Can Trumpism survive a Trump administration?

But instead Trump is apparently considering Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton for the State Department — the former because of his campaign-trail loyalty, the latter (presumably) because of his connections to the Heritage Foundation, which volunteered itself for the transition process back when that process seemed unlikely to go anywhere. Both men do share a temperament with Trump — combative, adversarial, sometimes bullying. But neither is particularly Trumpist when it comes to the actual details of foreign policy; indeed, both are embodiments of the full-spectrum hawkishness that the businessman-candidate often campaigned against. (Bolton, for instance, took to the pages of this newspaper last fall to dismiss Trump’s idea of “an American-Russian coalition against ISIS” as both “undesirable” and “glib.”)

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Now it could be that in a Trump cabinet they would gradually conform their worldviews to his, as presidential appointees often do, and that Trumpism would advance (as it did on the campaign trail) through convenient conversions among the people charged with putting it into effect.

But since Trump himself is inexperienced, underinformed and deeply malleable, it’s also quite possible that if he appoints conventional full-spectrum hawks to key posts, full-spectrum hawkishness is what we’ll get — that by year two of a Trump administration we’ll be arming the Ukrainians and Syrian rebels, saber-rattling anew with the Russians, and adding another intervention or two to the Obama administration’s (six and counting) frozen conflicts.

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