Trump and his croniesâ style reflects a platform where grievance is currency and performance is power.
At the events surrounding Ronald Reaganâs inauguration in 1981, guests were handed small jewelry boxes that opened with a satisfying snap. Inside, metal buttons rested on a plush blue-velvet cushion. Each bore the image of a bald eagle with its wings stretched wide before the Capitol dome, a banner streaming from its beak that read âReaganâBush.â The buttons were more than keepsakes; they were emblems of conservative longing. After two turbulent decades marked by civil unrest, oil shocks, the Watergate scandal, and a failed war in Vietnam, Republicans yearned to restore a pre-1960, prim and proper American society. On that day, under a clear winter sky, those gleaming buttons symbolized optimism. A card included with the gift read: âTogether, let us make this A Great New Beginning.â
Republican organizers had commissioned the buttons from Ben Silverâa Charleston, South Carolinaâbased outfitter whose trade was, and remains, the adornment of Americaâs gilded classâon the assumption that every attendee of Reaganâs celebrations already owned a navy sport coat onto which the hardware could be affixed. With a swift replacement of buttons, hopsack jackets turned into blazers: not merely articles of clothing but markers of identity.
Although blazers were initially worn for sport (the term comes from the red jackets worn by members of the Lady Margaret Boat Club at St Johnâs College in Cambridge, which visually âblazedâ along the water), by the early 1980s, they symbolized belonging in polite society. Blazers allowed one entry into country clubs and Ivy League alumni houses, where paintings of 19th-century men hanging above mahogany wainscotingï»ż enshrined success according to particular moral and professional codes. For many conservatives, such environments represented civility and decorum.
Four decades later, that uniform has all but vanished. The shift isnât unique to Republicansâmenâs fashion writ large has grown increasingly informal. But within the GOP, that broader trend reflects a reordering of power. The Republican Party is no longer governed by Reaganâs acolytes but by Donald Trump, a real estate showman whose understanding of politics is indistinguishable from his understanding of branding. Trump has remade the party not only in spirit, but alsoâperhaps primarilyâin aesthetics, transforming it into a right-wing populist platform in which grievance is currency and performance is power. Where Reaganism once whispered the genteel respectability of brass buttons, Trumpism bellows in red MAGA hats, âNever Surrenderâ T-shirts, and metallic gold sneakers that give off a tinsel gleam like a casino chandelier. The shift in aesthetics mirrors that in politics: Everything is spectacle, and the louder the spectacle, the more authentic the power it claims to represent.
To trace the evolution of the Republican aesthetic, one must understand codes in menâs tailoring. Before Trumpâs rise in politics, Republican dress was firmly rooted in Brooks Brothers, the oldest American menswear brand in continuous operation. The relationship between Brooks Brothers and conservatism was once so tight that the anarchic attempt by Republican operatives to stop the 2000 Florida vote recount became known as the âBrooks Brothers riot.â
For much of the 20th century, Brooks Brothers represented the white bourgeoisieâparticularly WASPs who traced their roots back to the Mayflower. In the early 1900s, the company debuted its iconic No. 1 Sack Suit, which was distinguished by its soft, natural shoulders, center hook vent, and a three-button closure with lapels gently rolling to the center button. Most notably, the sack suit lacked a front dart, the long, stitched-down fold that makes the garment hug the wearerâs contours. The sack suit carried American elites from the jazz clubs of the Roaring Twenties through the Great Depression and onto the Ivy League campuses of the postwar boom.
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Even so, there was a paradox stitched into the Brooks Brothers aesthetic. Because the company dressed elites, its raiments took on status as those men saw their fortunes rise with industrial capitalism. At the same time, its styles were a reflection of Yankee values that emphasized restraint and downplaying wealth. The American sack suit was more democratic than its European counterÂparts: straight sides, soft shoulders, and machine-finished lapels, as opposed to the shapely silhouettes in Italy and the hard, militaristic shoulders in Britain. Brooks Brothers suits were typically accompanied by matte silk, rep striped ties in dull colors, and oxford-cloth button-down shirts with frayed collars.
When Adlai Stevensonâa model of the well-bred, intellectual eliteâcampaigned for president in 1952, a Life photographer captured the underside of his shoe, revealing a worn-out sole. Years later, Tom Wolfe would popularize the âBoston Cracked Shoeâ in The Bonfire of the Vanities, capturing this aesthetic of genteel disrepair. In this way, threadbare clothing from a certain store, worn in a particular way, could both downplay and signal affluenceâthe paradox of old money. Before long, this became known as Ivy Style, worn by men who rode the conveyor belt from Phillips Academy Andover to Harvard to Washington.
