When Donald Trump launched his 2016 campaign, many of his critics predicted that it would go the way of his short-lived 2000 presidential run with the Reform Party — which he suspended in February of that year. But Trump not only won the 2016 GOP presidential nomination and defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the general election — he also became the dominant figure in the Republican Party, continuing to excite his hardcore MAGA base. According to liberal economist Robert Reich, however, that base isn’t the true source of his power.
In a Friday opinion column for The Guardian, Reich argues that Trump’s power comes not from millions of MAGA voters, but from his audacious nature.
“It’s important to understand the source of Trump’s power,” writes Reich, who served as labor secretary in the Clinton administration. “His power doesn’t come from his being president of the most powerful nation in the world[.] Nor does his power come from his MAGA base, which is now having second thoughts about supporting someone who got the U.S. involved in another Middle Eastern war, caused prices to rise, and whose administration still refuses to release the complete Epstein files. Nor does his power flow from any kind of strategic brilliance or cunning.”
Reich continues, “Trump’s power comes from his willingness to violate all the norms, rules and laws about how U.S. presidents are supposed to act — to do anything that helps him accumulate more wealth, power and glory, and wreak vengeance on anyone who has tried to get in the way.”
That source of power, Reich says, was evident during the recent 2026 NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey.
“The NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) presidents and prime ministers treated Trump with extraordinary deference because they’re afraid of what he might do if he doesn’t get what he wants,” Reich explains. “Whether it’s NATO, Iran, the World Cup, the 2020 election, making billions off his presidency — or anything else — he’s unconstrained by norms, rules, treaties and laws…. Trump isn’t unethical. He’s non-ethical. He isn’t immoral. He’s amoral.”
Reich continues, “It’s hard for most of us to conceive of living in a Trumpian world without standards, norms, rules or laws — a world composed only of transactions and calculations in which the only test is what’s in it for me and at what cost. And that difficulty most of us have of imagining such a world is itself the key to Trump’s power.”