Never Again

By Ramesh Ponnuru

Thursday, December 01, 2022

 

Donald Trump has had the support of the vast majority of conservatives for most of his political career.

 

There was initial skepticism. At the beginning of 2016, as he competed in Republican presidential primaries for the first time, voters who considered themselves “very conservative” were less likely to support him than those who considered themselves “moderate.” Trump’s conservative positions on guns, abortion, taxes, and many other issues were of recent vintage, and many conservatives questioned whether they would prove durable. His ignorance of U.S. government was troubling, and his fondness for foreign dictators — he had praised the Chinese communist regime for sending the tanks to Tiananmen Square — monstrous.

 

Even then, though, a large minority of conservatives backed him. Some of them thought a pugnacious businessman who had never held office was just what the country needed; some thought that only he had the requisite toughness and realism to confront the challenges of illegal immigration, Muslim terrorism, and the rise of China as a rival. Then, after Trump won the nomination, nearly all conservatives voted for him on the ground that, notwithstanding all his flaws, he was far preferable to Hillary Clinton. 

 

Once in office, he surpassed conservatives’ expectations by hewing closely to them on the issues that matter to millions of them. In practice, if not always in speech, Trump opposed nearly all proposed gun regulations, imposing only those accepted by pro–Second Amendment groups. He signed tax cuts. He drastically slowed the growth of business regulations. While Republicans failed to replace Obamacare — a failure that was shared party-wide rather than borne by Trump alone — Trump and his congressional allies loosened its strictures. Anti-abortion activists got nearly everything they asked of the Trump administration. And Trump nominated, and got confirmed, the most conservative slate of nominees to appellate courts and to the Supreme Court in modern history.

 

Democrats, naturally, opposed Trump bitterly on all those issues, and many more besides. They sometimes described him as an illegitimate president and frequently accused him of fascist tendencies or worse. Through insinuation and hyperbole, they portrayed him as an agent of Vladimir Putin. When his policies coincided with the best economy in two decades, they either denied that times were good or credited them to Barack Obama. Sharing opponents further bonded conservatives to Trump.

 

Being satisfied with having an ally in the White House — and having learned from the previous four decades that primary challenges to sitting presidents spell doom to the party in power — few conservatives even entertained the possibility of giving the Republican nomination to someone else in 2020. They opposed what they regarded as a partisan impeachment designed to weaken him in advance of that year’s general election. (Even Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, now regarded as anti-Trump obsessives by most Republicans, sided with Trump then.) And they voted for his reelection to keep a leftward-marching Democratic Party out of power. 

 

Conservatives opposed Trump’s second impeachment, too, if a little less uniformly. Many believed that a Senate trial of a former president, however objectionable his conduct, was either improper or unnecessary. But by this point, Trump’s fortunes were no longer intertwined with those of conservatives in the way they had been from May 2016 through November 2020.

 

***

 

Even those of us who, like this writer, never voted for Trump and favored both impeachments must admit that conservatives’ alliance with Trump delivered important benefits to both. Whether conservatives should tie their fate to his again is a different question. It is one that Trump is now raising. And even those conservatives who have disagreed with me about Trump since 2015 should see that it is harder than ever to justify a positive answer.

 

Trump wants Republicans to give him their presidential nomination for the third time in a row. But his star is no longer as bright, and even Republicans who supported him before are saying that he cannot win in November 2024. They say he won in 2016 only because he had the good fortune to run against Clinton, one of the few major-party nominees in U.S. history in his league of unpopularity. They add that he has lost, or caused Republican losses, in three other elections: those of 2018, 2020, and 2022. 

 

The electoral case against Trump can easily be overstated. Congressional Republicans would have seen losses, if perhaps fewer of them, in the midterms under any Republican president in 2018. And Trump could win in 2024. If at that time the economy were in recession and he were the Republican nominee, he might even be a slight favorite. But nominating Trump would be riskier for Republicans, on account of his persistent unpopularity, than nominating any other plausible contender. He is also less likely than other contenders to provide effective conservative governance if he wins. And both truths have the same root cause: Trump’s character.

 

That subject has been the top issue of our politics for the better part of a decade. It has often been debated at a theoretical level: How much weight should voters give to a candidate’s character and how much to his policies? Some of Trump’s supporters have treated the issue dismissively, as though the only objection were to his tweets and the only problem with them was that they were “mean.”

 

But his career has nearly constantly demonstrated the immense practical importance of character. To take an example more relevant to him than to the public interest: No amount of money will buy him the top-notch lawyers he regularly needs, because those lawyers do not want a client who lies to everyone and stiffs his creditors.

 

The same flaws repeatedly undermined Trump’s ability to achieve conservative objectives while in office — and that’s true using nearly any definition of “conservative objectives” you like.

 

Consider the fate of his famous pledge to build a wall across our southern border. During his first year in office, when he had a Republican Congress, he did not make it a priority. When Democrats, at a moment of political weakness, said they would agree to fund the wall, Trump raised a new demand, a reduction in legal immigration, that didn’t have much support in either party. Then Republicans lost the House.

