Pick One: Conservatism or Trump

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, March 21, 2023

 

Conservative Americans must choose. Do they want Donald Trump to play a central role in Republican politics, or do they want to win elections and achieve the policy outcomes that supposedly inspired them to get involved in politics in the first instance? My question is literal, not rhetorical. Conservatives must choose. They cannot have both of these things. They must pick only one.

 

As president, Donald Trump delivered some welcome conservative victories. He is not going to do so again. In fact, the opposite is true. If Trump is allowed to stick around, he will remain what he has already become: a massive drag on the fortunes and the efficacy of the political Right. Electorally, Trump is a bust. Ideologically, he is a mess. And as an agent of persuasion . . . well, let’s just say that, at this point, the GOP might be better off asking Charles Manson to serve as the chief representative of its brand. A Republican Party that features Trump as its star attraction is a Republican Party that will stay at the margins of federal office and watch impotently as progressives continue to accrete power. The bureaucracy will grow. Taxes will increase. Entitlement spending will spiral. The border will remain porous. The Supreme Court will be flipped back. That, and not the handful of salutary reforms that were achieved between 2017 and 2021, will be Trump’s legacy.

 

Trump is not going to win elections going forward. He won in 2016 because he ran against Hillary Clinton — and, even then, he secured only 46.1 percent of the vote. In 2018, he was a drag on the Republican ticket. In 2020, he lost reelection by 7 million votes. In 2022, he almost single-handedly demolished the GOP’s chance to retake the Senate. If Trump is nominated in 2024, he will lose once again. The same goes for 2028, 2032, 2036, and every election season in between. Trump is a poor candidate; he has become worse, not better, over time; and his time in the wilderness has turned him into King Lear.

 

Nor is Trump going to help other conservatives to win office or to thrive. We can, of course, debate who is and who is not a “conservative,” just as we can argue over which sort of conservatives we would like to lead the movement going forward. But that is not the endeavor in which Donald Trump is engaged. Rather, Trump habitually divides the world into two groups — one full of people he likes, one full of people he does not — and then backfills his reasoning on the fly. For Trump, there is nothing important in American politics besides the one-way personal loyalty that other Republicans exhibit toward him and his ambitions. Why are Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik and Dr. Oz held up as desirable conservatives? Answer: Because McCarthy and Stefanik are willing to prostrate themselves before him. Why, by contrast, are Brian Kemp, Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, and, increasingly, Ron DeSantis deemed problematic? Answer: Because, in one way or another, they are unwilling to toe his line. Given a choice between advancing his own interests and burning down the entire American conservative movement, Trump would light a match.

 

If pushed, Trump will suggest that he is now synonymous with American conservatism — that, as a practical matter, his interests and its interests are inextricable. This is false. Across the board, Trump’s existence within the debate is making it more difficult to sell conservatism than it was before he arrived. Conservatives believe in the importance of institutions, of delayed gratification, and of exhibiting humility about what we do not — and, perhaps, cannot — know. Donald Trump believes in none of these things. Conservatives believe that politics exists to facilitate civil society, and they insist that the idea that “everything is political” represents the first step toward totalitarianism. Donald Trump sits at the head of a cult of personality and subordinates all political and moral questions to his whim. Conservatives cherish the American constitutional order, and they understand that its constraints will not always line up with the transient wishes of the majority. Like contemporary progressives, Donald Trump expresses a desire to abolish any portion of the system that temporarily inconveniences him.

 

This infantile impatience is applied universally, because, at root, Donald Trump believes in nothing. Sensing a fleeting political advantage, Trump has begun to throw the entire Democratic playbook at Ron DeSantis, who, because he has noticed that our federal entitlements are insolvent, has been labeled a “wheelchair off the cliff kind of guy.” This is not helpful. Desperate to divert blame for the performance of his ridiculous candidates in 2022, Trump insisted that it was Republicans’ position on abortion — one he once adopted himself — that had cost them the Senate. This is not helpful. Blinded by the cameras after the massacre at Parkland in 2018, Trump responded to Mike Pence’s demand that any changes to the law must “allow due process so no one’s rights are trampled” by declaring, “I like taking the guns early” and, “take the guns first, go through due process second.” This is not helpful.

 

As a famous man once said, “We have come to a time for choosing.” Unlike in 2020, Donald Trump’s nomination in 2024 is not a fait accompli, and the question before conservatives is not whether they would prefer a second Trump term to the prospect of Joe Biden. The question now is whether, with the advantage of a great universe of alternative options before them, conservatives would prefer to take concrete steps to advance their political goals or to sacrifice everything to feed the ego of a maniac. Those are our two choices — and they are not going to change.