By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, January 02, 2021
Were the anti-Trumpers right all along?
They point to the president’s performance over the last
two months, ranging from the bizarre to the shameful, and point out that this
Trump is the only Trump there has ever been. There is no denying that. Indeed,
it is why many conservatives who supported him for reelection, and who were
generally supportive of the policies if not the person, opposed him in the 2016
GOP primary, coming around to The Donald only through gritted teeth (if you can
call Hillary Clinton “gritted teeth”).
In this moment, two tumultuous months after Election Day,
the case for having supported the president’s reelection bid is harder to make.
The backdrop for it will be more propitious in the coming months — when Joe
Biden’s aping of Obama-style pen-and-phone government crashes into a strikingly
more constitutionalist federal bench; when a return to appeasement of China and
Iran has us fondly remembering Mike Pompeo; when the DOJ’s Civil Rights
Division’s reset to its preferred racialized anti-police crusade has us
recalling the good old days of Bill Barr, who carried on as if defending
speech, economic, and conscience rights were actually a Justice Department
mission; when reregulation suffocates an economy ignited by deregulation; and
when “climate” returns to its lofty place as the caprice by which progressives
pick the economy’s winners and losers while empowering America’s adversaries.
The Trump fanatics notwithstanding, the case for Trump,
in 2020 as in 2016, was never based on the comparative merits and demerits of
the man. It was Trump as opposed to whom? That’s still the most sensible
way to look at it. It is, of course, why few anti-Trump conservatives framed
their opposition as positive support for the Democrats, even if that was its de
facto effect.
The hard part in this family squabble is not diagnosing
the weakness of the other side’s argument. It is grappling with the weakness of
my own. The problem with “Trump as opposed to whom?” is that we who’ve
supported the president on that basis are less the bottom-line realists we see
ourselves as, and more like riverboat gamblers. And what we’re gambling with is
the country.
You may still conclude that, in the dilemmas on offer,
gambling on Trump was better than resigning ourselves to a Hillary Clinton
presidency or, now, a President Biden. Even the damage now being done, the
trail being blazed for the next Democratic administration to subvert future
Republican electoral victories, has to be weighed against, say, what the
Supreme Court would look like for the next 30 years if Mrs. Clinton had been
president for the last four, and what that would portend for our constitutional
republic.
Still, let’s not pretend this was anything but a gamble.
Some conservatives have moored themselves to Trump,
persuaded that our “transactional” president is magnificent — that even his
recent hop aboard the Bernie/Pelosi/Schumer free-money train, after doing
nothing about runaway spending and unsustainable entitlements for four years,
is somehow a brilliant play. If their man says the election was #RIGGED!, then
there must have been pervasive fraud, notwithstanding the lack of evidence and
the president’s propensity to fold his tent when federal judges — some of whom
he himself appointed — invite him to prove his case in court.
For the reluctant supporter, however, Trump has always
been a roll of the dice: Avoid the certain nightmare of Democrats in power, and
hope potential catastrophes won’t overwhelm the capacity of the president’s
capable aides to compensate for his glaring flaws.
Thus my contention in support of the Trump reelection
bid: You don’t so much vote for a president as for an administration. But it
has been easier for me to see the weakness of this contention over the last two
months. There is no separating the president from the presidency, in competence
or character, and this is never truer than in times of crisis.
Crisis, after all, is really why we have the presidency.
In normal times, the quotidian details of governance are handled by an
administration, now grown to thousands of bureaucrats. The real genius of the
Framers was to plan for the inevitability of crises. They are best met with not
only energy but decisiveness, the kind a chief executive is better positioned
to provide than a council, committee, or parliament. That is the awesome power
of the presidency and, for better or worse, of the president alone.
Presidents are thus defined by their crises. That goes
not just for the ones that happen due to circumstances beyond presidents’
control, but also for the ones their own shortcomings blunder us into.
The cartoon version of President Trump is that he is a
power-craving would-be despot, who may have to be forcibly pried from the Resolute
desk. In reality, his lust is more for pomp than power. There has always been a
chasm — sometimes hilarious, sometimes not so much — between the Twitter
thunder and the modest actions, or often the lack of any action at all. The
brawler who threatens to start World War III (when not grousing about “forever
wars”) reliably melts into Trump the meek, acceding to the guidance of seasoned
advisers — many of whom depart before long, exhausted from the effort and
vilified by their fickle principal for making it. President Trump is not
obsessed with the reins of power (which he willingly let aides hold these last
four years); he is incensed by losing an election, and with it the illusion
that he has always been wildly popular.
For all his bluster, the president has acted within the
bounds of the Constitution and the laws. He has resisted usurpations and
aggression that he could easily have gotten away with — eschewing invocations
of the Defense Production Act in response to the pandemic, for example; drawing
down forces where other presidents might have escalated and become more
adventurous. His fatal flaws have little to do with coveting power and
everything to do with vanity, self-absorption, and a manic inability to admit
error, say the patently obvious right thing, or apologize even when he is
patently in the wrong.
We don’t want our presidents merely to wear the office.
We want them to strive to be worthy of the presidency. We overdo the vision of
America as an idea. America is a nation, albeit a historically unique one, a
constitutional republic driven by ideals bound up with liberty, equality,
agency, and sacrifice. The presidency has a critical role in that construct.
