By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
In 2016, my friend Roger Kimball of Encounter Books
commissioned a little book from me titled The Case against Trump. This
was during the Republican primary election, and, at one point, Roger suggested
that we might want to rethink the project, assuming that Trump would be out of
the race before we were able to print the book. But that is not what happened.
Trump stayed, the book came out, and we had a very fun launch party in
Manhattan, with guests wearing “Make
America Read Again” hats. Roger has had a change of heart about Trump
since then, and I have not. But I have never lost a friend over mere politics
and hope that I never will.
The case against Trump in 2020 is a lot like the case
against Trump in 2016 but bolstered
by the accumulation of evidence and experience. Any hope that he might mature in
office and come to appreciate the gravity of his responsibility has been
dissolved. He is, if anything, a less serious candidate in 2020 than he was in
2016, and even more the game-show host. He has a few good people around him who
have tried to push him in the right direction, but they have, for the most
part, failed.
But before I get into the case against Trump, I’d like to
consider the case for Trump, which was made ably in the last issue of National
Review by my friend Andrew C. McCarthy.
There are two distinct versions of the case for Trump,
one of them defensible and one of them indefensible.
The qualified case for Trump — Andy’s case, basically —
goes: “It’s him or the Democrats, the Democrats have declared war on capitalism
and the Bill of Rights, among other things, and whatever instincts toward
moderation may be ricocheting around like a terribly lonely pinball inside the
vast empty interstellar expanse of Joe Biden’s doddering old noggin are sure to
be overwhelmed by the relatively disciplined and organized efforts of the
hard-left Democrats, bat-guano nutters such as Kamala Harris and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez who are so barking mad that Nancy Pelosi is, incredibly enough,
now a figure of the party’s center rather than a meshuga San Francisco outlier.
That being the case, I choose Trump.” That is not my position, but it is a
reasonable position.
The unqualified — and indefensible — case for
Trump goes: “Donald Trump’s presidency has been good for America — positively,
on its own merits, rather than merely relative to what we might have expected
from Mrs. Clinton.” That argument is partly dishonest, partly delusional.
One of the many perversities of Trump’s presidency is
that Donald J. Trump’s core deficiencies as a chief administrator — his
ignorance and his laziness — are the chief practical virtues of his presidency.
He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know, and this has
created the opportunity for some of the people in his administration to get
some useful things done. For this reason, the conservative advances that have
accompanied the Trump presidency (and it won’t do to pretend that these do not
exist) mostly have been in the fields in which the president has the least
engagement and interest, whereas the catastrophes of the Trump presidency (and
it won’t do to pretend that these do not exist) are strongly associated with
those few areas of policy in which he takes an active interest or is personally
and strongly engaged with ex officio.
For example, I would bet any sum of money that, prior to
his seeking the Republican nomination, Donald Trump had no idea what the
Federalist Society is or does. I would not be in the least surprised if he
still didn’t know. He gives no indication of having given a second’s thought to
any judicial philosophy beyond Roy Cohn’s and does not seem to have any
interest in the subject. And that’s worked out . . . great. Trump’s
principal success has been as a rubber stamp to the very “establishment” at
which Trump and his admirers like to sneer. In the matter of judges, that
establishment is instantiated by the Heritage Foundation — which simply gave
Trump a list of good judicial candidates, while Trump, always happy to let
someone else do his homework for him, has stuck with it. Heritage in fact took
a very prominent role in staffing the administration across-the-board.
The same is true for any number of “swamp,” “insider,” or
“establishment” institutions. Trump and his followers have lambasted this
magazine as a “swamp” mouthpiece, but his administration nonetheless has hired
a number of people associated with it for key roles, while poor scheming Steve
Bannon of Breitbart was not only dismissed but disowned — “Steve
Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency,” Trump wrote — and then arrested
on fraud charges by Trump’s Department of Justice. (It was a scheme
involving shaking down rubes for money purportedly going toward a border wall —
that kind of justice is not merely poetic but Shakespearean.) Trump signed off
on a tax plan that has some good elements, but the so-called Trump tax cuts
were largely the work of Mr. Establishment, Paul Ryan — and they ran contrary
to the personal preferences and rhetoric of the president, who spent much of
the campaign bellyaching about Wall Street fat cats not paying as much in taxes
as he thinks they should. Trump’s
regulatory reform efforts have been designed and implemented by Bushies such as
Neomi Rao (now a federal judge) and her former deputies.
Which is to say, the Trump administration has succeeded
most where Trump has the least to do with it. The nat-pops may turn up their
noses at “Conservative Inc.” but that is who has delivered such benefits as we
have received from the Trump administration. All Peter Navarro and the rest of
those crackpots has done is bankrupt a lot of farmers and drive up the expenses
of beer brewers and manufacturers.
