President Donald Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill is not what you think it is. It’s not a stunt. It’s not a meme. It’s the most unmistakable evidence yet of a transformed Republican Party. To understand who benefits from this bill is to recognize the party’s new political mandate: delivering for the working class.

That is, the GOP’s working-class base. That phrase shocks official Washington.

Just look at what’s in the tax bill — it delivers real relief for everyday Americans. Tips, overtime and car loan interest are no longer taxed, and seniors won’t pay taxes on Social Security benefits. That means a single mom waiting tables could take home an extra $1,300, while a utility worker putting in overtime after a storm won’t owe a dime on his extra pay.

This isn’t the party of Reagan or Bush. It’s Trump’s party. And, at least for the foreseeable future, it’s not going back.

What happened? Go back to November 19, 1955, to the inaugural issue of National Review, wherein its editor, William F. Buckley Jr., wrote that the magazine would “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” That defiant posture helped to reshape American politics. Buckley used NR over time to integrate libertarians, traditionalists and anti-communists into a unified conservative movement.

That so-called “fusionism” culminated in Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in the 1980 election. And Reagan’s win, of course, owed much to “Reagan Democrats,” the hardscrabble denizens of the Rust Belt who felt culturally abandoned by their fathers’ party.

This should have come as no surprise. As recounted in Sam Tannehaus’s monumental new biography of the great man, “Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America,” when Buckley ran for mayor of New York City in 1965, his campaign team “was expecting our supporters (in 1965) to be National Review types — car dealers, academic moles, literate dentists, dissenting students, whatever. As soon as we hired halls, though, we learned that (Buckley) was speaking for the people who made the city go — corner-store owners, cops, schoolteachers, first-home owners, firemen, coping parents."

These voters now define the GOP.

Working-class support for the GOP waned post-Reagan. The primary reasons: the Bush-era wars that weighed heaviest on working-class families, the 2008 financial crisis and its (bipartisan) bailouts, and the global trade consensus that hollowed out manufacturing towns.

Working-class voters grew disenchanted with, and then disgusted by, the elite, wealthy liberals. The political world witnessed a variation on this theme on June 24 in New York City. It’s still a Democratic town, but in the Democratic primary for mayor, voters with median incomes below $50,000 went 19 points more for the more establishment-centered Andrew Cuomo. In contrast, voters with median incomes above $100,000 went 13 points more for the avowedly socialist candidate (who won the nomination), Zohran Mamdani.

The same holds for Democrats nationally: In 2024, Kamala Harris won 13 of the 20 wealthiest counties in the country. Trump won seven. In 2004, George W. Bush carried 17 of them.

Yes, Buckley and Trump are indeed worlds apart in style, and in some critical respects, on substance. Both were populists of sorts who challenged the right-of-center establishment. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phonebook than by the Harvard faculty. Trump said it less elegantly — but just as forcefully — by going to war with Harvard itself.

In 2015, Trump rode down an escalator and declared “Stop” — on immigration, foreign wars and economic policies that served the boardroom but not the breakroom. Working-class voters listened. They voted for him in 2016, 2020 and 2024. And now they’re not just part of the Republican coalition, as they were with Buckley and Reagan. They now define the alliance.

And that carries policy implications. Trump’s economic populism is cracking the GOP’s free-market consensus. The new GOP platform emphasizes “tax relief for working families,” rather than capital formation. It offers cultural confrontation with elite universities, not deregulation of multinational banks. It holds that foreign policy begins with American self-interest, not idealistic crusades abroad.

What does this mean for the GOP, for American politics? As National Review’s Phil Klein put it, Trump’s is the “new fusionism of wanting to blow stuff up.” Not for the sake of chaos, but to drive out the institutional decadence that has failed ordinary Americans for decades.

It may be Trump’s party, but this isn’t about one man anymore. This is a movement. The GOP is no longer fighting over marginal tax rates for high earners. It’s fighting over who the country is for. And right now, working-class voters believe it’s for them.

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ABOUT THE WRITERS

Michael Catanzaro is the CEO of CGCN Group, a strategic communications, policy consulting and lobbying firm in Washington. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

Sam Geduldig is a managing partner of CGCN Group, a strategic communications, policy consulting and lobbying firm in Washington. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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