A month before Election Day, I posted this on Facebook:

As the last week’s events around the failure of the Republicans and Donald Trump to shape Congress’s most recent spending bill reveal, I got this prediction pretty much right.

I should confess right off the bat that I do get a fair number of predictions wrong. Most painful, I was sure Clinton would win in 2016, a prediction that my critics, understandably, have never let me or my readers forget.

But one thing I did get completely right about Trump’s first term, before it even began, was that he would be a spectacularly weak president; failure, rather than success, would be his lot. The reason for that failure and that weakness, I argued again and again, had little to do with Trump’s personal fecklessness or incorrigible incompetence, considerable as they were and are. It had much more to do with the dysfunction internal to the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

I continued to make that argument throughout Trump’s first term and was frequently criticized for it. Which has made it all the more surprising, these past few months, to see people claim that the new Trump, the Trump who ran and won in 2024, has learned the painful lessons of his first term, when key underlings opposed him and even more key Republicans departed him. Last I had checked, hardly anyone was willing to acknowledge that the story of his first term was not Prometheus Unbound but a lot of sound and fury, signifying, well, you now how that goes.

Regardless, as this Facebook post from October suggests, I’ve not been convinced that Trump 2.0 would necessarily be all that different from Trump 1.0. Nothing having to do with Trump personally; I’ve always thought the focus on his personal flaws and hapless leadership has distracted us from the deeper rot within the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

Well, with the last week’s events, the media has finally realized the truth: the dysfunction continues. The problem, for Trump, remains what it has always been: not the so-called moderates in his party but the hard right. The media, which, before and after the election, was anticipating a new conservative colossus, seems, at least for the moment, to have had some clarity put into its perspective.

All those claims about a Republican Party now and newly beholden to Trump, terrified to cross him (or, I guess, Elon Musk, who’s now deemed to be the true Mephistopheles of the moment)? This is what the New York Times had to say about that on Thursday:

Just two days ago, President-elect Trump and Elon Musk threatened to ensure a primary challenge for any House Republican who voted for a bill that didn’t include a debt limit increase. Tonight, 170 of them did just that.

Again, none of this is new. As I’ve argued repeatedly, whenever the GOP has wanted to cross Trump, they have.

There are many reasons for this, but a key source is a combination of changes in party structure, campaign financing, and American business. As Paul Heideman shows in an eye-opening book that will be coming out (I think) next year with Verso, these hardcore right-wingers who tanked Trump’s plans for raising the debt limit are not just ideological purists and fanatics; the GOP has had those forever. The problem is that they’ve got independent sources of funding and huge levels of support in their districts. As one of them told the Times, “I love Donald Trump, but he didn’t vote me into office; my district did.” These representatives reflect a dramatic shift, which Heideman traces back to the 1980s and 1990s, in the way power in the party works and how politicians get funding, and business has reverted to its historical mode of being politically powerful but internally disorganized — and thus unable to impose any discipline on the party from the outside, as it was once was able to.

That doesn’t make for power or coherence in the party, but just the opposite. Just as we saw powerlessness and incoherence in Trump’s first term, we’re seeing it now, even before his second term has begun. As I’ve been arguing since the election, the idea that any of this is going to get any easier come January is foolish. The GOP is going to have the tiniest majority in the House — smaller than the majority it will have in the Senate, which has hardly ever happened to a political party in recent American history — and that is going to put it, and Trump, in an even weaker position than he and it were when Trump and the party were voted into power in 2016.