The six warring factions that make up Trump’s coalition – The Washington Post
(Illustration by Natalie Vineberg / The Washington Post; John McDonnell / For The Washington Post; iStock)
Trump’s coalition is built for internal conflict — held together by fealty to him, but riven by differences on immigration, tariffs, abortion and other policies.
August 26, 2025, 14 min, By Natalie Allison
Donald Trump widened the Republican coalition in November in a way the party hadn’t seen in decades, winning support from parts of the electorate that Democrats had long taken for granted.
But as Trump has brought in more ideologically and racially diverse voters, he has made an already strained GOP more prone to internal conflict and fundamental disagreements about what it means to be a Trump supporter.
The Washington Post identified six main factions of today’s Republican Party, spanning wealthy Silicon Valley executives and health-conscious moms along with the business leaders, antiabortion activists and budget-cutting conservativeswho drove earlier eras of GOP politics.
In the first months of Trump’s administration, fault lines in that coalition have repeatedly surfaced — over tariffs, the scope of deportations, federal budget cuts, and whether countries such as Ukraine and Israel should receive aid.
By force of personality and his popularity among Republican voters, Trump has held his coalition together. He celebrated a major victory last monthwith the passage of his One Big Beautiful Bill, which rewarded several of the party’s factions as it made its way through a closely divided Congress.
Doubts remain within the party about how a coalition whose unity depends so heavily on Trump will hold together in coming years when his role changes. There is disagreement, too, about whether the wide tent is more gift or curse.
“Tensions and stresses are not only nothing new, they are the origin story of the Republican Party,” which was formed in the lead-up to the Civil War, said Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a veteran Republican consultant. “They are not a sign of the party’s weakness. They are one of the reasons for its success.”
Stephen K. Bannon, a former top Trump adviser who now hosts the “War Room” show widely watched by Trump’s MAGA populist supporters, likened Trump’s coalition to the widely divergent, mutually suspicious groups Franklin D. Roosevelt assembled into his coalition in 1932.
“You had super-progressive professors from Harvard, to racist crackers in the South, to ranchers in the West, to businessmen in Chicago and on Wall Street — and by the way, those factions went after each other viciously,” Bannon said. “It’s not unique in American politics for people and coalitions to be going after each other.”
Laura Loomer, a right-wing commentator and journalist who has influenced Trump on a number of personnel decisions in recent months, takes a different view.
“Coalition building, in my opinion, is toxic long term,” she said. “It might have short-term benefits. But long term, it’s going to be explosive.”
How we did this
To determine the most important factions in the GOP, The Washington Post spoke with Republican strategists, party officials and prominent conservatives who have closely tracked the party’s makeup. We also reviewed polling data from a widerange of sources. Because some groups have large influence but relatively few voters, it is difficult to track the factions entirelythrough polling. The lines separating one faction from the other aren’t alwaysneat and clean: Republican primary voters and even prominent elected officials can fall into more than one category. Vice President JD Vance, for example, represents the populist wing of the party, but is also closely associated with the tech right. Sen. Lindsey Graham is a traditional Republican but is also a key ally of the religious right on antiabortion legislation.
Here are the factions at play.
MAGA populists
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Stephen K. Bannon, JD Vance
Largely working-class, anti-immigration and anti-interventionist, these voters form the core of the president’s political base. They are the supporterswho stand outside for hours in the summer heat to attend Trump rallies and who wear MAGA caps and T-shirts with his face on them.
MAGA voters tend to support Trump’s tariffs, believing they will increase U.S. manufacturing jobs.
While not all populists are hyper tuned-in online, many consume a steady diet of right-wing media and social media. They are more likely than other factions to regularly listen to commentary about the 2020 election being stolen — segments sometimes supplemented with top election denier Mike Lindell marketing his MyPillow products live on air.
Many populist voters also believe that one of Trump’s top prioritiesshould be to expose corruption in a system they see as covering for the rich and powerful in both parties at the expense of the working class. That’s why the MAGA movement has been especially agitated that the Trump administration has not released more information about the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier whom the government charged with sex trafficking of minors.
In the Trump coalition,Bannon said, populists are “clearly the dominant force.” He pointed to an analysis of election data by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center showing that Trump doubled his lead among voters who did not graduate from college, increased his lead among rural voters, and improved with Hispanic and Black voters between 2016 and 2024. Many of those changes reflect gains among populists, Trump’s strategists say.
“Now, does that show up in elected officials’ votes in the House and the Senate? No,” Bannon chuckled, adding that many “old-school Republicans” and “neoliberal neocons” still needed to be replaced.
Groups such as Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and Bannon’s “War Room posse” often channel the energy of the populist audience to rail against Republican politicians they see as insufficiently MAGA (Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for example). Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has harshly criticized party leaders recently, saying the GOP has “turned its back on America First and the workers.”
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