As Donald Trump begins his second term as president, the country and the world are braced for what is surely to be an onslaught of illiberal and undemocratic affronts from the new administration. From immigration and trade to climate change and education policy, Trump’s second term promises to be far more radical and unconstrained than his first.
But how did we get to this place, where a disgraced former president—a convicted felon who set precedent by presiding over the first violent transfer of power in the nation’s history—returns to the highest office in the land?
As scholars, journalists, and citizens continue seeking to make sense of the 2024 election results, a crucial factor must not be overlooked. Apart from his apparent popular appeal, Trump’s current political dominance is rooted in his complete and uncontested control over the Republican Party. Trump’s success in transforming the GOP into an institutional expression of his MAGA movement is his greatest success to-date—and studying the party’s conversion is critical to understanding Trump’s continuing hold on our national politics.
Remaking the GOP
Ever since Donald Trump first appeared on the political scene in 2015, there was a widely-shared belief—sometimes explicitly stated, sometimes simply implied—that his more unconventional and erratic tendencies would be constrained by institutions. Fears of his desire to raise trade barriers and clamp down on immigration were assuaged with reference to the Republican establishment’s business-friendly policy objectives, which favored free trade and migrant labor. Concerns about his clearly authoritarian impulses were calmed by recalling the unwritten norms followed by presidents of both parties and the constitution’s formal checks and balances. Such hopes were not unreasonable—as a political outsider with no prior experience in elected office, Trump should have been more easily corralled by party institutions and the country’s constitutional infrastructure. But he wasn’t.
Instead, Trump set about reshaping the Republican Party in his own image. No amount of public embarrassment or humiliation could stop party leaders and elected officials from standing by the president. Even in the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 election, the leaders of the Republican Party proved too spineless and craven to rebut Trump’s ludicrously false claims of election fraud. Nor did they possess the courage to permanently banish Trump after he threatened their very lives on January 6, 2021, when a mob he summoned to Washington launched a violent assault on the Capitol.
But how did Trump reduce the GOP to a vehicle for his political ambition? The party’s transformation involved a series of simultaneous changes in its ideas, policies, and personnel. However, on the most fundamental level, Trump’s remaking of the party involved a change in its discourse. Discourse involves the practices through which political actors engage with the social world—it is how they contest ideas, create identities, weave narratives, and ascribe meaning to political phenomena. As such, a shift in discourse serves as the foundation upon which concomitant changes in ideologies and policies can be effected and sustained.
In the case of Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, the shift in discourse represented a realignment between the traditional establishment and the insurgent faction often associated with the Tea Party Movement. This faction expressed a sense of nostalgic deprivation that Trump accelerated with his mantra of “Make America Great Again” and his willingness to entertain ideas long viewed as outside the realm of acceptable political discourse. His disregard for the rule of law, apocalyptic view of political competition, and commitment to taking political hardball to the extreme catalyzed the creation of a new party discourse that justified and supported Trump’s unprecedented actions, even if that required relying on false facts and contradictory beliefs to do so.
Of course, merely articulating an alternative discourse is insufficient to foment such a radical change, as it must be widely adopted by a community for it to have lasting influence. Trump accomplished the spread of his discourse within the party through two mechanisms—conversion and replacement. Through conversion, the majority of GOP officials and officeholders adopted his discourse, either due to honest affinity or strategic calculation. Conversion is particularly impactful for officeholders who fear being “primaried” by more faithful MAGA supporters. Replacement involves the purging of holdouts who refused to toe the line and follow the leader. Some Republican officials who refused to embrace Trumpism lost their reelection bids (e.g., Liz Cheney), while others simply chose not to seek reelection (e.g., Mitt Romney).
Analyzing Trump’s impact on the Republican Party from the angle of discourse provides unique leverage in unpacking how his dominance over the party became so complete. This discursive perspective complements those that focus on ideology, policies, and personnel—deepening our understanding of the practices that created and sustained the Party of Trump.
Data and Methods
To better understand how Trump transformed the GOP’s discourse, I analyzed a set of 1.3 million tweets issued by Republican members of Congress during Trump’s first term. After pre-processing the tweets to remove punctuation, stopwords, and symbols, I grouped them by member-month (all the tweets issued by a particular member of Congress in a given month) so as to have a basis for cross-member and over-time comparison. I used doc2vec, an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, to calculate document embeddings for each set of tweets. I then used these embeddings to calculate the cosine similarity between each member-month set of tweets and Trump’s tweets in that same month. The resulting cosine similarity ranged from 0 (least like Trump) to 1 (identical to Trump) and served as the “discursive similarity score” in the subsequent analyses.
Results
Congressional Republicans’ discursive similarity to Donald Trump increased considerably during his first year in office, rising three-quarters of a standard deviation from 0.78 in January 2017 to 0.83 in December of that year (s.d.=0.06). Similarity remained relatively stable throughout 2018, although it dropped precipitously late in the year—hitting an all-time low of 0.73 in December following the party’s midterm defeat. Yet, the start of the new Congress in January 2019 saw a complete recovery, as a new cohort of MAGA-aligned members arrived in Washington. Similarity hit an all-time high of 0.98 in February 2019 and remained above 0.9 for most of the year, but began an inexorable decline late in the year at the time of Trump’s first impeachment. This decline continued throughout 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic worsened, coming to rest at 0.84—one standard deviation ahead of his first month in office—following Trump’s defeat in the November 2020 election.
Part of this steady movement toward Trump can be explained by conversion, the process through which members of Congress actively shifted their discourse to become more like Trump’s. Figure 1 illustrates this trend by plotting the similarity scores for Republicans who served in both the 115th Congress (2017–18) and the 116th Congress (2019–20). Points above the diagonal line indicate members who increased their similarity between the two sessions, while those below the line became less like Trump over time. Overall, three-quarters of Republican members of Congress moved toward Trump, with the magnitude of the average change (+0.070) falling just shy of an entire standard deviation (0.072).

