National Review Online
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Donald Trump leads the polls nationally and in most
states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. There are
understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level
skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the
caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political
opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within
the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.
Trump’s political opinions have wobbled all over the lot.
The real-estate mogul and reality-TV star has supported abortion, gun control,
single-payer health care à la Canada, and punitive taxes on the wealthy. (He
and Bernie Sanders have shared more than funky outer-borough accents.) Since
declaring his candidacy he has taken a more conservative line, yet there are
great gaping holes in it.
His signature issue is concern over immigration — from
Latin America but also, after Paris and San Bernardino, from the Middle East.
He has exploited the yawning gap between elite opinion in both parties and the
public on the issue, and feasted on the discontent over a government that can’t
be bothered to enforce its own laws no matter how many times it says it will
(President Obama has dispensed even with the pretense). But even on
immigration, Trump often makes no sense and can’t be relied upon. A few short
years ago, he was criticizing Mitt Romney for having the temerity to propose
“self-deportation,” or the entirely reasonable policy of reducing the illegal
population through attrition while enforcing the nation’s laws. Now, Trump is a
hawk’s hawk.
He pledges to build a wall along the southern border and
to make Mexico pay for it. We need more fencing at the border, but the promise
to make Mexico pay for it is silly bluster. Trump says he will put a big door
in his beautiful wall, an implicit endorsement of the dismayingly conventional
view that current levels of legal immigration are fine. Trump seems unaware
that a major contribution of his own written immigration plan is to question
the economic impact of legal immigration and to call for reform of the
H-1B–visa program. Indeed, in one Republican debate he clearly had no idea
what’s in that plan and advocated increased legal immigration, which is
completely at odds with it. These are not the meanderings of someone with
well-informed, deeply held views on the topic.
As for illegal immigration, Trump pledges to deport the
11 million illegals here in the United States, a herculean administrative and
logistical task beyond the capacity of the federal government. Trump piles on
the absurdity by saying he would re-import many of the illegal immigrants once
they had been deported, which makes his policy a poorly disguised amnesty (and
a version of a similarly idiotic idea that appeared in one of Washington’s
periodic “comprehensive” immigration reforms). This plan wouldn’t survive its
first contact with reality.
On foreign policy, Trump is a nationalist at sea.
Sometimes he wants to let Russia fight ISIS, and at others he wants to “bomb
the sh**” out of it. He is fixated on stealing Iraq’s oil and casually
suggested a few weeks ago a war crime — killing terrorists’ families — as a
tactic in the war on terror. For someone who wants to project strength, he has
an astonishing weakness for flattery, falling for Vladimir Putin after a few
coquettish bats of the eyelashes from the Russian thug. All in all, Trump knows
approximately as much about national security as he does about the nuclear
triad — which is to say, almost nothing.
Indeed, Trump’s politics are those of an averagely
well-informed businessman: Washington is full of problems; I am a
problem-solver; let me at them. But if you have no familiarity with the
relevant details and the levers of power, and no clear principles to guide you,
you will, like most tenderfeet, get rolled. Especially if you are, at least by
all outward indications, the most poll-obsessed politician in all of American
history. Trump has shown no interest in limiting government, in reforming
entitlements, or in the Constitution. He floats the idea of massive new taxes
on imported goods and threatens to retaliate against companies that do too much
manufacturing overseas for his taste. His obsession is with “winning,”
regardless of the means — a spirit that is anathema to the ordered liberty that
conservatives hold dear and that depends for its preservation on limits on
government power. The Tea Party represented a revival of an understanding of
American greatness in these terms, an understanding to which Trump is tone-deaf
at best and implicitly hostile at worst. He appears to believe that the
administrative state merely needs a new master, rather than a new dispensation
that cuts it down to size and curtails its power.
It is unpopular to say in the year of the “outsider,” but
it is not a recommendation that Trump has never held public office. Since 1984,
when Jesse Jackson ran for president with no credential other than a great flow
of words, both parties have been infested by candidates who have treated the
presidency as an entry-level position. They are the excrescences of instant-hit
media culture. The burdens and intricacies of leadership are special;
experience in other fields is not transferable. That is why all American
presidents have been politicians, or generals.
Any candidate can promise the moon. But politicians have
records of success, failure, or plain backsliding by which their promises may
be judged. Trump can try to make his blankness a virtue by calling it a kind of
innocence. But he is like a man with no credit history applying for a mortgage
— or, in this case, applying to manage a $3.8 trillion budget and the most
fearsome military on earth.
Trump’s record as a businessman is hardly a
recommendation for the highest office in the land. For all his success, Trump
inherited a real-estate fortune from his father. Few of us will ever have the
experience, as Trump did, of having Daddy-O bail out our struggling enterprise
with an illegal loan in the form of casino chips. Trump’s primary work long ago
became less about building anything than about branding himself and tending to
his celebrity through a variety of entertainment ventures, from WWE to his
reality-TV show, The Apprentice. His
business record reflects the often dubious norms of the milieu: using eminent
domain to condemn the property of others; buying the good graces of politicians
— including many Democrats — with donations.
Trump has gotten far in the GOP race on a brash manner,
buffed over decades in New York tabloid culture. His refusal to back down from
any gaffe, no matter how grotesque, suggests a healthy impertinence in the face
of postmodern PC (although the insults he hurls at anyone who crosses him also
speak to a pettiness and lack of basic civility). His promise to make America
great again recalls the populism of Andrew Jackson. But Jackson was an actual
warrior; and President Jackson made many mistakes. Without Jackson’s scars,
what is Trump’s rhetoric but show and strut?
If Trump were to become the president, the Republican
nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support, what
would that say about conservatives? The movement that ground down the Soviet
Union and took the shine, at least temporarily, off socialism would have fallen
in behind a huckster. The movement concerned with such “permanent things” as
constitutional government, marriage, and the right to life would have become a
claque for a Twitter feed.
Trump nevertheless offers a valuable warning for the
Republican party. If responsible men irresponsibly ignore an issue as important
as immigration, it will be taken up by the reckless. If they cannot explain
their Beltway maneuvers — worse, if their maneuvering is indefensible — they
will be rejected by their own voters. If they cannot advance a compelling
working-class agenda, the legitimate anxieties and discontents of blue-collar
voters will be exploited by demagogues. We sympathize with many of the
complaints of Trump supporters about the GOP, but that doesn’t make the mogul
any less flawed a vessel for them.
Some conservatives have made it their business to make
excuses for Trump and duly get pats on the head from him. Count us out. Donald
Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of
generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and
crude as the Donald himself.
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