Is This ‘The End of Trumpism?’ | The Ezra Klein Show

Will Iran Break Trumpism?

March 27, 2026

Ezra Klein Jack McCordick

By Ezra Klein

Produced by Jack McCordick

 

The right-wing thinker Christopher Caldwell believes the Iran war is the end of Trumpism. Is he right? What was Trumpism in the first place?CreditCredit...The New York Times

Will Iran Break Trumpism?

The right-wing thinker Christopher Caldwell believes the Iran war is the end of Trumpism. Is he right? What was Trumpism in the first place?

 

Is Trumpism crashing on the shoals of the Iran war? That is what Christopher Caldwell thinks.

 

Caldwell is on the right. He’s a contributing editor at Claremont Review of Books.

 

Caldwell has been trying to define and, even, craft a coherent Trumpism. But in a recent piece in The Spectator titled “The End of Trumpism,” he seems pretty dispirited. He writes: “The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project.”

 

It wasn’t just Iran that led Caldwell to that point. It was also Trump’s brazen self-dealing, the waves of influence peddling, the sense that this man who was supposed to represent the will of the people in some way was doing something very different.

 

This has led to a debate on the right. Many noted a very obvious counterargument: Polls show that Trump’s base is largely sticking with him.

 

So this gets to questions that I think are important yet somehow still unsettled — despite Trump’s decade-long dominance in American political life: What is Trumpism? Is there a Trumpism — or is there just Donald Trump?

 

Caldwell has also spent a long time writing about right-wing populism in Europe. So he has a set of comparisons for what a program for that might look like here, and I think that’s what he sees coming apart now. So I wanted to ask him why.

 

Caldwell is a contributing writer for the New York Times Opinion section. He’s also the author of the book “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”