Figure 1: Conversion between 115th and 116th Congresses
Furthermore, the party’s discursive change can also be attributed to replacement—the process through which Republicans who refused to endorse MAGA were purged from the party. Figure 2 illustrates the relationship between members’ discursive similarity to Trump and the predicted probability that they ran and won in the 2018 and 2020 elections. Both top panels of the figure reveal that similarity to Trump was positively associated with running for reelection and winning in 2018. However, as revealed in the bottom panels, the case was somewhat different in 2020; although similarity to Trump was still positively related to running for office, it had a slight negative association with winning. Nevertheless, the size of this relationship was very small—even those with an almost perfect similarity score of 1 had a 93% probability of being reelected.

Figure 2: Replacement in the 2018 and 2020 Elections
But what does discursive similarity to Trump look like in practice? On the most general level, it must involve parroting the narratives that justify his exercise of political power, including his norm-shattering behavior, disregard for the rule of law, attacks on liberal values, efforts at executive aggrandizement, and disregard for the democratic process. However, to gain a more rigorous and precise understanding of Trumpian discourse, I compared the tweets of the Republicans in the top and bottom deciles of the discursive similarity scale. Specifically, I calculated a metric known as keyness, which measures the extent to which particular words are uniquely used by one group in comparison to another. Words with a high level of keyness—measured using the chi-square statistic (χ2)—are those that are most likely to distinguish one group from another.
Figure 3 illustrates the words with the highest keyness for those most similar to Trump (top panel) and least similar to Trump (bottom panel). In comparison to the least Trump-like, those at the top of the discursive similarity scale regularly engaged in attacks launched at Trump’s favorite targets, including “democrats,” “china,” “communist[s],” and “speakerpelosi.” Furthermore, these Republicans were more likely to refer to the biggest policy issues of Trump’s first term, including the “border,” “covid-19,” the revised NAFTA agreement (“usmca”), and the Paycheck Protection Program (“ppp”).
Unsurprisingly, they were also significantly more likely to mention “realdonaldtrump” himself.
Those at the bottom of the similarity scale were distinguished by their focus on traditional conservative policy concerns, especially tax cuts (“tax,” “taxreform,” “taxcutsandjobsact”). Regarding salient events of the Trump presidency, they also were more likely to mention natural disasters, especially “hurricaneharvey” and “hurricaneirma.” Furthermore, they stood out for their regular Twitter interaction with official accounts linked to governing entities, including the Republican membership of the House Ways and Means Committee (“waysandmeansgop”), House Foreign Affairs Committee (“houseforeign”), House Budget Committee (“housebudgetgop”), and Speaker Paul Ryan (“speakerryan”).

Figure 3: Keywords Among Most and Least Similar to Trump
Together, these results paint a stark picture of the divide between the Republicans who embraced Trump’s discourse and those who distanced themselves from it. The most MAGA members of Congress regularly engaged in attacking Trump’s opponents, emphasizing his key policy areas, and referring to the president himself. By contrast, those most dissimilar from Trump maintained a focus on more traditional Republican policy areas, discussing tax reform, hurricane relief, and mentioning official governing entities responsible for these areas.
Conclusion
It is certain that Donald Trump’s reelection in November 2024 has only further solidified his iron grip over the Republican Party. As attention turns to the policy plans and personnel announcements of his second administration, there is value in reflecting on the patterns witnessed during his first. In particular, studying discourse helps us understand American politics in the Age of Trump because it is through communication that we assign meaning to political phenomena, express values, explain events, and justify decisions. Thus, the Republican Party’s discursive shift helps explain its ever-increasing authoritarian tendencies and its acceptance of a type of politics that was once seen as beyond the pale.
Further clarifying how Trump established and maintains discursive dominance over the GOP is also crucial in anticipating what is to come during his second term and beyond. Certainly, we are beyond the point at which Trump might be seen as a historical anomaly and his MAGA movement a passing fad. Even when Trump himself fades from the scene, his transformation of the Republican Party will ensure that Trumpism will remain in some form—unless and until MAGA is displaced by another discursive shift within the party.
Joseph Cerrone, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at The George Washington University. His research focuses on questions of democratic decline and renewal in the United States and Europe, including political communication, anti-immigration politics, and voter support for the far right. His research has been published in Perspectives on Politics and Politics & Policy.