Trump has long taken an energetic personal interest in
two issues: trade and immigration. You may have noticed that there is no big,
beautiful wall being paid for by Mexico under construction along the southern
border. No serious person ever expected that there would be, of course, but
when his party controlled both houses of Congress, Trump never even attempted
to put together a serious border-security plan. He didn’t even start trying to
do something on immigration until Republicans had lost control of Congress,
which put him into the position of trying to wheedle his way toward some
symbolic victory (and even that has been blocked by the courts) or to put his
vaunted skill as a “negotiator” to work and move a reform through a divided
Congress. While Trump has railed against Mexico, there are more illegal
immigrants from Central America and Asia in the United States today than there
were ten years ago. That is a problem that isn’t going to get fixed without
Congress. Where’s the Great Negotiator? In reality, Trump’s talent for negotiation
is mostly fiction. Sure, you can blame it on Pelosi and Chuck Schumer for being
small-minded partisans — or blame Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy for being
swampy — but a negotiator who can work only with those already inclined to give
him what he wants is no negotiator at all. He’s just a guy who once played a
negotiator on TV.
Similarly, Trump’s trade war with China (and much of the
rest of the world) has been an unqualified failure — even by the president’s
own favored metric: The trade deficit for goods hit an all-time high on Trump’s
watch, and the overall (goods and services) trade deficit is higher now than it
was at any point during the Obama administration. The Chinese have weathered it
just fine, and the Europeans are putting together new measures to protect
themselves from what they regard as predatory interference from the United
States.
Which brings me to the practical case against Trump: He
stinks at his job.
This also brings me to a lie that needs to be addressed —
and it is not a misunderstanding but a lie, circulated with malice
aforethought: that the conservative objection to Trump is only a matter of
style, his boorishness bumptiousness and boobishness on Twitter, his
gooftastical manner of speaking, his preening, his vanity, his habitual and
often dishonest boasting in matters both small and great, etc. These things
matter, of course, because manners and morals matter, and they matter more in a
free society than they do in an unfree one, because free men govern themselves.
Trump’s low character is not only an abstract ethical
concern but a public menace that has introduced elements of chaos and
unpredictability in U.S. government activity ranging from national defense to
managing the coronavirus epidemic. Trump’s character problems are practical
concerns, not metaphysical ones. Trump is frequently wrong on important policy
questions (including trade, foreign policy, entitlements, health care, and many
others) and frequently incompetent even when trying to advance a good policy.
His vanity and paranoia have made it very difficult for him to keep good people
in top positions, and this imposes real costs both politically and as a matter
of practical governance. Trump’s problem is not etiquette: It is dishonesty,
stupidity, and incompetence, magnified by the self-dealing and cowardice of the
cabal of enablers and sycophants who have a stake in pretending that this
unsalted s*** sandwich is filet mignon.
At this point, the magic word “binary” can be expected to
make an appearance. I think of an exchange in Watchmen between Dan
Dreiberg and his mentor, Hollis Mason.
Mason: Nixon. To think I voted for
that prick five times.
Dreiberg: Hey, it was him or the
commies, right?
Living in Texas, I’ve never had much reason to think
about the possibility of a Democrat’s winning my state in a presidential
election — the last time that happened, I was four years old, and Jimmy Carter
had successfully hung the disgraced Richard Nixon around the neck of the
underappreciated Gerald Ford. Part of the case for Trump was the belief that he
“knows how to win,” but as of Monday morning, he was behind Joe Biden in one
recent poll, and tied in another, in Texas. That’s a funny kind of
winning.
If you’ll forgive the rank punditry: Taking into account
the reasonable margin of error we might expect of today’s polls, the realm of
possible outcomes is pretty broad, from a tight but not nail-bitingly close
Trump win to a Biden blowout that includes Texas’s 38 electoral votes. I would
be surprised to see Biden win Texas, but it is not an impossibility. In 2016, I
argued that the nomination of Donald Trump would mean the practical end of the
Republican Party as we had known it, even if the name and much of the machinery
survived in zombie form for a few more decades. Losing Texas would not cause
that to come to pass — it would only be more evidence that it already has
come to pass. The very fact that Texas is in play at all is evidence that
the Republican Party is not what it once was (and goodness knows it had its
shortcomings before Trump — I quit the GOP over Arlen Specter, which seems kind
of quaint in retrospect) and that what it is now does not appear obviously
well-positioned to deliver “so much winning, you’re going to be sick and tired
of winning.”
So, now that I am a swing-state conservative, am I going
to hold my nose and pull the “R” lever if only to put up a roadblock in front
of the Democrats?
Hell, no.
There’s more to citizenship than voting, and partisanship
is not patriotism. If casting a vote is all you have in you, then, fine — by
all means, do what you believe to be best. But consider the possibility that
the duty of the patriot in these times is not to choose one pack of jackals because
it looks a little less hungry and vicious than the other pack of jackals but to
oppose these jackals — these demagogues, profiteers, and hangers-on, these
greasy little salesmen trying to sell you something that is already yours — and
to insist that the free and self-governing men and women of this struggling
republic deserve better than what is on offer. We can have better than what we
have had because we can be better than what we have been.
