The Shaky Future of Trump's Personality Cult

In a little over a month, we’ll see the swearing in of a second Trump administration. But whether the administration remains the Trump administration for the next four years is a bit less certain than getting four years of Trump the first time around. The incoming president showed pronounced mental decline during the campaign, and his physical appearance, including growing signs of frailty, indicate his health isn’t terrific. He’s quite old, doesn’t exercise, and has a poor diet.

This throws a pretty substantial X factor into predicting what the coming years look like. Right now, as he’s assembling his cabinet, it’s clear Trump intends to rule not just as a temperamental authoritarian with clear fascist urges and worldview, but that he wants to bend the government towards personalism. He wants loyalty with the aim of personal enrichment. The result, so far, is a lot of incompetent people teed up for roles in the administration, from Musk and Ramaswamy given the task of finding inefficiencies, to cabinet picks chosen not because they’re skilled administrators, but because they look good on TV to a not very bright and not very informed old man.

So what happens if, in the next year or few, Trump’s health declines enough that he’s not capable of carrying out any of his duties, or maintaining the appearance of doing so? What happens if he dies?

The answer to that is bound up in a pretty basic feature of Trumpism: it’s not really an ideological movement, but is instead a personality cult. What defines Trumpism, and hold the MAGA coalition together, isn’t a shared commitment to a set of ideas and policy preferences. Instead, what defines Trumpism is Trump. The reason Trumpism has been successful in twice taking the presidency, and in fully claiming the Republican Party, is that lots of Americans like Trump, and he’s able to wield that admiration against any member of the GOP who steps out of line.

This has been a powerful force in American politics, obviously. But it’s also a brittle one. The American right, because it is not ideologically unified, is instead a coalition of factions in fact quite hostile to each other. These include the old school, Reaganite, Paul Ryan conservatives—or at least the ones who haven’t yet left or been driven out. They include the right reactionary “post-liberal” ideologues in the style of JD Vance and his patron Peter Thiel. And they include the QAnon faithful, the conspiracy addled anti-vaxxers, the newly resurgent neo-Nazis, and the just crazy weirdos like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Right now, all these groups can be lumped together into Trumpism because they’ve all sworn a degree of fealty to Trump, or believe that cozying up to him will advance their personal interests. But most of them fundamentally hate each other.

Thus when the personality cult loses its personality, it’s not clear what happens to American conservatism. Trump himself is popular with enough voters that he can squeak out electoral victories, but the actual policies of Trumpism (e.g., Project 2025) are spectacularly unpopular. Plenty of voters like the idea of this celebrity businessman who talks like them, upsets the people they don’t like, and has decades appearing in the news and on television as an appealing (to them) quintessence of “success.”

But if Trump is out of the picture, who steps in? Vance is loathsome, turns off basically everyone who hears him speak, and entirely lacks charisma. Donald Trump Jr. clearly wants to be the next headlining Trump, but is so dumb and coked up that he’s barely functional. No one in Congress appears poised to seize the opportunity. There are some influencers popular with MAGA crowds, but they lack the enormous brand awareness Trump brought to his campaigns, and so couldn’t coast, like Trump has, on the idea of Trump the voters want to support.

Trumpism faces a basic problem if it’s to continue beyond Trump. On the one hand, the people who would become Trump through shouting Trumpy things have largely failed with voters, especially when they have to convince a whole state of them, instead of an extreme right congressional district. This is why the Senate is considerably less Trumpy than the House. On the other hand, those who’ve tried to turn Trumpism into an ideology and then work to advance that (the Vances, the Millers) are just creepy as hell, and rightfully repulsive to most Americans.

Further, Trump’s greatest desire is to be the center of attention. He wants fawning and praise. He wants nothing more than to be the most important, most respected man there is. He’s happy to have obsequious loyalty, and he loves to surround himself with famous people whose fame rubs off on him. But this also means he hates getting upstaged. Even if Trumpism can somehow identify its heir apparent to be the next personality leading the cult, Trump is likely to knife that person as soon as its clear that’s what they are, or what they might become. If Trump were committed to the idea of Trumpism continuing, as a movement, after him, he’d be cultivating its next leader. But he’s not, both because he’s incapable of thinking that far in advance, and because he’s incapable of thinking about anything other than himself. For Trump, Trumpism is Trump, and the interests of Trumpism as a movement simply are whatever happens to be Trump’s own interests from moment to moment. He doesn’t care to continue the personality cult because he doesn’t care about anything beyond attention and money.

If Trump can’t make it through his term, there’s a rather more than zero chance that the Trumpist coalition splinters, and that his administration—or the new Vance administration—falls into a dysfunction of infighting, backstabbing, and everyone in a leadership role wanting an array of entirely incompatible policies. And then, if America survives until November 2028, the GOP gets wiped out in the election, with no immediate path forward.

None of that means Trump can’t do a ton of damage, or that whoever comes after him can’t do a ton of damage. And Trump might hold on to his health and sanity long enough to make it through until January 2029. But those of us who want to see Trumpism ended as a force in American politics would do well to think about how we can take advantage of this fracturing, and the suddenly weakened American right, if the time comes.