The cult of personality that has risen around Donald Trump has reached even more absurd levels in the new year. The latest development is that some conservatives are giving credence to questions about whether Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is a natural-born U.S. citizen.
As far as actual substance is concerned here, there is no real issue. Cruz is unquestionably eligible to be president. This is something that solicitors general for Presidents Bush and Obama explained in the Harvard Law Review last year. And for those who would dismiss such sources as too “Establishment,” the case for Cruz’s eligibility has also been outlined on several occasions by conservative constitutional lawyer and talk radio host Mark Levin, among many others.
But the focus on Cruz’s citizenship is less important than what it says about how misguided many conservatives have become due to their myopic obsession with being anti-Establishment.
What this group of conservatives has lost sight of are the underlying reasons to be skeptical of the Establishment. Conservatives often find themselves in opposition to elites for two main reasons. One, because elites are often telling them how to live their lives (in contradiction to the idea of a government of limited enumerated powers); and two, because it’s hard to trust Republican elites to actually advance a conservative agenda once in power.
Somewhere along the line, hating the Establishment became so important to a certain group of conservatives, that it’s an end in and of itself. It’s now reached the point at which they’re willing embrace crackpot theories a reality TV celebrity is trying to use to tar a genuine conservative.
Sure, Trump is mocked by the media. He’s dismissed by pundits. And he gives nightmares to the party bosses. But that doesn’t mean he’s doing so in the name of advancing conservatism. Quite the opposite.
Think of the major issues that angered conservatives during the Obama years.
Republicans spent much of the past seven years fighting against Obamacare. Guess what? Trump has advocated policies to the left of Obamacare. In his 2000 book the America We Deserve, Trump wrote of healthcare, “I am a conservative on most issues but a liberal on this one.” He went on to write, “We must have universal healthcare.” It’s hard to think of something more of an affront to conservative values than saying that it’s the federal government’s role to provide everybody with healthcare. In the book, he suggested looking at the socialist Canadian healthcare system as a “prototype” for the type of system needed in the U.S.
Even during this campaign, as Trump attacked Obamacare, he claimed that “As far as single payer, it works in Canada, it works incredibly well in Scotland.” In the real world, the socialist Canadian healthcare system is besieged with massive wait times that has wealthier Canadians heading to the U.S. for surgeries. As for Scotland, its socialist system does much worse than the U.S. when it comes to cancer outcomes. Last month, 10 of 14 of Scotland’s health boards were flagged for missing targets for treating cancer patients within 62 days after referral.
One of the regular criticisms among conservatives for much of Obama’s first term was that he did nothing to tackle the nation’s long-term debt problem. But the major driver of that debt is entitlement programs. One of the major victories for conservatives during the Obama years was convincing the normally timid party establishment to embrace Medicare reform.
But Trump scolded conservatives for this. Speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2013, he said, “if you think you’re going to change very substantially for the worse Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in any substantial way, and at the same time you think you’re going to win elections, it just really is not going to happen.” In other words, he exhibited the sort of defeatism on the issue of entitlement reform that conservatives have been fighting for decades.
During the current campaign, he’s demagogued Ben Carson for wanting to reform Medicare, claiming that the insolvent program “worked.”
Right now, conservatives are outraged because Obama has announced executive action on gun control. But Trump has a record that should worry gun rights’ supporters.
Conservatives have fought to make stricter gun control a non-starter for most elected Republicans. Yet in his 2000 book, Trump lamented, “The Republicans walk the NRA line and refuse even limited restrictions.” He wrote, “I support the ban on assault weapons and I also support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun.”
Sure, Trump would now argue that he’s pro gun rights. But keep in mind that Trump has excused his past donations to Democrats and friendship with the Clintons as merely the acts of a businessman who was trying to curry favor to advance his interests. Accepting this logic, it’s no surprise that he’s comfortable spouting out whatever he feels he needs to in order to appeal to his current customers — primary voters.
Now, it is true that a lot of Trump’s support is coming from non-traditional primary voters and that most conservatives see right through him. But to those anti-Establishment conservatives who are backing him to the point of defending a smear against an actual conservative candidate, they need to realize that the enemy of your enemy isn’t necessarily your friend. And the whole point of combating the Establishment is to do so in the service of conservative principles, not to feed the ego of a celebrity.
