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In 2022, shortly before the midterm elections and the unofficial start of the 2024 presidential campaign, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo traveled to Maine to appear on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation streaming talk show. For the previous two years, he was a frequent guest of Mr. Carlson’s. He usually did his hits — on the evils of critical race theory, or the plague of “trans indoctrination” — from his home outside Seattle. This time, he was excited to meet Mr. Carlson in person. When Mr. Rufo arrived at the Fox host’s rustic studio, after a cross-country flight and a 90-minute drive from the Portland airport, he discovered someone else in the Maine backwoods: Donald Trump Jr.
It was a perilous moment for the Trump family. After Jan. 6, Donald Trump had become persona non grata in elite Republican circles. (When he officially began his 2024 presidential campaign after the midterms, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post buried the news on page 26 under the headline “Been There, Don That.”) Many conservative leaders appeared ready to swing behind the presidential candidacy of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose promise of “competent Trumpism” — all the right-wing policies and red meat, none of the baggage — was striking a chord. That certainly seemed to be the case with Mr. Carlson, who hosted Mr. DeSantis on his show at least six times between September 2021 and the midterms; he didn’t have the former president on once. Mr. Rufo, meanwhile, was advising the governor on how to combat liberal teaching about race and gender in Florida’s schools.
At Mr. Carlson’s Maine redoubt, Mr. Trump Jr. never brought up his father or Mr. DeSantis or the presidential campaign. But Mr. Rufo assumed that was “the subtext of the visit” — that Mr. Trump Jr. was there to keep prominent conservative figures like him and Mr. Carlson in the former president’s camp. Mr. Trump Jr. greeted Mr. Rufo effusively and complimented him on his work. The three men talked about their political beliefs and the personal price they’d paid for them; Mr. Trump Jr. pointed out that he — like Mr. Carlson, who had left Washington for Maine, and Mr. Rufo, who had decamped from Seattle proper to the suburbs — had fled New York for a community more tolerant of his political views. By the end of the encounter, Mr. Rufo left convinced that the image of the Trumps as a family of New York liberals who had adopted populist politics only for cynical reasons was “totally off and that actually, Don Jr. had a personal commitment to the cause.”
The soft touch worked. Mr. Carlson remained firmly behind Mr. Trump and, while Mr. Rufo did endorse Mr. DeSantis, he was careful never to attack the former president; when Mr. Trump eventually romped through the Republican primaries, Mr. Rufo quickly fell in line.
The episode was one of many I heard from people around the Trump campaign, who, on and off the record, described an evolution in the role Mr. Trump Jr. has played in conservative politics over the past four years. Liberals have long loved to deride him as a sweaty failson. They’ve mocked his appearance (“That chin — it’s like Michelangelo himself carved him out of pudding,” Jimmy Kimmel recently joked) and have reviled him for his offensive social media posts (calling Mitt Romney “a pussy,” pretending to confuse Michelle Obama with a Pittsburgh Steeler linebacker). For a time, even his political allies, including members of his own family, held a dim view of him. As the former president’s onetime personal attorney Michael Cohen testified to the House Oversight Committee in 2019, “Mr. Trump had frequently told me and others that his son Don Jr. had the worst judgment of anyone in the world.”
But in the 2020 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump Jr. proved himself to be both a top fund-raiser and a talented surrogate — a “downright rock star,” as Sean Spicer, Mr. Trump’s first White House press secretary, described him to me when I wrote about him for The New York Times Magazine that year. Since then, his political standing, in the eyes of his father and others, has only grown. Today, Mr. Trump Jr. has come to occupy a perch of unrivaled influence inside the MAGA movement, so much so that of all the figures who surround the former president, his eldest son may offer the best window into the future of that movement.
While the 78-year-old Mr. Trump is running what, win or lose, seems likely to be his final campaign, the 46-year-old Mr. Trump Jr. has ambitious plans that extend well beyond 2024, and well beyond his father.
The Republican Party Mr. Trump Jr. is building is younger, angrier and even more anti-establishment than today’s version. It is united less by common values and common ideas than by common contempt for its opponents — the liberal elites in government, big business, academia and Hollywood, whom he sees as dangerous enemies that must be forcefully confronted and vanquished. It’s a Republican Party that, no matter who wins in November, offers little hope of a respite from the chaos and vitriol that have defined American politics for the last decade.
Trump World abhors a vacuum, and when Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner decided to leave politics after the 2020 election to pursue his first love — cutting billions of dollars of business deals with Persian Gulf sovereign wealth funds — Donald Trump Jr. became his father’s most trusted adviser. He performs that role very differently from his predecessor.
