Never Trump Is from Venus, Always Trump Is from Mars

Just to get my priors out of the way, I should admit that the idea of “Never Trump” always rubbed me wrong because I am not, by nature, a joiner. I reflexively recoil from anything that looks like a team or a movement or a club. I don’t even like the fellowship stuff at my own church; let’s just do a polite wave for the sign of peace and leave it that.

By the same token, I’ve never liked the Always Trump crowd, either. One of the things I don’t understand about the dedicated Trumpers is the way that almost none of them are willing to entertain even the possible costs of his tenure. It’s all “But Gorsuch!” and a blithe insistence that there are no downsides.

Say what you will about the Trump skeptics, but most of them—or at least the ones whose names don’t rhyme with Ren Jubin—allow that there are upsides to having President Trump (Gorsuch!) even if they ultimately hold that the bad outweighs the good.

But the other thing that strikes me about the Always Trump crowd is how gleeful many of them are about the entire enterprise, how much of a frisson Trump gives them. They don’t see his norm-breaking as the cost of doing business in pursuit of political objectives. For many (most?) of them it’s a feature, not a bug.

I would remind these folks that Democrats felt the same way about Harry Reid’s decision to destroy the Senate’s norms back during the Obama years. And now that the shoe is on the other foot, Democrats are miserable. It’s as though the Trumpers look at the world as it is being remade by their champion and cannot imagine the balance of power ever swinging back in the other direction.

Someday there will be a Democratic president giving rhetorical cover to Antifa thugs and attacking an independent counsel and refusing to release her tax returns and pushing through a Supreme Court justice of questionable moral worth (or packing the Court) and passing single-payer, socialized medicine on a one-vote majority—and a whole host of other things we can’t even imagine yet. And when that day comes, the same people who revel in Trump’s norm-defying antics now will be screaming bloody murder, oblivious to the fact that they helped create this timeline.

But this gets us to the genuine conflict between the principled combatants in the Trump wars. The Always Trumpers argue that the benefits of Republican control of the White House are real and that Trump has opened doors to reforming conservatism in ways that might ultimately be beneficial.

And, in some contexts, this isn’t wrong. Look at the way Trump charged out of the Paris Climate Accords, which were some of the dumbest and least-effectual “policy” measures ever concocted by the international community. Which is saying something. Look at Trump’s eagerness to renegotiate NAFTA—something no mainstream Republican president would have ever done and which seems to have resulted in a genuinely superior agreement for America.

It’s a commonplace for Trump defenders to point to the economy and declare victory. But the truth is, this is an area where Trump has been largely conventional. President Mitt Romney would have deregulated the federal government and then passed a massive tax cut. If anything, these are the areas where Trump has failed to reform conservatism. The Trump tax cut—with its giant boon to corporate America and studied indifference to fiscal responsibility—is perfectly in line with everything that has been wrong with traditional, establishment conservatism over the last 20 years.

But even in this, the Always Trump defender would say that the president’s actions were better than the alternative policy choices being offered by Democrats.

The Never Trump argument grants all—or much—of these arguments. But it then suggests that the medium-term price for these victories is the re-anchoring of norms which, in the long run, will outweigh the benefits.

What do I mean? Take Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview. Trump was asked about Kim Jong-un who is, objectively speaking, a monster. Here is what Trump said after being given a partial list of Kim’s crimes against humanity:

And here’s where the two sides diverge. As a bottom-line matter, the Always Trumpers will tell you that this isn’t any different from traditional realpolitik. And in a certain sense they’re correct. America has always done business with bad actors if it was in the national interest: Stalin; the shah; the House of Saud. And the truth is, if publicly fluffing Kim Jong-un leads to North Korean denuclearization, it will have been a bargain at twice the price.

But the Never Trumpers would point to the norm-busting: Because no American president ever talked about Stalin’s dragon energy or bragged about his personal chemistry with Augusto Pinochet. What Trump did was materially different. He broke another norm, right there on television.

Will this particular broken norm end up mattering in some concrete way? No one knows. In the unlikely event that North Korea denuclearizes, then all of Trump’s prostrating before him will have been worth it. But what happens if the American president fawns over Kim this way and then doesn’t get denuclearization? Because then the realpolitik view cuts in exactly the opposite direction: Trump will have committed the sort of appeasement that makes bad actors more dangerous.

So it’s too early to tally up the figures and determine which side is right, but here’s the point about Trumpism: We are, right now, working the credit side of the ledger. The debits haven’t come yet. They’ll start arriving on November 6 and we won’t fully understand how the liabilities of Trumpism add up until the next time the Democrats have unified control of the government.

Which is a thing I promise you will happen.

An analogy: During the immediate aftermath of the opening phase of the Iraq war there was a great deal of triumphalism on the part of Bush partisans. (Mission: Accomplished!) But that was before most Republicans could understand what the long-term political costs of the war and Bush’s larger “freedom agenda” would be. Those costs came into focus in 2006 and 2008 and include, roughly, the whole of the Obama administration. So here’s a question: If you were a supporter of George W. Bush in 2002, would you have changed your mind if someone had come from the future and told you that, directly or indirectly, invading Iraq would lead to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid, a president who rubbed elbows with domestic terrorists, a Trojan horse to nationalized health care, the destruction of the filibuster, Kagan, Sotomayor, Title IX kangaroo courts, Obergefell, the trans movement, and the whole parade of horribles?

Since the subject of Trump is so fraught, this might actually be the best way to have the same conversation, but with some emotional distance. And the big difference I think, between the Never Trumpers and the Always Trumpers comes down to a single the foundational question: How fragile is all of this, the this being our liberal American order?

Are the policy victories so important that they are worth re-anchoring norms in ways that will end up having negative consequences down the line, some of which are obvious and some of which we can’t yet foresee?

The Always Trumper will answer, Yes. Absolutely. That winning beats losing, every time. The Never Trumper will answer, No. That free societies cannot function without norms and that these invisible pieces of scaffolding are worth preserving, even if it means losing out on individual fights.