By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, March 20, 2026
Okay, I have very little time today. I’m in Baton Rouge
for a talk and then have to race to the airport. So I am relying on Bill
Buckley’s advice: When you don’t know what to write about, write about
something that annoys you.
Now, after decades of doing this, I’ve added a few
corollaries to this rule. Annoyance is a great muse, but so are other
less-than-wholly-virtuous emotions, like schadenfreude.
And it is with a mixture of schadenfreude and annoyance I
come to the issue of Donald Trump’s supposed betrayal of MAGA by launching a
war against Iran.
But let’s start from the beginning.
“Meet the Harvard whiz kid who wants to explain
Trumpism.”
That was the headline for a 2017 profile of Julius Krein written by my friend Eliana
Johnson for Politico. It began: “A 30-year-old conservative wunderkind
is out to intellectualize Trumpism, the amorphous ideology that lifted its
namesake to the presidency in November.”
In pursuit of the effort to create an ideologically
serious thing called “Trumpism,” Krein was launching the journal American
Affairs. Given what I thought then—and now—about Trump, Trumpslaining, and
other forms of Trump apologia, it would be reasonable to assume that I heaped
scorn on Krein’s project. I didn’t. I welcomed it. But as I told Eliana for her reporting, he
had his work cut out for him:
“It will take a
good deal of time for even Trump’s most gifted apologists to craft an
intellectually or ideologically coherent theme or narrative to his program,”
said Jonah Goldberg, a senior editor of National Review. “Trump boasts
that he wants to be unpredictable and insists that he will make all decisions
on a case-by-case basis. That’s a hard approach for an intellectual journal to
defend in every particular.”
I’ve been making versions of this argument for a decade.
Trump has no “ideology.” He does have a few ideas. Off the top of my head: take
the oil, tariffs are economic Viagra, strength good, never apologize, women
won’t resist celebrities when they grab them by their privates, “good genes”
matter a lot, allies are whiny bitches, a bunch of romantic convictions about
the supremacy of his instincts, and some Norman
Vincent Peale-inspired nonsense about willing the reality you want into
existence.
Taken together, these ideas, gut impulses, sentiments,
and irritable mental gestures do not amount to an ideology. They could be
the foundation of an ideology. But constructing an actual ideology requires
thinking about how your various commitments might conflict, where the
trade-offs are, what the edge cases might be, etc. That’s why I’ve been
writing, over and over again, that Trumpism isn’t an ideology, it’s a psychology. When he
attacks critics or even loyalists who defy him, it’s almost never because of
the arguments or reasons offered by the critics and defiers. It is the mere
fact that they don’t defer to him. If you say “no” to something he really
wants, it’s because you must “hate
Trump.”
But Trumpism is not just about Trump’s psychology,
it’s the psychology of many of his supporters. If Trump is for it, it must be
right.
Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign conducted focus groups to ask Republican voters about
issues like COVID lockdowns. Seventy percent of participants said they opposed
them. But then, when they were asked about Trump’s COVID lockdowns, 70
percent supported them. Simply “attaching Trump’s name to an otherwise effective
message had a tendency to invert the results.”
What is true of random voters in poorly lit hotel
conference rooms is also true of a great many pundits, politicians, economists,
and intellectuals. The motives may be more cynical and mercenary, but the
effect is the same.
If you could do a comprehensive search of every form of
media and interaction, I bet you’d find I have been accused of “Trump
Derangement Syndrome” more than a million times. If you want to understand my
occasional political dyspepsia, please consider that the vast majority of
people who level that charge at me are people who literally change what they
believe (or say they believe) based on whether Trump believes it—at any
given moment.
Seriously, think about that. Trump changes his positions
constantly, and hordes of his supposedly principled intellectual defenders
change their positions with him—and I’m supposed to be the deranged one for
not doing likewise? When the Trumpists said that merely
carrying a legal weapon was proof of criminal—even terroristic—intent, how
many longtime, dogmatic, Second Amendment boosters aped the talking points?
I have some grace for normal voters when it comes to this
kind of thing. Most Americans aren’t politicians, ideologues, or intellectuals.
They trust Trump—foolishly, I think—but often understandably. But it’s
difficult for me to hide my contempt for self-styled intellectuals and
ideologues who routinely jettison their convictions based on what Trump does or
says on any given day. If you thought Bill Clinton’s sybaritic and priapistic
tendencies were appalling but simply laugh off objections to Trump’s even more
sordid behavior, you don’t have a principled objection to adultery. You have a
“principled” objection to objecting to immoral behavior by politicians you
like. That is the single unspoken standard behind every double-standard
regarding Trump and his most committed opponents. They are making Trump the
standard for their views.
Swap out sexual licentiousness for industrial policy,
protectionism, corruption, mental incoherence, arrogance, and replace Clinton
with Joe Biden or Barack Obama and the argument doesn’t change.
Oh, and now you can add to that list “Middle East wars.”
Which brings me to the revolt of some Trump
“intellectuals” over the Iran war. Tucker Carlson, Sohrab Ahmari, Christopher
Caldwell, Mollie Hemingway, and numerous others are stunned, shocked, appalled
by Trump’s “betrayal” of MAGA. And it’s schadenfreudtastically hilarious.
