The breadth of Trump's coalition is different: It stretches from anti-corporate naturalists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - who says Trump has promised him "control" of public health agencies - to post-liberal Catholics like JD Vance to crypto bros to Elon Musk. This, too, is a coalition with vast policy differences. They are united by a shared distrust in - and desire to take control of - American institutions.

We're used to elections pitting Democrats against Republicans. This election pits Guardians against Counterrevolutionaries.

To Democrats, the institutions that govern American life, though flawed and sometimes captured by moneyed interests, are fundamentally trustworthy. They are repositories of knowledge and expertise, staffed by people who do the best work they can, and they need to be protected and preserved.

The Trumpist coalition sees something quite different: an archipelago of interconnected strongholds of leftist power that stretch from the government to the universities to the media and, increasingly, big business and even the military. This network is sometimes called the Cathedral and sometimes called the Regime; Trump refers to part of it as the Deep State, Vivek Ramaswamy calls the corporate side "Woke Inc." and JD Vance has described it as a grave threat to democracy.

In 2024, Pew polled Democrats and Republicans on their views of various government agencies. The net favorability gap between Democrats and Republicans on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was a stunning 92 points; on the Environmental Protection Agency, it was 80 points; on the Department of Education, it was 73 points. Fine, all those are liberal-coded agencies. But it keeps going: a 62-point gap for the F.B.I., a 60-point difference on the Department of Transportation; a 37-point gap on the Department of Homeland Security. In all of these cases - yes, even the Department of Homeland Security - it was Democrats reporting far more favorable feelings.