Unlike Mr. Kushner, who worked in the White House and oversaw the Trump campaign in 2020, Mr. Trump Jr. has eschewed an official position. “Jared really fashioned himself as an expert on all things, and wanted to be involved in all things, and had an opinion on all things,” says Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida. “Don is considerably more focused. He picks his spots. He doesn’t want to be an employee in the org chart of the White House.”
The result, according to Trump advisers, has been an unusually functional and drama-free Trump campaign, with Mr. Trump Jr. frequently deferring to the campaign’s co-managers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, who, in turn, defer to Mr. Trump Jr. on the rare occasions when he weighs in.
The other big difference is ideological. Mr. Kushner is a former Democrat who was viewed, by both admirers and detractors, as someone who attempted to be a moderating force in the Trump political operation. Mr. Trump Jr. is as MAGA as they come. He spent his childhood summers visiting his maternal grandparents in what was then called Czechoslovakia, where he gained a love of hunting and a hatred of communism. “He was the only family member who talked politics before his dad ran for president,” one person close to Mr. Trump Jr. told me in 2020. As Steve Bannon testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018, “I’d describe Don Jr., who I think very highly of, as a guy who believes everything on Breitbart is true.”
Rather than try to moderate his father, Mr. Trump Jr. has pushed him to be even more extreme. “Don’s take on our movement is that we don’t see the greatest growth potential in things like the ‘Platinum Plan,’” says Mr. Gaetz, referring to a 2020 Trump campaign effort that tried to appeal to Black voters by promising to make Juneteenth a federal holiday and lynching a national hate crime. “The growth is in the disaffected people in the middle of the country who are low-propensity voters. Don would rather put our time into getting someone who is disaffected about voting to vote than to try to convince someone who hates us to hate us a little less.”
At the urging of his son, Mr. Trump is seeking to appeal to mostly white, mostly male voters on the political margins. One can detect Mr. Trump Jr.’s fingerprints in the Trump campaign’s unrelenting focus on culture-war issues such as “transgender insanity” and “Marxist equity” programs, as well as its trollish tone: “Kamala is for they/them,” the narrator in one Trump ad says. “President Trump is for you.” Even the campaign’s media outreach strategy — putting the former president on bro-y podcasts like the Nelk Boys’ — is a sign of Mr. Trump Jr.’s influence.
As early as 2021, Mr. Trump Jr. was keenly aware of the vaccine skepticism that had taken hold among the MAGA base. Publicly, he complained that Americans were acting “like sheep” for not opposing vaccine mandates. Privately, according to people familiar with the matter, he urged his father to address the issue. The former president once took understandable pride in his administration’s work developing a Covid vaccine — “Look, we did something that was historic, we saved tens of millions of lives worldwide,” he boasted a year after leaving office. Then, he stopped talking about it. And when his silence wasn’t enough, he staked out an openly adversarial position, threatening to withhold federal money from schools that have vaccine mandates.
It was Mr. Trump Jr. who brought Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the Trump inner circle. For more than a year, he urged his father to find a way to get Mr. Kennedy to drop out of the race. In July, when Mr. Kennedy first expressed interest in doing so, Mr. Trump Jr. began using a combination of flattery (bonding with Mr. Kennedy over their shared skepticism of vaccines and love of the outdoors) and inducement (offering Mr. Kennedy a spot on Mr. Trump’s transition team) to secure his endorsement. “I had an impression that Donald Jr. was kind of a lightweight,” Mr. Kennedy later said in an interview, “but I’ve gotten to know him and he’s exactly the opposite.”
Mr. Trump Jr.’s biggest impact on the 2024 campaign was his role in the selection of JD Vance as his father’s running mate — which, he believed, would help cement Mr. Trump’s nationalist and isolationist tendencies into hard doctrine. On his podcast and social media accounts, he constantly talked up Mr. Vance and created a reservoir of good will for him among the MAGA faithful.
According to a Trump adviser, it made an impression on his father: Whenever the former president looked at social media, he saw that the base supported Mr. Vance. Mr. Trump Jr. then had people, including Mr. Carlson and the Cantor Fitzgerald chief executive, Howard Lutnick, serve as “validators” who would privately go to bat for Mr. Vance with the former president. “Don’s opinion on the vice-presidential selection,” said Mr. Gaetz, “was probably the second most important one after D.J.T.’s.”
Mr. Trump Jr. is planning to ensure that loyalty to his father and the MAGA movement would extend beyond the vice president’s office to all corners of the administration. “What I want to do is work on the transition, and it’s not about placing people,” he recently told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s about blocking the people who would be a disaster in that administration. I will cut out so many people, people’s heads are going to spin.”