During the first six or so decades of the 20th century, liberals and conservatives alike wore Ivy Style into the hallowed halls of power. But as the century pushed forward, the look became politicized. After the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and anti-war protests, the suit went from a symbol of respectability to an emblem undeserving of awe. Young Americans refused to inherit the establishmentâs uniform, adopting alternative styles: the rocker, the beatnik, the hippie, the radical.
Still, tailored clothing didnât die. After a slow decline starting in the late 1960s, it roared back in the â80s, this time not as the threadbare tweeds of old-money elites but as the slick uniform of a new tycoon class. This was the era of the power suitâan oversize garment with extended, padded shoulders and a severely defined waist that gave men an imposing V-shaped figure. Whereas the Brooks Brothers suit favored soft lines, this style of tailoring was angular. The power suit was worn with bright ties and banker collars, exemplified by Michael Douglasâs Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street. If the Ivy look was about playing down wealth, the power suit announced it with exuberance.
Itâs worth pausing in this era. As much as the power suit seemed like a rejection of the staid sobriety the Reaganites claimed to admire, its rise was inseparable from Reagan and his trickle-down army. Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford had mostly accepted the New Dealâs social framework, expanding Social Security, sometimes backing public works, and maintaining a pragmatic relationship with organized labor. Reagan replaced that settlement with a brasher form of conservatism that centered market liberalization, tax cuts, and confrontation with unions. In doing so, he gave the partyâs corporate elite license to pursue their old ambitions to roll back the welfare state. Reaganâs genial patriotism and Hollywood charisma repackaged these aims in a way that felt new, even as they harked back to preâNew Deal economic inequality. In a decade that worshiped millionaires and shamed the poor, the power suit became the natural uniform of a new cultural vanguard.
Itâs no accident that this was the moment Trump burst onto the scene. With the grand opening of Trump Tower in 1983 and the publication of The Art of the Deal in 1987, he emerged as one of New Yorkâs highest-profile figures. Like many, he played with trends in his youth like wide paisley ties and giant lapels, but he would quickly cement his image as a 1980s business magnate by adopting the power broker uniform: thick shoulder pads, satin ties in balloon colors, and outfits that echoed the American flag. Trumpâs showboating style has remained there ever since.
Everything Trump wears, builds, or sells is part of that same stagecraft, all calculated to remind you that heâs rich. His Fifth Avenue penthouse is designed in an ostentatious, neo-rococo style that borrows from Louis XIVâera French opulence, which he has since imported into the Oval Office. At Mar-a-Lago, the interiors are best described as âGilded Age fantasy meets 1980s American excess and Mediterranean pastiche.â When Trump agreed to appear on Comedy Central Roast in 2011, he told comedians that they could joke about anythingâhis hair, his weight, his multiple marriages, his strange comments about his daughter Ivankaâbut they couldnât question his wealth. Anthony Jeselnik later told The Hollywood Reporter, âTrumpâs one rule was âDonât say I have less money than I say I do.ââ
The irony of a billionaire posing as a populist hasnât gone unnoticed, but Trumpâs theatrical style has helped him cast himself as an outsider. During his first term, his two biggest adversaries, Mitt Romney and Robert Mueller, embodied the polish of an older class. Both men favored soft-shouldered tailoring and conservative foulard ties, knotted in the understated four-in-hand (many people in Trumpâs cabinet favor the thicker Windsor knot). Mueller was loyal to Brooks Brothers, a detail recorded by his biographer, Garrett Graff. If Romney and Mueller represented the authority of the old establishment, Trumpâs square-shouldered Brioni suits mark him as a warrior against it. When he vows to âdrain the swamp,â heâs talking, in part, about ridding DC of Brooks Brothers bureaucrats.
The anti-establishment image Trump has cultivated is one way heâs been able to wield power. Many people in his base have taken that aesthetic and amplified its defiance. At the center of this spectacle is the fire-red MAGA hat, which is designed not to persuade but to provoke. (Recall Marjorie Taylor Greene shouting from the stands during Bidenâs 2024 State of the Union, her red hat standing out in a room full of dark suits). At rallies, supporters often show up in military gear and T-shirts featuring Trumpâs mug shot, expressing how they see legal prosecution as inseparable from political persecution. A master of merchandising, Trump built a licensing empire to help bankroll his campaigns, including gold cell phones and âNever Surrenderâ sneakers. Representative Troy Nehls of Texas, a former sheriff aligned with the partyâs populist wing, has fully embraced this chaos. Not content with the uniform of a dark worsted suit, he occasionally pairs it with a âNever Surrenderâ T-shirt and glossy high-tops. He also owns a collection of neckties featuring an image of Trumpâs face repeated in a crude, unbroken strip, like prize tickets unfurling from a Skee-Ball machine.
