The Coming Fight over Trumpism: Charisma or Policy?

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, October 28, 2022

 

Darren Beattie, the energetic muckraker behind Revolver News, has penned an outstanding polemic about a coming contest to define the near-term future of the Republican Party. It is his tribute to the combative and magnetic Kari Lake, and her seemingly unstoppable rise to the Arizona governorship. For Beattie, Lake is the proof that political charisma is more important than the right policy agenda.

 

And I hope he won’t mind my quoting it at length before registering my objections. Beattie takes to task those “professional conservatives” who “have lectured voters about the need to translate President Trump’s winning style into a ‘serious’ policy agenda.” He charges us with “fantasiz[ing] about Trump’s policies (or a stale, watered-down version thereof) offered by a figure as boring as they are, someone less combative and therefore more ‘respectable.’ This person, they believe, will win electoral and policy victories without spurring the liberal opposition’s anger and intensity.”

 

While Beattie concedes that policy is important, he works up to his main point:

 

For America’s ruling elites, all authentic challengers to the regime are automatically disreputable, dangerous, and a “threat to democracy.” The elites don’t fear bespectacled policy recommendations about the tariff rate or border security, important as those may be. They fear a popular leader’s charismatic challenge to their authority.

 

The only way to be an America First politician, then, is to be so charismatic and so politically talented that one can evade, outflank, outfight, and embarrass the unanimous opposition of the ruling class. Donald Trump wasn’t the first candidate to articulate a platform that might be called “America First.” He was the first candidate to win with one.

 

Beattie’s thesis in some ways was echoed in a recent viral clip from Megyn Kelly’s podcast, in which the host explained why she thought Trump would easily cream Ron DeSantis, a clip that Trump shared this week on his own social-media platform.

 

So, Beattie is half right. Charisma absolutely matters. This is not something our normie-conservative parents entirely forgot. They know why the actor Ronald Reagan succeeded, and the Bircher Dan Quayle did not. And our peers know it too, which is why they made Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s speech to the World Congress of Families go viral earlier this month.

 

But he’s half wrong. He’s connected the underrating of charisma with an unwillingness to withstand scrutiny, and skipped past the issue of competence in office. A great number of even the boring conservative policy dorks understand that there is no Republican who can be elected to the presidency and avoid being called a fascist, or Hitler and Attila the Hun’s love child. Even the strangely now-respected George W. Bush suffered some of this in his terms of office.

 

The problem with Trump wasn’t that he was called names, or that polite Washington rejected him. It’s that he did not have the ability to govern himself and subsequently could not control his White House or the enormous executive branch. Megyn Kelly says that his biggest fans feel he was cheated out of his first term by the Russiagate hoax. Well, what if some conservative dorks prefer presidents who don’t get cheated out of their first term.

 

Trump’s ability to evade, outflank, outfight, and embarrass the unanimous opposition of the ruling class was only in the medium of television, and in social media. And unsurprisingly, Beattie ends his article showing clip after clip of Kari Lake embarrassing, humiliating, and turning the tables on her media antagonists. This is a very real skill. A good tactic is one your people enjoy, saith Saul Alinsky. But Trump only challenged their status and self-regard; his four years in administration tended to reinforce their power.

 

For those of us who have supported a more populist and nationalist orientation for the Republican Party — we want manufacturing jobs coming back to America, investment in the American workforce, a border that’s secure, troops brought back from missions they should not be in, and a real trade competition with China. We want more than a lot of memorable tweets and a handful of super-cut compilations of our president owning the libs.

 

Beattie says that “any idiot can adopt a policy position, or fake it. Nobody can fake charisma.” That’s true. But we lived through four years of a man with charisma who faked being in charge of the executive branch.