 

With no prospect of getting funding from Congress, Trump declared a national emergency so that he could unilaterally spend federal money on the wall. Some barriers were built, but legal challenges continued throughout his term and most of the border remains unwalled. Underneath all of these discrete blunders were inconstancy, lack of political judgment, an absence of intelligent counsel; a failure to master the legitimate powers of the presidency and a willingness to exceed them. But even this summary does not fully capture the perversity of Trump’s record: The same month he declared the emergency, Trump endorsed increasing legal immigration to a record level. A few months later, he would tell two reporters that he never really favored cutting legal immigration in the first place.

 

His trade policies failed, too, on their own terms. They did not expand manufacturing employment, or reduce the trade deficit, or force China to end its predatory practices. This was only partly a matter of economics. His own goals with respect to China were unclear and his negotiators split. They got the Chinese government to agree to purchase more American goods — especially soybeans, a way to compensate American farmers for the damage the trade war had done them. China did not follow through on the commitment. Whatever one thinks of U.S. trade policy before Trump, it is hard to see any improvement on his watch.

 

Imposing economic costs without getting much to show for it was bad enough. Creating a humanitarian crisis out of carelessness and callousness was worse. Such was the story of Trump’s “family separation” policy. Enforcing laws, including immigration laws, can result in taking children from their parents. The Trump administration imposed a “zero tolerance” policy on illegal border crossings knowing that it would massively increase such separations, with some officials cheering their deterrent value. The policy was implemented in an atmosphere of chaos and deceit, and the administration did not bother to keep track of the children and whether they were ever reunited with their parents. This course of action would have been unjust even if it had led to a sustainable improvement in immigration policy, but of course it did no such thing.

 

That episode was exceptional not only as a debacle but as an instance of Trump’s prevailing on recalcitrant aides to implement his wishes, if only until public revulsion forced him to back down. In many other instances, Trump was incapable of transmitting his will through his administration. Explaining it does not require any theory of a “deep state.” For one thing, Trump didn’t take his own wishes seriously enough to follow through on them or hold aides accountable for failing to pursue them. He frequently contented himself with the role of commentator, as when he said that he wanted a strong ban on assault weapons and everyone who worked for him decided to ignore it, secure in the knowledge it would slip his mind. For another, Trump’s government was full of people — his own appointees, in many cases, not career bureaucrats — who didn’t respect him.

 

He has contempt for them, too. No president has ever heaped as much scorn on his secretary of state, on his secretary of defense, on his national-security adviser, on two successive attorneys general he put in office. Even Mitch McConnell, without whom the Trump administration would have had far fewer accomplishments (and may not have even come to be), has been the target of deranged attacks. Trump has so many dysfunctional relationships, and they all have one thing in common.

 

***

 

His behavior following the 2020 election was of a piece with everything that preceded it. He declared himself the victor — in a “landslide” — while the votes were being counted. He filed one frivolous lawsuit after another, none of them offering any evidence of (and few of them even alleging) the widespread voter fraud he kept insisting had taken place. He pushed for state legislators to defy the verdict of the voters. All of this made for what Rich Lowry and I called in these pages “the worst exit of a defeated president in U.S. history”: a judgment we were able to render weeks before the attempt to get Vice President Mike Pence to interfere with the electoral count and weeks before the January 6, 2021, riot. The dishonesty, the subordination of the national interest to his own personal interest, the indulgence of conspiracy theories, the indifference to the Constitution: None of it was a surprise, and all of it was a result of the conjunction of low character and high office.

 

The same Trump traits led to the Republican midterm debacle this year. He demanded that candidates espouse his false (and for many voters discrediting) claims about the stolen 2020 election, making it a consideration far above electability or conservatism, and he retained enough sway over Republican voters to secure nominations for many of his picks. In races that should have been competitive, or even Republican locks, voters rejected these candidates as dangerous weirdos. Conservative Republicans who had not pledged fealty to Trump’s obsession, meanwhile, won.

 

Trump will be 78 at the time of the next election. His personality will not change. If he is elected, there will be more election officials who have to go into hiding, more abuse of office, more chaotic governance, more gushing over dictators. (“Our country,” he said in October, had been “almost forcing” Putin to invade Ukraine by taunting him.) And there will be more rationalization of all of the above by Republicans. Wokeness will get worse, too, using him as a catalyst as it did during his presidency.

 

There is much less on the other side of the ledger than there was in 2016. Nothing he is saying is fresh, or directed at the priorities of persuadable voters. He isn’t talking about submerged topics such as the opioid crisis. He’s talking about himself and about his enemies. He’s attacking the Supreme Court — the site of his greatest accomplishment — for not being in his corner.

 

It is enough. It is more than enough. Whatever we might have thought of Trump over the past seven years, we conservatives should now be able to agree on what we want next: Let Trump have as happy a retirement as his disposition will allow, and let us seek new leaders for a new day.