There are headlines that make one pause in admiration at their sheer absurdity. “One in three Republicans say Trump is improperly enriching himself,” announced a recent Pew survey, as though the finding were an epiphany and not the long-delayed recognition of sunlight at noon. It is the political equivalent of reporting that a third of arsonists now concede fire might be hot.

The data are simple enough: a measurable faction of Republican voters — people who have spent eight years tithing to a billionaire’s legal fund, buying his merchandise, and defending his every invoice to the nation — have decided that perhaps, just perhaps, something transactional is going on. It’s the moral awakening of the century, if the year happens to be 1772 and the subject is the discovery of oxygen.

[ 🎧 Listen to the narrated edition of “The Republican Enlightenment” (9 min): https://dunneagin.substack.com/p/the-republican-enlightenment-audio ---]

Revelation by Fatigue, Not Conscience

The instinct to call this “progress” is understandable; in an age when cynicism passes for wisdom, any statistical twitch toward reality looks like courage. But conscience has nothing to do with it. What Pew detected was not repentance but exhaustion — the weary realization that defending corruption is hard work, especially when the corruption keeps submitting receipts.

Republicans are not scandalized that Trump is enriching himself; they are tired of pretending he isn’t. This is moral fatigue disguised as enlightenment, the sigh of a congregation that has grown bored with its own choir. It’s the same exhaustion that follows every unending justification — no, the wall was metaphorical; no, the payments weren’t payments; no, the mug shot is actually heroic. At some point, even the most faithful need a nap.

The Economics of Denial

Trump’s genius has never been governance; it has been conversion — turning loyalty into a monetizable asset. The entire Trump era has functioned like a reverse tithe: the flock gives, the shepherd prospers, and the miracle is declared self-financing. The campaign became a PAC, the PAC became a legal-defense fund, and the legal-defense fund became a family business with better branding.

To be fair, the man is not a thief in the ordinary sense. Ordinary thieves conceal the act. Trump itemizes it, invoices it, and claims a tax deduction for moral outrage. His supporters, ever patriotic, call it capitalism at work. Only now, as the grift approaches diminishing returns, do a few notice the math.

Still, let us not underestimate the cultural weight of this discovery. In a nation where politics and marketing have long shared a bed, acknowledging corruption is a kind of aesthetic rebellion. These voters are not revolting against immorality; they are protesting the inelegance of the scam. The con has grown too obvious, the con man too needy. They miss the good old days when the hypocrisy was at least subtle.

The Fragile Birth of Doubt

There is, however, something historically poignant about this one-third. Civilization advances, the philosopher once said, when someone dares to notice the obvious. In the same spirit, perhaps, a fraction of the Republican base has rediscovered the principle of cause and effect.

Picture the scene in some suburban living room: a voter watching the news, surrounded by years of MAGA memorabilia, whispering to no one in particular, “You know, I think he might be in it for himself.” The remark lands with the weight of Copernicus moving the Earth. Suddenly, the center shifts; the universe looks different; the merchandise refunds do not.

What Pew has measured may be less a conversion than a momentary blink — one of those rare intervals when self-interest pierces the fog of tribal identity. The awakened voter still approves of the policies, the posture, and even the cruelty, but admits, with a kind of embarrassed honesty, that perhaps the Savior is charging appearance fees.

The Party of Cognitive Dissonance

The rest of the Republican party — the other two-thirds — respond to this apostasy with the practiced calm of people who have built entire worldviews on denial. To them, corruption is not sin but strategy, proof that their champion knows how to play the game. They see his enrichment not as betrayal but as victory spoils: He’s one of us because he cheats like us.

Republican elites, meanwhile, interpret the survey as a “healthy sign.” They call it balance, nuance, maturity — the way a publicist calls smoke “atmosphere.” It is the same rhetorical reflex that allows them to describe autocracy as “strength” and self-dealing as “savvy.” For a party that once fetishized moral clarity, ambiguity has become the new virtue.

