The term New Right has come to define the philosophy of President Donald Trump and, by extension, the modern Republican Party, paving the way for new conservative thought leaders such as Vice President JD Vance. This Washington Examiner series will look at the history of the New Right, the matters that define it, the movement’s major players, and its future.
New Right has meant different things to various people across time periods. For example, it was used to describe Arizona Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign and applied to the views of unorthodox 1990s political figures such as Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh.
Nowadays, it refers to ideas that have become increasingly popular in the Republican Party and conservative movement ever since Donald Trump famously descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015.
His policy views on immigration, trade, family, and foreign policy have broadly become the pillars of the New Right in the 2020s and have spawned their own set of intellectual leaders and think tanks advancing the cause.
Like the term’s definition, the history of the New Right is slightly different depending on who is asked. However, discontent with the state of the Reagan-style Republican Party began to emerge as early as the mid-2000s, with writers Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam warning that establishment Republicans were no longer connecting with their own voters.
“President [George W.] Bush’s domestic policy looks less and less like a visionary twist on traditional conservatism, and more and more like an evolutionary dead end,” they said in “The Party of Sam’s Club.” “On domestic policy, the party isn’t just out of touch with the country as a whole. It’s out of touch with its own base.”
Calls for change accelerated when the economy collapsed, and former President Barack Obama roared to victory in the 2008 presidential election, carrying almost the entire midwest, plus North Carolina and Florida, en route to winning 365 Electoral College votes.
The Republican grassroots responded by launching the Tea Party movement, which proved successful in the 2010 midterm elections. However, in 2012, the GOP nominated Mitt Romney, who is seen today as the avatar of the corporate-focused establishment Republican Party, as its presidential nominee, and again faced a decisive loss to Obama.
The GOP’s Reaganite messaging about limited government and deregulation had clearly gone stale by that point, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy argued during a speech last summer at the National Conservatism Conference.
“Our own Republican presidential candidates, from George W. Bush to John McCain to Mitt Romney, didn’t know exactly why they were saying the things they were saying,” Ramaswamy said. “All they knew is that they were supposed to say them.”
In 2016, a crowded Republican field of 17 candidates largely espoused the same orthodox views on low taxes, free trade, small government, and an aggressive foreign policy that would spread democracy and capitalism around the world, sometimes by force.
Trump, on the other hand, promised to protect entitlement spending programs, favored tariffs to promote domestic industry, vocally opposed the Iraq war, and, most notably, pledged to crack down on illegal immigration and build a wall on the southern border. His message found a wildly receptive audience, at least among white, working-class voters.
“There were these existing structure trends within the electorate, and it took someone like Trump, someone from outside of the party, to point them out,” said Sam Hammond, chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation.
Trump talked about politics throughout his real estate and media careers but was never tied to the existing GOP platform. He briefly ran for president in 2000 on Ross Perot’s Reform Party platform and was a registered Democrat between 2001 and 2009.
“It was sort of right place, right time because the existing Republican establishment had become perceived as captured by corporations, multinational interests, the war machine, failures of the Iraq war, and then the global financial crisis,” Hammond said. “Those were discrediting events.”
“At the same time, you had the internet and social media coming to the masses. That enabled coordination between disparate groups that would have been spurned by the mainstream media,” he continued.
Trump was unafraid to call Jeb Bush a warmonger or make other departures from establishment thinking and could be rewarded for doing so by the electorate.
“The grassroots energy created by the Tea Party would be translated into a presidential candidate in the form of the Donald Trump campaign,” Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk said in 2022. “Only Trump could bulldoze the Republican establishment—which had actively fought the grassroots from taking control of the party — radically reshaping and challenging GOP orthodoxy in a hostile takeover.”
Though Trump does not use New Right to describe his views, they were clearly different from those of his GOP predecessors, with whom he formed an uneasy alliance during his first term in the White House.
Trump chose old-school Republican Mike Pence as his vice president and famously warred with his own administration throughout 2017 and 2018. He was an outsider not only to the Republican Party but to the ways of Washington, D.C., which left him bogged down in internal disputes and fighting accusations of Russian collusion in those years.
He also left it to others to try and put an intellectual floor under his policy views. In 2016, Vance published his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which detailed his upbringing in working-class Ohio and was widely seen as a Rosetta stone for politicos trying to understand Trump’s appeal.
Two years later, former Romney policy adviser Oren Cass published The Once and Future Worker, a book that sought to solidify a post-Trump consensus of thought within the GOP. Vance praised it as “a brilliant book, and among the most important I’ve ever read.”
