Yet almost half of the elite
conservative establishment remains opposed to Republican President Trump.
About a quarter of them, it seems,
openly despise him. These are prominent Republican senators,
think-tank writers, television pundits, op-ed columnists, and generic public
intellectuals.
MSNBC and CNN are now homes for disgruntled Republicans or
former conservative pundits in the way that those outlets once for a time found
it useful to welcome in paleo-conservatives opposed to the Bush Administration
during the Iraq War.
Bret Stephens, the NeverTrump former
conservative at the Wall Street Journal, now advocates the repeal of the
Second Amendment in the pages of the New York Times. Did Trump turn off
some of the Republican establishment, or liberate it to espouse progressive
views that it always held, but found impolitic to express?
The usual conservative status quo
complaint against Trump is that the deficiencies of the messenger outweigh
the many positives of the message. Or Trump, the person, nullifies the
policies that have accompanied Trump into power.
The anti-Trumpians cringe at Trump’s
incessant Twitter and news conference spats with everyone from “fake news”
reporters at CNN to the San Juan mayor.
His marathon rambling speeches at
rallies in red-state America remind them that they find Trump supporters on
the screen far more alien than they do their liberal counterparts in their own
Washington and New York neighborhoods.
Never Trumpers certainly are louder
in their opposition to Trump than was the Tea Party’s past criticism of McCain
or Romney.
They are embarrassed that someone
from their own party has a vocabulary that focuses on about four adjectives
(“tremendous,” “great,” “awesome,” “wonderful,” etc.), or that he often
exaggerates and errs in a manner of Barack Obama, though without the latter’s
mellifluousness or Ivy League brand.
The Republican establishment used to
lament that the old Reagan Democrats, Tea Party types, and working-class whites
of the Midwest had stayed home in 2008 and 2012, and thus allowed good
candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney to be steamrolled by Obama’s
fatuous “hope and change” identity politics.
Now they are either worried or
shamed that these same swing voters came out in droves and left the Republican
Party in a dominant position at the local, state, and federal level not seen
since the 1920s.
In sum, the NeverTrump lament seems
to be that whatever good Trump has done is more than outweighed by his
“character is destiny” flaws.
Neil Gorsuch and scores of conservative circuit
court judges; Nikki Haley at the United Nations, James Mattis at Defense, H.R. McMaster
at the National Security Council, Mike Pompeo at the CIA, and Rex Tillerson at
the State Department, all restoring deterrence; rollbacks of Obama-era
executive orders; green-lighting pipeline construction and increased fossil
fuel production; protections of Second Amendment rights; restoring national
borders; and genuine efforts to reform Obamacare and the tax code—all of
that for them is not worth the spectacle of Trump on the national stage.
Or
for some, all of the above Trump efforts now are seen as disruptive and
unnecessary—once the crudity of Trump enlightened the establishment to what it
now sees as inherent wrongs present all along in conservative thinking.
The economy is gaining momentum. The
stock market is way up. GDP growth exceeds Obama-era levels. Real unemployment (U6) is falling as labor participation improves. Business
confidence is growing. Middle-class incomes and corporate profits increase.
Consumer confidence is rebounding—all symptoms of an initial, implicit
psychological rebuke to the overregulated and dreary business climate of the
last eight years.
But again, should the economy hit an
annual GDP growth rate of 4 percent, Trump’s popularity would probably not
exceed 50 percent; and the NeverTrump establishment likely would not endorse
his reelection, even should he appoint three conservative justices and thereby
ensure a conservative Supreme Court for a generation.
The strange disconnect between a
disliked person and his mostly praised policies again raises fundamental
questions.
Is Trump’s occasional crudity and
unapologetic animus counterproductive and turning off possible allies, as
conventional wisdom suggests? Or is his rambunctiousness instead integral to
reifying his message? Neither or both?
Is he hated in unprecedented fashion
by the media and the Left because he can be crude in a manner unmatched by past
presidents?
Or because his efforts, both real and rhetorical, to overturn the
progressive project, are of the street-fighting caliber never quite seen before
from a party of sober and judicious Republicans but long adopted by the Left
and therefore likely to be both eerily familiar to them and perhaps even
efficacious?
Has the progressive cultural
ascendency, media partisanship, and university identity politics reached a
point at which half the country felt that the only desperate remedy was a
populist pushback rather than more creased brows and throat-clearing op-eds?
