It’s Getting Harder for Trump to Keep the Gang Together

The long-awaited breakup between President Trump and Elon Musk was as personal and petty as anticipated, and yet it’s a sign of something much more than a conflict between two of the world’s most powerful and mercurial men.

It’s a signal that Mr. Trump is not finding it easy to hold his populist conservative coalition together.

At the beginning of the year, Mr. Trump’s coalition did not seem so vulnerable. To an extent unmatched since at least Ronald Reagan, it seemed as if Mr. Trump could enact a conservative agenda and find considerable support from the public. By raising tariffs on China, deporting undocumented immigrants, increasing oil production, cutting spending or fighting the “woke” left, he could stay on solid political ground.

Whether it’s because of his own limitations as a manager of competing players, the excesses of his own policies or the growing challenge of the national debt, it doesn’t appear to be so straightforward for Mr. Trump to hold the gang together.

The second Trump coalition is fraying

Mr. Trump won a second term with a much broader political coalition than the one that brought him to the presidency in 2016.

He added millions of young and nonwhite voters to his base of older, white, working-class populists and stalwart Republicans. He also added considerable support from anti-woke and anti-establishment elites who previously backed Democrats.

These new Trump supporters were very different from the voters who backed him in 2016. They were neither traditional Republicans nor conservative populists drawn to Mr. Trump’s pitch on issues like trade and immigration. Instead, they were animated by issues that weren’t so potent back in 2016, like the excesses of the “woke” left and pandemic-era public health policy or anger at rising prices, crime, homelessness and an influx of migrants. In different ways, Joe Rogan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mr. Musk each epitomize different facets of this enlarged Trump coalition.

It seemed possible that vehement opposition to progressives would hold everyone together during the presidency, as it did during the campaign, and that maybe Mr. Trump would also do enough to please each group and avoid alienating a constituency.

Less than five months into Mr. Trump’s term, there are already indications that this broader coalition is fraying. The polls suggest that many young and nonwhite voters who backed Mr. Trump in November now disapprove of his performance. There haven’t been as many examples of elite defections, but there have been many signs of queasiness with the excesses of his policies. The extent of Mr. Trump’s tariffs, his defiance of the courts, his attacks on high-skilled immigration and higher education and more simply go beyond what many of Mr. Trump’s backers thought they were signing up to support.

Mr. Musk’s defection is not necessarily representative. His grievances may be personal as much as they’re about policy. Still, Mr. Trump failed to keep Mr. Musk on board, and it seems to have been at least partly because of the challenge in reconciling the ideologically diverse factions in his orbit. And while Mr. Musk complained most loudly about how much the Republican tax and spending bill would add to the national debt, the possibility that other policies were a factor — like attacks on international students or reducing support for renewables — shouldn’t be discounted.

And even if other Trump policies, like deportations or universal tariffs, weren’t problems for Mr. Musk, they might well erode Mr. Trump’s support among other members of his coalition.

The return of deficit politics

For the last decade or so, deficits haven’t been a major issue in American politics.

This is changing, fast.

The U.S. fiscal picture has gotten markedly worse over the last few years. The national debt is projected to be well over 100 percent of G.D.P. in a decade. Already, interest payments on the debt have reached nearly one-fifth of federal revenue. The country is projected to have trillion dollar deficits for the foreseeable future, even during a period of low unemployment and economic growth. High interest rates will make it very expensive to finance additional debt.

The deteriorating fiscal situation is already beginning to affect politics, most obviously in the challenge of passing a big tax and spending bill. In the past, it was easy enough for Republicans to cut taxes. Now, with the deficit and interest rates so high, a nearly $3 trillion expansion in the debt over the next decade is suddenly not so easy to swallow.

This challenge for Republicans won’t go away. The alliance between traditional and populist conservatives was much easier when Mr. Trump could promise tax cuts while sparing popular entitlement programs. As the burden of the debt mounts, this win-win proposition will be hard to sustain.

Less obviously, the same fiscal issues will be a major challenge for the Democratic coalition as well. With all the fighting between progressives and moderates over the last decade, it’s easy to overlook that deficit spending made it much easier for the party to stay unified. Mainstream Democrats could bridge the gap between the party’s ideological wings by campaigning on investments in infrastructure and renewable energy as well as on modest but significant expansions of the social safety net, like universal pre-K or paid family leave. The debt issue might prove to be an even bigger one for Democrats than for Republicans.

It’s hard to say whether the Republican megabill is really the reason Mr. Musk broke with the president. Still, he called the bill an “abomination.” And the potential power of this issue over the longer term should not be underestimated.

When interest payments reached a similar share of federal revenue back in the early 1990s, it helped break up the Reagan coalition and propel the rise of Ross Perot. If over the next few years the national debt becomes an existential issue for voters, all bets are off.