It pains me to include Caldwell in that list, because
there are few writers and intellectuals I have respected more over the last 30
years, regardless of my disagreements with him. Caldwell is probably best in
class of a group of intellectuals who have tried to argue for a serious
intellectual consistency to Trumpism.
He has declared the Iran war “The End of Trumpism.” He writes:
Contrary to its
portrayal in the newspapers, Trumpism was a movement of democratic restoration.
At its center was the idea of the deep state. In recent decades, selective
universities created a credentialocracy, civil-rights law endowed it with a
system of ideological enforcement, the tax code entrenched a class of would-be
philosopher-kings in the nonprofit sector, and civil-service protections armed
government bureaucrats to fight back against any effort at democratic reform.
There is more wisdom in this than some knee-jerk
Trump-haters will allow for. That wisdom accounts for a large portion of why I
have grace for generic Trump voters. It’s also why I said they were foolish for
putting their faith in Trump. Because the high-minded versions of Trumpism were
always ridiculous when applied to Trump himself.
Let’s give Trump the maximum benefit of the doubt and
assume he saw what Caldwell sees about how America got off course. The guy who
took a plane from Qatar never held this “democratic restoration” of American
government as his goal. The guy who is turning the Department of Justice into a
score-settling and self-aggrandizement machine and who sees personal loyalty as
the only non-negotiable criterion for government employment didn’t care about
“The Deep State” as a threat to democratic government.
And, just to check the box, the guy who tried to steal an
election doesn’t care about actual nuts-and-bolts democracy. Caldwell has
talked himself into a strange corner. He sees Trump as a paladin for the
informal, atmospheric, poetic, abstract concept of “democracy” while
yada-yadaing over the slap-to-the-face reality that Trump has nothing but
contempt for the formal, non-poetic, practice of actual democracy.
Simply put, Trump got into politics for himself. To the
extent Trump saw and understood the zeitgeist that Caldwell identifies, he
considered it an opportunity, not a cause.
The idea that Trump’s war on Iran is a betrayal of “True
Trumpism” is the last gasp of people who told themselves that Trumpism was an
ideology. And it’s embarrassing.
I don’t agree with Trump on much, but he is
incandescently, blazingly, irrefutably correct when he says “I think that MAGA is Trump.” Or as he told The Atlantic, “Well, considering that I’m the
one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used
until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that.”
Now, just to be clear, Trump did not invent the term
“America First.” Because he doesn’t know anything about American history, he
didn’t know what “America First” meant until a reporter used the phrase with
him in an interview.
But on his larger point, Trump is right. Whether you call
it MAGA or America First or Trumpism, he determines what it is. And that has
been true from the beginning. If you sincerely thought otherwise, the joke is
on you.
Now, ascribing sincerity to Trump’s intellectual
defenders is not a concession I am willing to grant wholesale. I think some
intellectuals, Caldwell among them, came to their positions in good faith (you
can tell from his “End of Trumpism” piece that he saw Trump the man with fairly
clear eyes). But Tucker Carlson and many of the others were always liars. They
knew the beast they were hitching themselves to. For instance, Carlson once
texted a friend “I hate [Trump] passionately” but publicly insisted “I love Trump.”
One reason I find this moment so deliciously hilarious is
that some of the people turning on him are discovering that I was right all
along. They were fine with all of the terrible, ugly, cruel, and stupid things
Trump did so long as they thought Trumpism meant what they wanted it to mean.
It’s like they cheered Godzilla smashing one building or another, crafting
ornate theories for why he crushed that school or why he melted that radio
tower. But when Godzilla turns his gaze toward something they love, they shout
“Betrayal!”
Others knew all along what Godzilla was all about, but
they benefited from pretending otherwise for money, fame, or influence. Or they
reasoned that after Godzilla retreated to the sea to go live on Mar-a-Monster
Island, they would be able to rule the rubble he left behind.
Regardless, the war on Iran isn’t a betrayal of Trumpism,
this is Trumpism on full display.
That people are calling it a betrayal is what economists
call a “revealed preference.” Godzilla smashing things is wise, defensible, and
worthy of celebrating. But smashing things allegedly in service to Israel is an
outrage.
As I
wrote earlier this week, there are many defensible arguments against this
war and for it. I do not believe America is doing it for Israel. Yes, it
benefits Israel. And haters of Israel, like haters of Jews (not necessarily the
same thing), tend to operate from a conspiratorial—cui bono?—theory of
causation. If Israel benefits from something—or can even be perceived as
benefiting—then Israel must be the author of it. That’s the gist of Joe
Kent’s preposterous, ahistorical, and delusional letter of resignation from the National Counterterrorism
Center. None of these people resigned or denounced Trump because of Trump’s
tariffs, or his seizure of Nicolás Maduro, January 6, or any of the other
ridiculous or heinous things Trump has done. They defended it. They polished
the turds until they could see their own reflection in them. But helping the jooos?
Stop the Trump train. I want to get off.
The invasion of Iran reveals nothing new about Trump or
Trumpism. The reaction to it reveals a great deal about a lot of people.
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