But self-preservation hums beneath the spin. Elected Republicans read the same data and glimpse the beginning of post-Trump arithmetic. The faithful may still chant, but the accountants have started counting votes. When one-third of your base begins to wonder whether the prophet is pocketing the collection plate, it’s time to diversify your theology.

Arthur Schlesinger warned half a century ago that the Imperial Presidency would test the limits of a free republic. We are now living through its sequel — a presidency that is not only imperious but also adored for its overt narcissism.

The Power Dividend

If corruption was Trump’s business plan, power has become his investment portfolio. According to the latest Pew survey, nearly half of Americans now believe he is exercising more presidential power than his predecessors — and that this excess is bad for the country. Yet among Republicans, this imperial expansion is recast as efficiency, the authoritarian impulse repackaged as leadership. They do not see a president breaking the bounds of office; they see a CEO streamlining democracy for quarterly results.

In this newer Republican enlightenment, tyranny is no longer feared — it is admired for its productivity. Republicans have been re-educated to treat checks and balances as red tape, to regard opposition as waste, and to applaud the executive who calls himself the only shareholder who matters — a worldview that stands in open contradiction to the majority of Americans, who still see limits on presidential power as the foundation of freedom. Once the grift was financial; now it is constitutional. Trump has learned that the real money isn’t in the merch table — it’s in the machinery of the republic itself.

The Optics of Belief

What’s remarkable is how easily moral discovery now aligns with market timing. The same voters who shrugged through indictments, an attempted autogolpe, and pandemics begin to blink awake only when corruption risks affecting the share price of their candidate’s electability. It’s not that they’ve found ethics; they’ve found optics.

This is the Republican Enlightenment: a flicker of reason powered by polling data. If 2021 was the party’s emotional apocalypse, 2025 is its intellectual adolescence — a halting recognition that maybe, just maybe, the cult leader isn’t in it for the common good. The trouble is that adolescence doesn’t guarantee adulthood; it often ends in nostalgia.

Even so, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the irony. For decades Republicans insisted that government should be run like a business. Trump obliged, complete with billionaire shareholders, conflicts of interest, and a CEO’s contempt for regulation. Now, having witnessed the quarterly earnings, a minority of shareholders want an audit. The market, at last, is correcting.

Conscience Deferred

None of this should be mistaken for repentance. History rarely grants second chances to those who mistake fatigue for virtue. But perhaps there’s value in the gesture itself. People who finally admit they’ve been conned are at least halfway to understanding democracy: it works only when you stop worshiping the con man.

The Republican Enlightenment will likely be brief, as most awakenings are. The old seductions — resentment, grievance, the narcotic pull of belonging — will return. The con man will rebrand, the base will re-subscribe, and the cycle will resume. But for one brief moment, the data show, reality leaked through the partisan firewall.

It is tempting to laugh at that, but laughter alone won’t save us. Every democracy flirts with self-delusion; our’s simply monetized it. The one-third who now admit to the emperor’s wardrobe malfunction are not heroes, but they are, inadvertently, witnesses — proof that even in a country addicted to denial, truth has a stubborn half-life.

So, let us record the miracle accurately: after years of gilded corruption, a faction of the faithful looked up and saw the gold flake off. They did not cry out; they simply changed the subject. In this land, that counts as moral progress.

Conclusion

So perhaps this is the truest measure of our Republican Enlightenment: not that a few believers finally saw through the grift, but that so many have come to mistake domination for competence. The Pew numbers don’t just chart moral fatigue — they map a quiet redefinition of freedom itself. When citizens begin to see unchecked power as strength, and self-interest as patriotism, democracy becomes little more than a stage prop in someone else’s empire. Trump’s followers may think they are watching the resurrection of American greatness; in truth, they are witnessing the leveraged buyout of their own consent. Every empire has its moment of clarity — ours just comes with executive privilege attached.

~Dunneagin