Would the establishment
Republicans prefer losing again with a kind and generous man figure as Mitt
Romney, who grimaced but allowed Candy Crowley to hijack the second
presidential debate of October 2012, or to win messily with someone who
embarrasses them as much as Romney made them proud but honorable losers?
Yet did any recent past Republican
nominee—forget Trump’s motivations or questions about his relative
sincerity—even run on the premise that working Americans were ignored and
losers in the redirects of globalization, open borders, and outsourcing and
offshoring?
Or that consequently they deserved empathy and a second-chance at
the American dream?
Was there a chance that Trump saw not just a political
opening but an injustice perpetrated against political outcasts deserving of
concern in a way that other more politically qualified and supposedly
empathetic candidates of 2016 did not?
Was the 24/7 confrontation and
incurring of hatred from the media (just 5 percent of whose coverage of Trump is positive) inevitable, once
Trump sought to do the once unthinkable and backtrack on the progressive
agenda?
When he proposes things such as disengaging from the Paris Climate
Accords, or pruning back the EPA, or closing the border—and demonstrates that
he is doing so not merely because these promises serve him rhetorically and
politically but because he really means to enact them—can anyone be surprised
by the Left’s reaction?
If Trump never tweeted again, expanded
his vocabulary, did not reply in kind to his critics, and patterned his public
appearances and press conferences after those of George Bush, John McCain, and
Mitt Romney, would his approval ratings climb, his endorsements increase—and
his efforts against the administrative state improve?
For all Trump’s combativeness, his
insecure worries over getting proper credit and attention, and cul de sac
spats, was the federal government response to Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and
Maria more effective compared to what we saw a decade ago after Hurricane
Katrina?
Was Trump’s rudeness and constant
aggressiveness in the face of criticism lamentable or long overdue in demanding
a level of fair coverage lacking during the Bush Administration’s inability
or unwillingness to counter unprofessional media animus?
Was Bush not criticizing New Orleans
Mayor Ray Nagin more thoughtful and ethical than Trump criticizing San Juan
Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz?
Why exactly did Katrina wreck the second-term and
experienced Bush presidency in a way that Harvey, Irma, and Maria so far have
not ruined the novice Trump Administration?
But what is clear
is that many liberal and conservative prognostications about his presidency
have so far not happened.
No one quite knows the answers to
all these questions—logically so, given Trump has not even completed his first
year of his presidency and he is the first president without either prior
political or military experience.
But what is clear is that
many liberal and conservative prognostications about his presidency have so far
not happened.
He did not crash the stock market.
He did not stealthily introduce a liberal agenda. His appointments, both at the
cabinet level and judicial, were not of the fringe and unhinged sort. He was
not knee-deep in Russian collusion. In times of crises not of his own making,
whether hurricanes, or mass shootings, or civil unrest, or North Korea nuclear
threats, the temperamental and thin-skinned Trump did not freeze or melt-down.
His positions on most of the iconic
social crises that reappeared throughout 2017 have been largely conservative
and reflect majority support: do not in mob-fashion tear down statues at night,
especially without democratic and lawful sanction; NFL players who kneel
during the National Anthem are violating their own league rules, mock the
voluntary patriotic protocols of their country, and are at odds with the fans
who pay their high salaries; radically pruning back the Second Amendment will
not stop gun violence, which is decreasing as gun ownership is on the rise.
No previous president has been the
target of such public venom.
Assassination chic is now endemic. Anti-Trump
obscenity is a staple of late-night television. Words like “racist” and “Nazi”
and “fascist” are now so commonplace that they have lost all currency.
Celebrities vie to virtue signal their disgust for Trump. His wife, his
daughter, and his sons are all the stuff of public invective that, had it been
directed toward the previous president, careers of the vituperative would have
ended long ago.
Yet it is likely that there is a
50/50 chance that the unpredictable and irascible Trump and policies will
achieve in the not so distant future a sustainable 3 percent annual rate of GDP
growth, a reform of the tax code, a systematic dismantling of onerous
government regulations through executive orders, a restoration of U.S.
deterrence abroad, another conservative Supreme Court justice, and a return to
legal, measured, and meritocratic immigration—and thus even more hysteria and hatred of Trump, the person,
from policy supporters and opponents alike.
