Now that President Trump has officially announced he will be a candidate for reelection, it’s time for a Republican to provide a serious challenge to him.
This president needs a challenger who is a conservative reformer, who is reality-based, who respects facts and truth, who shuns demagoguery, who believes civility and decency are essential for the long-term health of the public square, and who is committed to an unprecedentedly large restructuring and scaling back of the role government plays in our society.
What’s needed is a practical political-philosophy-in-action that draws from James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ronald Reagan, and Jack Kemp, applied with insights drawn from a creative meld of the reformist suggestions of Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., and lawyer/author Philip K. Howard. (To get really in the philosophical weeds, it would help if the candidate is a constitutionalist rooted in the thought of the late academics Walter Berns and George Carey, who emphasized the importance of deliberative and representative democracy, acting primarily through duly elected legislative bodies.)
The lodestars of the ideal conservative challenge to Trump will be fiscal responsibility to ward off a looming debt crisis, radical reduction of the pervasiveness of government in our lives, liberty as the founders understood it, and reinvigoration of civil society.
The obvious question, though, will be: “Why challenge Trump?” Why should a conservative Republican oppose Trump’s reelection?
Hasn’t Trump made the economy great again? Hasn’t he appointed excellent judges? Isn’t he rolling back regulations? Hasn’t he put America first? (The answers, by the way, are not exactly, yes, yes, and no.)
The way I see it, even where Trump has done what conservatives want, he hasn’t done so any more effectively than most other recent candidates for the Republican nomination would have. Paul Ryan’s tax cut was one any Republican president would have signed. Trump’s judicial nominees merely continue a good tradition begun by the younger Bush. Much of Trump’s deregulatory effort involves undoing things President Barack Obama’s team did, which any Republican president would undo.
But Trump has been a disaster on other policy fronts. He and the House Freedom Caucus, not John McCain, were mostly responsible for the failure to repeal and replace Obamacare. His fiscal irresponsibility is of epic proportions. His tariff wars are extraordinarily harmful to long-term American interests. His record of foreign policy embarrassments stretches from North Korea to Venezuela to deep-festering sores, ones where their full toxicity may not become apparent until too late, that he has caused in relations with major U.S. allies.
Meanwhile, Trump in ways large and small is helping destroy civil society (in part by removing the civility from it), and he is doing horrendous damage to conservatives’ long-term electoral prospects by alienating young voters, minorities, and suburban women in ways that are demographically and politically unsustainable. His war against facts and the very concept of truth, meanwhile, speeds up the maleficent growth of the culture of relativism.
There are those of us who believe that the strength of the culture, and the health of unwritten norms, are at least as important for the survival of the American Experiment as are the outcomes of politics and the fealty to formal law. Trump undermines culture and norms every day he remains in office.
A conservative challenger to Trump will draw out these contrasts and trumpet the conservative virtues under attack. Such a person will have to be a real conservative, not just an ideological peripatetic such as former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld.
Until someone else steps in, though, I’ll play the role. Consider this the announcement of my virtual campaign for the Republican nomination. I’ll raise no money, file no forms, and appear on no ballots. (So, you Federal Election Commission regulators can stand down.) But in this space, over the coming weeks, I’ll wage a campaign of sorts, pointing out Trump’s errors and flaws, and giving an airing to the conservative arguments, ideas, and policies that risk being discarded.
And I’ll challenge Trump to a debate, anywhere, anytime.
Because if you want someone to handle “debt, decency, and diplomacy,” well, welcome to Hillyer Time.
