This week in the “Is President Trump good for conservatism?” debate, the defense presents Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court as Exhibit A while the prosecution rests its case with Russian President Vladimir Putin being the “easiest” to deal with in a list that includes NATO and the United Kingdom.
But the better question might be whether Trump is good for Trumpism. Conservatism existed before Trump and is bound to continue in some form afterward. So too will the Republican Party, even if Trump causes losses at the ballot box this year and in 2020. It is barely remembered that President George W. Bush at his nadir was less popular than Trump is now. And if the Republicans survived the Great Depression while the Democrats survived the Civil War, major parties are awfully hard to kill.
A specific president’s efforts to rebrand and reshape a major party are often more short-lived, however. Does anyone talk about Dwight Eisenhower’s “Modern Republicanism” anymore? There are elements of Trump’s platform that are unique to him that offer a more plausible path to Republican growth than some of his intraparty critics’, but it is not clear how many of them will survive him.
Part of this is for the same reason the Republican Party and conservative movement definitely will outlast him: They have enduring institutions and organizations, even in the face of diminishing interest from the outside world. Trumpism has — Diamond and Silk? Its institutions exist only in embryonic form.
Additionally, Trump can’t seem to introduce a policy or idea into the Republican mainstream without simultaneously increasing its toxicity with everyone else. Take for example his eminently sensible advocacy of greater burden-sharing among NATO allies. He has certainly made it a greater priority and bigger part of the public discussion than his predecessors did, but not without seeming petulant and speaking of NATO as a U.S.-led protection racket.
Trump is addicted to overstatement. Germany talks a bigger game against Putin and Russia than it plays. But does that make it a “captive of Russians,” as the president says?
Russia is also a much different threat than the former Soviet Union. It is not a peer, though it is still nuclear-armed. It is expansionist, yet too poor to really satisfy its grandest territorial ambitions. It remains illiberal, though not the same rival model of governance competing against the West. Cybersecurity violations and electoral interference are Moscow’s calling card today, which requires a different response than preparing for World War III or even the Cuban missile crisis.
It is significantly harder to make the case against Cold War 2.0 when you downplay the threats Russia actually poses or seem overly solicitous of Putin. This is especially true when you stand accused of having colluded with the Russians in their attempts to influence the U.S. presidential election while equivocating about whether that interference ever existed in the first place.
During the campaign, Hugh Hewitt gently tried to clarify Trump’s characterization of Hillary Clinton and then President Barack Obama as co-founders of ISIS. Their policies, Hewitt said, created the vacuums ISIS filled in Iraq and Libya, “but they didn’t create ISIS.”
Trump tellingly disagreed. “[T]hey wouldn’t talk about your language, and they do talk about my language, right?” he responded. True. But unlike in the New York tabloid culture, all publicity is not necessarily good publicity.
Under Trump, Americans who want less immigration finally have representation in the White House. But there may also be fewer such Americans. The latest Gallup poll found support for reducing immigration at a record low, down 6 points from last year.
“Trump’s fixation on building the wall and reducing the number of immigrants who are allowed into the country appears to be a key reason that those ideas are becoming less popular,” writes the Washington Post’s James Hohmann.
There’s an obvious counterargument to all this: Trump is president of the U.S. and he is pursuing these policies, just as he is cutting taxes, decreasing regulations, and putting conservatives on the Supreme Court. A more eloquent defender of populism and nationalism, a President Steve Bannon, Pat Buchanan, or Peter Thiel, would be generating the same hostile reaction from the same people.
Before reality TV, Trump made a name for himself as a builder. It is fair to ask what lasting structure he is building here. That question is important to the party the president in trying to lead, for Trump is the Republican who actually expanded the electoral map and showed in the medium term how to win with the coalition the GOP already has.
Author Henry Olsen writes:
If Trumpism isn’t the way to appeal to and deliver results for these voters, Republicans are going to have no choice but to come up with something else.
