By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Hardly a day goes by when I don’t see stories on my Internet homepage from commentators, on both the left and the right, designed to convince voters who voted for Donald Trump that they have been “had”; that they voted for an incompetent and unprincipled con man who has no idea what he is doing in the White House.
They will tick off the “broken promises” on tax reform, repealing Obamacare, building the wall on the Mexican border, and an avoidance of overseas military interventions.
National Review and The Weekly Standard lead the charge on the right; MSNBC and CNN on the left. Serious discussions are featured in these venues on the upcoming impeachment of Trump. They interview people who voted for him in the hope of finding a groundswell of defections.
So far, there is no such groundswell in sight.
Why not? Permit me to take a stab at the question.
I am among those who have not a trace of buyer’s remorse over the decision to vote for Trump. I was never a Trump enthusiast. I can see the man’s failings.
Yet not a day goes by when I do not think of what I would be going through if Hillary Clinton were in the White House. Every time I hear Maxine Waters, Larry O’Donnell, and Rachel Maddow getting hysterical about what it means to have Trump in power, it reaffirms my decision to vote for the man. They know the stakes. Imagine if they were gloating in the wake of a Clinton victory.
I submit that this is the key to why Trump’s backers have no intention of jumping ship. Whenever anyone calls my attention to Trump’s deficiencies — his seeming indifference to the principles of conservatism, his careless language, his willingness to flip on key issues — I get their point.
But then I think of the people he ran against for the Republican nomination. Most of his Republican opponents were accomplished and experienced, impressive public servants, sober, thoughtful individuals — who would have lost to Hillary.
Be honest, now. Can you picture any of Trump’s Republican opponents standing up to the Clinton smear machine; any who would have been able to capture the votes of the blue-collar voters in Michigan and Wisconsin who sealed Trump’s victory? I can’t.
It took a unique individual to defeat Hillary in this age of celebrity and reality shows, someone brassier and with a harder edge than the usual Republican candidates. Filling that role does not make Trump a better person than his Republican opponents. Quite the contrary, perhaps. But it made him a more successful candidate.
But doesn’t it matter to me that Trump seems indifferent to the principles of conservatism, that he seems to have run into a roadblock on his campaign promises to build the wall on the Mexican border, to end sanctuary cities, to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood, to end and replace Obamacare? Aren’t I bothered by his willingness to bomb Assad’s forces in Syria and confront the North Korean Communists, when he promised during his run for the presidency to no longer act as the world’s policeman?
These policy issues matter to me. But we must keep things in perspective. My hunch is that most of those who voted for Trump and continue to back him are saying the same thing to themselves: They know he is not a dictator or king who can impose his will upon the nation. They know that the Congress and the courts are putting up resistance to Trump in these matters.
And they are satisfied, at least for the time being, that Trump is willing to take on these forces in Congress, hopeful that he will be able to secure significant victories down the road. His tax and healthcare reforms still seem likely to pass later this year. Isn’t it better to have someone in the White House who is tackling the liberal agenda, rather than leading it, as would Hillary Clinton?
Trump’s supporters do not limit their focus to those areas where he is coming up short. They look at his victories as well: The Keystone Pipeline is being built. The flow of illegal aliens across the Mexican border dropped, over 60 percent in March alone. It is reasonable to conclude this was because of Trump’s tough talk on immigration and the freer hand he has given to our border control authorities.
This year’s budget has cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Neil Gorsuch is now a Supreme Court justice, securing the likelihood of decisions that conservatives will welcome for decades to come, especially if Trump gets to appoint another justice or two. This isn’t chump change.
Also, Trump’s assertiveness toward Assad’s government in Syria and Kim Jong-un does not include any plans for nation-building. Trump is not talking about creating some “new world order.”
That leaves us with the question of Trump’s lack of conservative bona fides. There is no question that the man is not a “movement conservative.”
I would wager he has not spent any significant time reading the authors found in the leading anthologies of conservative intellectual writing. I doubt he would have any interest in the issues that divide the libertarian and traditionalist wings of the conservative movement or the split between the neo- and paleo-conservatives.
If someone said to him that we must be aware of the danger of “immanentizing the eschaton” (a much-discussed concept in National Review at one time), he would likely roll his eyes and look for the nearest exit.
But that brings up an important point: the fact that these squabbles among conservative intellectuals have been part of the conservative movement from the very beginning in the late 1950s.
When modern conservative intellectuals at National Review or The Weekly Standard accuse Trump of “betraying” the conservative cause, what they mean is that he is not championing their particular understanding of conservatism. In the main, their complaint against Trump is that he is not as dedicated to limited government and free-market theory as a conservative should be.
The problem is that the same can be said of a large number of the most hallowed figures in the formative years of the conservative movement. I submit that James Burnham, L. Brent Bozell, Whittaker Chambers, Thomas Molnar, and Willmoore Kendall are in that category.
Their primary concerns were elsewhere: with moral relativism and the preservation of our national culture and military resolve during the Cold War. They were not part of the old debates over privatizing Social Security or running privately owned lighthouses on a pay-as-you-go basis.
There are more than a few modern conservatives — Patrick Buchanan and Victor Davis Hanson, for example — who see the world in a similar way. They are not “never Trumpers.”
Jesus said, “In my Father’s house, there are many mansions.” One would think there should be a “mansion” for Donald Trump and his backers inside the modern conservative movement.
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