The constitutional qualifications for the presidency are minimal, and winning
an election entitles the victor to assume power. But winning alone does not
make the victor worthy of the office’s majesty. For that, a president needs to
wake up every morning, recognize the job as something greater than himself, and
commit to rise to its immense obligations.
President Obama infuriated his opposition by acting as if
the presidency were too small for his titanic ego. That was not indifference.
Quite the opposite: It was an aloofness suited to taking America and its
heritage down a few pegs (though Obama would look at it as refining our society
to meet his advanced sensibilities). Trump, by contrast, is maddeningly
indifferent to what makes the presidency the presidency. He seems to think it
is indistinguishable from the elected person — particularly when that person is
Donald Trump. He just does not see the presidency as a national treasure,
independent of any incumbent’s personal and political interests; as something
to which every incumbent owes study, decorum, and honesty; as the office of
Washington and Lincoln that every president is honor-bound to preserve.
For most of Trump’s term, this character flaw was
constantly irritating and occasionally gross, but supporters could overlook it:
Trump was a well-known quantity when the people chose to elect him; and even if
he hadn’t been, allowances would be made for anyone subjected to the unhinged
and sinister lengths to which Trump’s opponents went to delegitimize him. Plus,
the policies over which he presided were a dramatic improvement. Though not a
committed conservative, he enabled conservative subordinates to implement sound
agendas. The economy roared, for a change benefiting even those in its lower
rungs.
Normally, that kind of president gets reelected by a mile.
Trump’s prospects were always hostage to his persona, though, so the whole of
his administration’s policy package would always be more popular than he is.
Obama in reverse.
Although not of his own making, the pandemic was a true
crisis that brought out the worst in Trump rhetorically. He spoke without
thinking things through, and indifferent to whether what he said was true. He
spoke, with thousands dying, as if COVID-19 were an unfair thing done to him
rather than a tragic blow to the nation. In point of fact, the president’s
actions were often commendable. The ramp-up in protective gear, ventilators,
and testing capacity was impressive, and done with deference to state
sovereignty. The push to develop vaccines in less than a year is nothing short
of astonishing. He’ll never get the credit he deserves for it.
Trump being Trump, he could never grasp that with the
presidency comes the responsibility to give the bad news to us straight, and
credibly. In a real crisis, Americans don’t want a reality-TV presidency. They
don’t want to hear the leader of the free world’s take on the ratings of cable
news shows and the NFL. They want a president who studiously tunes out the
partisan sniping while projecting selfless strength and confidence that
Americans are up to any challenge — which, as President Bush demonstrated after
9/11, tends to silence the sniping, at least for a while.
This is the biggest point the Trump diehards miss. How
is it possible that a zilch like Biden could garner 12 million more votes than
the charismatic Obama got in 2008? They emote this question as if the very
asking proved the gargantuan but somehow elusive election fraud. As if the
nation’s population had not grown by 25 million since 2008. As if Biden’s haul
is inherently fishy but Trump’s 12 million-vote improvement over his total from
just four years ago is perfectly natural.
Biden may be a trademark hack, but that’s not why he
stayed in his basement. He did that because he and the president had the same
idea: Make the election all about Trump. The president started out in 2017 as
one whom 54 percent of the country had voted against. He remained personally
unpopular with over half the country throughout his term, especially when the
pandemic erased his surging economy while highlighting his incorrigible
foibles. It is not at all hard to see how Biden could collect a record-setting
81 million popular votes. In the main, they were votes against Trump,
not for Biden.
Since the election, we’ve had two months of a president
publicly insisting the election was rigged while hoping no one noticed that his
campaign expressly declined the invitation to prove massive fraud and
illegality in Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, Trump’s team did not just formally
drop fraud charges, they explicitly represented to federal courts that they
were not alleging fraud. Yet Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) now vows to join
Trump’s House allies in objecting to the counting of Pennsylvania’s electoral
votes. And other states’ votes, too. Even Hawley does not claim that the
election was stolen or that any known departures from Pennsylvania’s election
laws would have changed the outcome. He just wants to “raise these
critical issues.”
Don’t faint when the Democrats start to “raise critical
issues” too. If the election was rigged, for example, is that why Republicans
did so much better than expected in the down-ballot contests? If Republicans are
going to press the president’s claims, why wouldn’t Democrats target all those
congressional seats and state houses won by the GOP?
Four years from now, what’s to stop Democrats from
delegitimizing an election some Republican has won by mimicking Trump’s own
lines of argument? Conservatives can scream bloody murder while Democrats,
relying on today’s House Republicans, insist that Vice President Kamala Harris
has the unilateral authority to decide which states’ electoral votes to count,
and which to invalidate as too suspect. Try to keep a stiff upper lip, too,
when Democrats cite Trump arguments in support of their quest to dispense with
the Electoral College altogether — reasoning that a state’s popular election is
irrelevant if enough elected Democrats decide the winner should be the Democrat
who, the media will dutifully point out, has won the popular vote nationally.
Anti-Trump conservatives always maintained that, despite
its policy successes, the Trump presidency would prove to be a boon for Democrats.
I bet that they were wrong. On November 3, that wager looked better than it
does at the moment. The last two months have been bad. It may take a few years
to quantify how bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment