then again, Harris could still win, and all the laughter in Trumpworld would have to stop.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.