President Donald Trump talking to reporter aboard Air Force One on December 9, 2025 (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley/Flickr)
President Donald Trump is more ideological in his second term than his first term, a prominent conservative recently noted — and, as a result, he is turning against the interests of his own supporters.
“One factor that explains what’s gone wrong with Donald Trump’s second term is the abandonment of pragmatism as a governing principle,” Gerard Baker, editor at large for The Wall Street Journal, wrote on Monday. “Mr. Trump’s successes have owed to an iconoclastic style and substance that eschewed ideology and embraced practical solutions to the world’s challenges.”
Baker argued that, because Trump entered office in 2017 as a businessman with no political experience, he had an opportunity to govern as an “uber-pragmatist” and to some extent did so.
“In 2016 the Republican Party was ripe for the heterodoxy Mr. Trump represented,” Baker argued. “Most voters were disillusioned with the tired orthodoxies of modern conservatism: globalism, which facilitated mass migration and the elevation of international capital that ravaged communities at home; neoconservatism, which committed America to costly and futile foreign interventions.”
In that vein, Baker praised Trump’s first term for being pro-business and effectively vaccinating millions of Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic with Operation Warp Speed. By contrast, he has spent his second term imposing costly tariffs that have hurt American businesses, denying vaccine efficacy, persecuting perceived political enemies (such as former FBI Director James Comey and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell) and launching a costly war against Iran.
“The best mindset for a political leader is a commitment to core beliefs and ideas allied to a flexible pragmatism in pursuing them,” Baker wrote. “Even the best ideas need to be executed in a manner that acknowledges the constraints of reality. And if the ideas turn out to be bad, a pragmatic approach ensures their deleterious effects can be vitiated by wise submission to the facts.”
He concluded, “What we have now is what happens when the pragmatism has gone and the ideas are awful.”
Baker is not alone among conservatives in claiming Trump has betrayed his ostensible political principles. Writing for The New York Times on Sunday, conservative commentator Christopher Caldwell argued that the president has overseen a period of American decline.
“A cosmopolitan and literate writer, Caldwell shares the core MAGA belief that liberal elites have damaged the United States through lax immigration, the promotion of cultural diversity, and economic globalism,” The Nation’s Jeet Heer wrote of Caldwell’s editorial. “Caldwell seems to have taken Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ rhetoric more seriously than the president himself. Giving credence to Trump’s criticism of neoconservative-regime change war, Caldwell hoped for a new foreign policy of restraint in Europe and the Middle East, coupled with a redoubling of US power in the Western Hemisphere.”
Heet added that Caldwell cannot justify a war against Iran with the pro-Western Hemispheric hegemony that Trump advocated and which could have rationalized his belligerence against Venezuela, Cuba and Greenland.
“The invasion of Iran undermines this project of hemispheric domination, and Caldwell knows it,” Heer explained. “In mid-March in The Spectator, he decried the Iran War as ‘the end of Trumpism.’ In his latest Times column, he correctly notes that the war has shown the limits of US coercive power, especially since the depletion of cruise missiles in the conflict means the American Empire is now forced to cannibalize weapons deployed in Europe and Asia.”
Similarly, in March, prominent pro-Trump commentator Joe Rogan said on his popular podcast that Trump has alienated many of his supporters by suppressing investigations into his friend, the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, as well as with his war against Iran.
“Well, it just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?” Rogan said at the time. “He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.” He also said that the president’s ongoing cover up of the Epstein scandal looks “terrible.”
“Who knows what f — — happens with all this Epstein files s — —,” Rogan said. “It just keeps getting crazier and crazier and crazier and deeper and deeper.”
Rogan added, “Why would your name be redacted if you’re not a victim? Like, this is what’s crazy about all this. Like, how come you redact some people and you don’t redact other people?”