Cass uses the term New Right explicitly to describe his policy views.
Of course, Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, which raised the question of whether he enjoyed lasting appeal or was a historical anomaly. He entered the 2024 GOP primary as quickly as possible, where he faced off against more establishment figures such as former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Republican primaries quickly proved that Trump had staying power in the GOP.
When the 2024 election came to pass, Trump soundly defeated former Vice President Kamala Harris on an “America First” platform of strict immigration enforcement, protective tariffs, and a relatively isolationist foreign policy stance. This time, he not only won white working-class votes but made historic inroads among minority voters.
Pence was replaced by Vance, who was once a Trump critic. A Yale law school graduate, Vance has worked to put policy chops behind Trump’s blunt rhetoric, making high-profile speeches on foreign policy and the economy in his first months as vice president.
Meanwhile, there are now entire think tanks dedicated to sharpening and promoting New Right policy, from Cass’s American Compass to the Claremont Institute and even the Heritage Foundation.
“The New Right isn’t a mere sliver of the Republican coalition anymore,” said Dr. Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation president. “Today, we’re leading the movement against the Left’s increasingly totalitarian agenda and uniting people around policies that prioritize the integrity of the American border, the flourishing of American families, and the dignity of American workers.”
As with any political movement, there is some disagreement, even among proponents, about exactly what New Right policy is and should be. In general, it advocates an “America First” outlook that includes limited foreign engagement, the promotion of U.S. manufacturing, strict limits on immigration, and a pro-family policy that encourages marriage and family formation.
Immigration is probably the most well-known of these views, and it has been Trump’s signature issue since the beginning.
Whereas a Chamber of Commerce-oriented GOP sometimes encouraged immigration in order to promote economic growth, the New Right seeks to stabilize and grow wages by limiting the amount of new labor entering the country.
While Vance largely eschews some of Trump’s more colorful language on immigration, he tends to speak of the matter in economic terms.
“The fundamental goal of President Trump’s economic policy is, I think, to undo 40 years of failed economic policy in this country,” he said at the American Dynamism Summit in Washington, D.C. “For far too long, we got addicted to cheap labor, both overseas and by importing it into our own country — and we got lazy.”
All of the New Right’s thinking on the economy is geared toward boosting middle-class families, a common goal of many political philosophies. However, the movement is focused on domestic manufacturing in particular, which it claims benefits workers without a college degree, provides high-paying work that can support a family, promotes American innovation, and improves military readiness.
On the subject of tariffs, if limiting immigration shores up the economic prospects of blue-collar Americans, then limiting imports, especially from adversaries and low-wage countries, does the same thing on the foreign policy front.
“We went through a period of 30 or 40 years where conservatives just had way too much faith in markets,” Cass told Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, in a recent interview. He added that trade with “an authoritarian communist government that’s trying to hollow out American manufacturing,” such as China, is “not really a free market” and should not be encouraged.
New Right thinking tends to be much more limited in its views of America’s role in the world compared to the “Old Right.” This can be seen in Trump’s attempts to win a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine rather than spending billions of dollars on its defense and in the Signal group chat revelation that Vance hesitated to strike the Houthis because “I just hate to bail out Europe again.”
“There are blocs and factions that run the country, and the New Right is an effort to present a counter to the old right and to replace it,” Hammond said. “It stems from a broader disillusionment with the elites, and once that happens, everything should be rethought.”
However, on the domestic front, the New Right takes a more expansionist view of the government’s role, typically advocating a more aggressive role as opposed to the prior view that the government should be limited to “get out of the way” of free markets.
The second Trump administration has been more aggressive in implementing its view of what the government should do.
For example, even while slashing the workforce at the Department of Education, Trump has used the department to investigate allegations of race-based programming, launched a portal for parents and students to report race- or sex-based discrimination, and made an example out of Columbia University by canceling $400 million in grants over its handling of pro-Palestinian protests.
Several other moves made by the Trump administration showcased its commitment to New Right thinking and its willingness to implement it in practice.
Trump’s Federal Trade Commission has pursued an antitrust case against Microsoft, the Department of Transportation is emphasizing marriage and birth rates in doling out projects, and the Department of Labor confirmed pro-union Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
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None of those moves would have been likely in a Bush or Romney administration, and they are testing out in real time a governing philosophy that has come to dominate the GOP over the last 10 years.
“He challenged an existing status quo, an entire existing system,” Ramaswamy said of Trump’s Republican Party overhaul and the ideas that underpin it. “What began as a challenge to the system became the new system.”
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