The other day my wife sent me an email with the subject line, “Submitting to His Will.” As it turned out, it was an article about the Feast of St. Teresa of Ávila. “Christ does not force our will,” the saint wrote. “He takes only what we give him. But he does not give himself entirely until he sees that we yield ourselves entirely to him.”
But I have a confession to make: When I saw the subject line I thought it was about President-elect Trump.
In my defense, I get a lot similar messages these days. This was, of course, foretold.
“Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump,” predicted former reality television star and incoming White House aide Omarosa Manigault.
Blogger Jazz Shaw put it slightly less colorfully, warning that unless Trump-skeptical conservatives get on board with the Trump agenda, “you are no longer momentarily estranged friends. You are, to borrow the title of a truly awful Julia Roberts movie, sleeping with the enemy.” [Emphasis in the original]. We saw this sort of binary logic a lot during the campaign: if you were not for Trump, you must be for Hillary Clinton.
But as the Age of Trump dawns, conservatives should realize that binary politics no longer applies. To be sure, Democrats and their Hollywood allies will continue to overreach and overreact, making them an easy foil. The ludicrous attacks on Betsy DeVos, for instance, remind us of their obsession with protecting a failed educational status quo. The boycotts, protests and assorted hysterical tantrums remind us why voters have turned against fashionable Left.
But on a host of issues, the lines will be blurrier. It is, after all, possible to criticize the wrongheadedness of Democratic Rep. John Lewis’s comments on Trump’s legitimacy, while also being chagrined by Trump’s petulant Twitter response to the civil rights icon. Conservatives can affirm that Trump won the election fairly and freely, but also recognize the gravity and implications of Russia’s interference in the campaign.
Independent conservatives can applaud Trump’s support for Israel and still be thoroughly appalled by his slavish adulation of Vladimir Putin and terrified by his attitude toward our NATO allies.
In theory, it is possible to be a Trump Republican and still believe that character matters, although it’s going to be interesting to see how that works out.
The real test of this for-us-or-against-us binary politics is likely to come soon, when we finally find out what Trump has in mind for healthcare, entitlements, taxes and stimulus spending. Earlier this week, Trump told the Washington Post that he had a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare that would guarantee that everyone would be covered at lower costs. But, Yuval Levin reports, “the conservative health-care universe, including some people on Trump’s own team, quickly concluded that the separate administration plan he described was entirely a figment of Trump’s imagination.” So, will Republicans now be pressured to bow the knee to a purely imaginary plan?
And then there is the budget itself. Will Tea Party conservatives who railed against the Obama stimulus plan, now be expected get on board the Trump infrastructure plan? Or put another way: Is it possible to remain fiscal conservative, who cares about things like a national debt, without being a traitor to the Trump Revolution?
The new president has made it clear that he has no interest in reforming entitlements and has now apparently rejected the GOP’s “border adjustment” bill to tax imports and exempt exports. And yet, he still wants deep tax cuts, even though they may explode the deficit. Without that tax and without entitlement reform, the numbers simply don’t add up. “There is no way to balance the budget without entitlement reform,” House Budget Committee member Tom Cole says, “It’s just simply mathematically impossible.”
So there are no longer two sides in most Washington fights. Trump is a third side. This leaves conservatives with a choice: follow their party or follow their principles. They can submit to Trump’s will or they can stand for something. Either choice has consequences.
Charles Sykes is a Milwaukee-based author and commentator. He is working on a book titled “How the Right Lost Its Mind,’ which will be published in October by St. Martin’s press. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
