As Republicans abandon the bow-tied gentility of the Reagan era in favour of the “based” rhetorical and governing styles wrought by Donald Trump, it has become commonplace to describe this trend as the MAGAfication of conservatism. But, as Trump’s message to CPAC 2025 made clear, it is no less apt to think of it as the CPACification of MAGA; that is, the seamless absorption of traditional conservatism’s policy goals into the worldview of the president’s populist coalition. His closing address at this inner sanctum of the US Right, though littered with rambling Trumpisms (“I love beating George Washington!”), nonetheless confirmed not so much the disjuncture but the continuity between old and new.

Where Trump as a candidate in both 2016 and 2024 evinced little concern for the small government pieties of the Republican establishment, Trump once in power seemed to imbibe, as if by osmosis, the belief that nearly all of the country’s problems could be solved with cuts to either taxes or spending, or more likely, both. This explains the rush toward “the largest tax cuts in American history,” which the president called for in the speech (that were originally designed by Paul Ryan). It’s also noteworthy that Trump had outsized praise for the visiting Argentine leader Javier Milei, the Western Hemisphere’s chainsaw-wielding, arch-libertarian.

While Trump had no trouble bragging about axing DEI, USAID and the CFPB in his address, he had to find a much more artful and sensitive way to talk about Social Security and Medicare, programmes he has pledged to defend. This stance has put him at odds with Republican legislative offices and policy shops, who have been angling to make cuts for years. The resulting trade-off seems to be to assert widespread fraud and corruption (such as by claiming 150-year olds are receiving cheques) as a means to opening the political space to discuss potential changes to the programme, something press secretary Karen Leavitt had to make reassurances about on Fox News.

Even tariffs, which occupied a lengthy, protracted section of the speech (“my favourite word in the dictionary…” “will bring in so much money…”) had been anathema to the pre-Trump Right, has been folded into the new GOP orthodoxy, in such a way as to justify and compensate for tax cuts, which has been the central policy dogma of the party for over 40 years. Indeed, Trump harked back wistfully to a time “when we were very rich” before income tax and the welfare state.

Yet even as the president calls on his base to “fight, fight, fight” and boasts of “the highest poll numbers ever,” a rising tide of doubt and discontent is becoming evident not just from the usual; liberal and Democratic quarters. It is also coming from an array of key GOP-leaning constituencies set to be adversely affected by the cancellation of government services and contracts, not to mention the imposition of pain-inducing tariffs. Among these are veterans, farmers, small business, the elderly and red state communities more generally.

Perhaps the escalation of such opposition will bring about the long-delayed reckoning between the MAGA and CPAC halves of American conservatism, who may finally realise that they are not — and never have been — natural allies.

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Michael Cuenco is Senior Editor at American Affairs.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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