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What this all adds up to is a modern Republican aesthetic, if it can be called one, that is less a coherent style than a cultural garage sale: a jumble inspired by memes and viral gimmickry. It draws not from the restrained codes of the moneyed but from the churn of pop culture and the glare of the digital age. The influence of Internet culture in politics is unmistakableâeven official government accounts, such as that of the Department of Homeland Security, now post AI-generated memes designed for outrage. In place of polish and propriety, this aesthetic offers spectacle. At Trump rallies, the media personality Blake Marnell can be found in a two-piece âbrick suitâ with a matching tie, turning himself into a walking metaphor for the US-ÂMexico border wall. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth frequently appears in stars and stripes. In this context, the louder, gaudier, and more profane the display, the more it reads as authentic: Vulgarity becomes an offensive stand-in for populist credibility, a rejection of elitism, and a public performance of loyalty to Trump.
Macho grandstandingâmanstanding?âplays much the same role. The GOPâs transformation from the party of country clubbers to that of the populist white working class is partially due to how much it has penetrated spaces that stoke an emergent hypermasculine culture. During his 2024 campaign, Trump engaged with manosphere podcasters like Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and Andrew Schulz. He appeared alongside UFC CEO Dana White at mixed-martial-arts events and received endorsements and messages of support from some of its top fighters. While many of these figures grew up middle-class, theyâve adopted a style of Henleys, work boots, and tactical gear. Their clothes telegraph masculine self-reliance, even if these men have never held a wrench.
The irony of the Republican rebellion against âgood tasteâ is that it targets a ruling class that has vanished. Cultural and political power no longer reside with George Plimpton or H.W. Bush, but with tech titans like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. Before he and Trump broke up, Musk wore âDark MAGAâ hats with black jeans and topcoats at the White House; Bezos frequently plays out an alpha male fantasy, showing up in all-black velvet suits and Ibiza-esque shirts with tight white jeans. For a man who claims that heâs fighting the âglobalists,â Trumpâs inauguration was conspicuously attended by Silicon Valley and Wall Street leaders.
On July 4, flanked by Republican lawmakers while the US Marine Band played patriotic marches in the background, Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Actâpassed by a Republican-controlled Congress. Thus far, the legislation is the crowning achievement of his second term. It folds decades of Republican ambitions into a single package, delivering roughly $5 trillion in tax cuts weighted toward the rich, pouring billions into deportations, scrapping clean energy incentives in favor of oil and gas development, and adding $150 billion to the Pentagon budget, making it one of the largest peacetime defense buildups in US history. Where Bushâs Social Security privatization plan fizzled and Paul Ryanâs austerity budgets died in committee, âBBBâ has fulfilled old promises: a 12 percent cut to Medicaid over 10 years, new work requirements for SNAP, and reduced access to financial aid for low-income college students. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that nearly 12 million people will lose their health insurance as a result. With Muskâs help, before the bill passed, DOGE set the foundations by dismantling foreign aid programs, including HIV/AIDS treatment and malaria surveillance in Africa.
If earlier GOP leaders failed to deliver this agenda, it was not for lack of will, but for lack of Trumpâs instinct for spectacle. The old conservative uniform belonged to country clubbers who preached free trade and cast America as a beacon of liberalism. Trumpism swapped that for an anti-Âestablishment costume, performing rebellion against a vanished class to give Republicans cover for the most plutocratic version of their agenda. He has made the GOP a more nativist party, but the core Republican priorities continue to be cutting taxes, deregulating markets, and hollowing out the administrative state.
Ten years after Trump descended his golden escalator, he has done little to restore American manufacturing or reshape foreign policy. The lives of white working-class voters havenât improved. His populism signals revolt only through dress and demeanor, aimed not at dismantling centers of power, but at baiting members of the legacy media, academics, and coastal elites who police taste and tone. Social media companies have enabled this transformation, with algorithms rewarding the most provocative self-presentations. In an era when politics is entertainment, and power is measured in engagement metrics, the uniform does as much work as the message.
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