What is called for right now is not more idolatry of the
presidency or a rousing chorus of “Happy Days Are Here Again!” but prayer and
penance, intelligence and application.
Words About Words
Goodness, gracious, this foolishness. Writing at The
Atlantic, Angus King Jr. and Heather Cox Richardson believe they have poked
a hole in originalism.
In some cases, interpreting the
Constitution with an originalist lens is pretty easy; for example, the
Constitution says that the president must be at least 35 years old (“35” means,
well, 35), that each state has two senators (not three and not one), and that
Congress is authorized to establish and support an Army and a Navy. But wait a
minute. What about the Air Force? Is it mentioned in the text? Nope. Is there
any ambiguity in the text? Again, no. It doesn’t say “armed forces”; it
explicitly says “Army” and “Navy.” Did the Framers have in mind the Air Force
115 years before the Wright brothers? Not likely.
So is the Air Force
unconstitutional, even though it clearly fails both prongs of the “originalist”
test? No, a more reasonable and obvious interpretation is that the Framers
intended that the country be protected and that the Air Force is a logical
extension of that concept, even though it wasn’t contemplated in 1787. This
isn’t judicial lawmaking; it’s judges doing what they’re hired to do.
This is the rhetorical style of people who are clever but
not quite as clever as they think they are.
The U.S. Air Force was, in its early days, a part of the
U.S. Army: the Army Air Corps. In the same way, the U.S. Marine Corps is,
formally, a department of the U.S. Navy: “The men’s department!” the old
joke goes.
Army and navy are generic nouns — Hannibal
and Genghis Khan had armies that were nothing like the U.S. Army — and also
part of proper nouns: The Army Air Corps, the Army Corps of Engineers, etc. The
bureaucratic separation of the U.S. Air Force from the U.S. Army is a matter of
departmental organization, not a question of constitutional powers. The Air
Force and the Marines are part of the “armies” referred to in the Constitution,
even if they are not, as a matter of the DoD org chart, administrative
divisions of the U.S. Army.
Formally, there isn’t one U.S. Army but nine of them:
First Army headquartered at Rock Island Arsenal, Fifth Army at San Antonio,
Seventh Army at Heidelberg, Ninth Army at Vicenza, etc. The Constitution does
not authorize the creation of the Airborne Command Control Logistics Wing of
the Navy, but no one seriously believes that an originalist understanding of
the Constitution forbids such organizational arrangements. There’s no mention
of the Marine Corps in the Constitution, but the Continental Marines were
established in 1775.
The authors lean heavily on passages such as this:
Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the
Declaration of Independence and paid close attention to the drafting of the
Constitution from his official post in France, understood this danger
explicitly: “I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in
laws and constitutions,” he wrote in an 1816 letter addressing what he
perceived to be weaknesses in the new government, “but . . . laws and
institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that
becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new
truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of
circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We
might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy,
as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous
ancestors.”
But the position of originalism is not that the law or
the Constitution must never change — it is that the law and the Constitution
say what they say unless and until the legislature — the lawmakers —
change it. It is the place of legislators to write the law, not the place of
judges. This is The Atlantic’s answer to those dumb celebrities sneering
at Amy Coney Barrett: “Oh, you call yourself an originalist — but you vote,
right?” As though the 19th Amendment were anathema to originalists rather than
a textbook example of precisely how they think constitutional change should
be implemented. Of course there is wisdom in Jefferson’s insistence that
“institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times” — that is
precisely why there is a constitutional process for amending the Constitution
and why Congress has such broad discretion over that which falls within its
proper sphere of influence.
I feel like I’ve probably reached the point at which I
can write about things in The Atlantic without a personal disclaimer.
That is some pretty half-assed thinking and writing, based in a common error:
the overestimate of verbal cleverness, the magical thinking that rearranging
words rearranges reality and that social progress is just a matter of clever
phrasing.
Home and Away
One of the problems with the grievously misnamed
Affordable Care Act is that big, complex problems such as health care do not
usually lend themselves to one-time fixes implemented through ambitious,
landmark legislative packages. The ACA regime is a failure by its own authors’
criteria — millions remain uninsured, premiums have skyrocketed, etc. — but
when Republicans talk about repealing it, Democrats demand: “What’s your plan?”
And Republicans retreat in shame — or they do what Donald Trump did during the
debate and lie about having a big, bold plan of their own. The health-care plan
that is just about to be released is the Republicans’ supermodel girlfriend in
Canada.
But maybe the answer isn’t big, bold plans — maybe big,
bold plans are part of the problem. In
the New York Post, I argue for a one-piece-at-a-time approach to
health-care reform.
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