His plans include the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue as well. In House and Senate races, Mr. Trump Jr. has thrown his weight behind candidates who showed not just the loyalty that his father prizes above all else, but also political talent, which his father has often overlooked. His early endorsement of the 2024 Senate campaign of Representative Jim Banks of Indiana convinced the former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels not to open his own bid for the seat, saving the G.O.P. from a costly and bloody primary in the state. He also worked to help Tim Sheehy and Bernie Moreno win contested Republican Senate primaries in Montana and Ohio. “Don has been a kingmaker,” says Senator Steve Daines of Montana, who heads the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm.
Mr. Trump Jr.’s goal is to build what he calls “a MAGA bench.” As he told The Wall Street Journal, “I don’t want just MAGA with only Trump, and then it goes back to the old ways.” His recruits seem ready and willing to ensure that doesn’t happen. “What Don sees is when his dad got into office in 2017 and 2018, he had a lot of Republicans around him, but they were also stabbing him in the back when it came to the agenda,” Mr. Moreno said. “Don Jr. is uber passionate about making certain that people who get into the Senate are actually going to be doers and not just talkers during a primary, during an election.”
The Senate Republican caucus of Mr. Trump’s first term — which twice acquitted him of impeachment charges but also prevented him from withdrawing the United States from NATO and starting a crippling trade war with Mexico — will look like a citadel of resistance compared to the Senate Republicans he would be likely to encounter in a second term. (Mr. Banks is all but certain to win in November; Mr. Sheehy leads the polls against a Democratic incumbent; and Mr. Moreno is within the margin of error in his race.)
Mr. Trump Jr. has long had a fraught relationship with his father. After his parents divorced when he was 12, he refused to speak to his father for a year. As an adult working on “The Apprentice,” he consoled the crew members whom the future president berated, citing the mantra, “It’s not your fault; it’s your turn.”
He is as cleareyed about his father’s flaws and limitations as John Kelly, Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence or any of the other Republican officials who tried to use the Trump presidency as a vessel for their ambitions — and now seem to bitterly regret it. But Mr. Trump Jr. is nonetheless confident that the MAGA movement can be more than just a cult of personality and that his father can instead be the vehicle for remaking both the Republican Party and the United States.
Ever since Mr. Trump won in 2016, New Right figures, including Mr. Rufo, have been trying to add intellectual heft to his lizard-brain populism. It has been a frustrating, at times quixotic effort. But in Mr. Trump Jr., the New Right believes it now has a powerful ally — someone who recognizes the importance of ideology and administration and is capable of translating his father’s charisma and instincts into a rational formula that can become policy, someone who can actually achieve the dream of “competent Trumpism.”
Mr. Rufo told me he saw the first Trump term as an administration focused on “material concerns: the economy, energy resources, migration.” The second, he predicts, would also be focused on “culture, policy, academia, ideology, trying to reverse the left’s long march through the institutions.” He believes that this shift would be “largely through the influence of Don Jr.”
Even for those who don’t subscribe to the #Resistance caricature of him as the Fredo of the Trump family, the notion of Mr. Trump Jr., a self-described “shit-talker par excellence,” as an intellectual influencer can seem like a stretch. But as Mr. Rufo argues: “The Medici were not painting the ceilings or writing the historical tracts. They would delegate that to people around them, and they were appreciators. And I think Don Jr. is the same.”
Should his father lose, Mr. Trump Jr. will be a key player in the MAGA movement’s efforts to prevent more moderate Republicans from wresting back control of the party. And if his father wins? While it’s doubtful Mr. Trump Jr. would go to work in the White House, he will wield as much power as anyone who does — and in 2028, he will almost certainly play a major role in deciding who the next Republican nominee is. “Everybody running is going to be competing in the Don Jr. primary nearly as much as the Trump 47 primary,” says the Republican strategist Jeff Roe, who ran the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, oversaw a PAC that supported Mr. DeSantis’s 2020 campaign and presumably has designs on playing a major role in someone’s 2028 campaign.
The person close to Mr. Trump Jr. told me that his ultimate goal is to transform the Republican Party into an America First party, without ever having to run for office himself. But there may come a point where staying on the sidelines is no longer possible. Last year, Mr. Trump Jr. “pre-endorsed” Mr. Gaetz for Florida governor — a job that Mr. Gaetz has not yet said he’s running for. “So I jokingly told him, if that were to occur, I’d get back at him by appointing him to the United States Senate,” Mr. Gaetz recalled. I asked him how Mr. Trump Jr. took that. Mr. Gaetz said, “He laughed and bristled all at the same time.”
Jason Zengerle is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.
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