Anti-anti-anti-Trump?

In the beginning, there were the Trumpers. (Trumpkins? I don’t know that we’ve settled on a neutral term yet, like “Reaganites.”) We can take it as given that in any group there are going to be bums and bad actors. But let’s put them aside for the moment and only talk about fair-minded, smart people who genuinely think that Donald Trump will be a good president doing important work that benefits the country.

Charles Kesler is one of these people. Ditto Conrad Black. If you want to read the most convincing arguments for why Trump will succeed—not boosterism, not score-settling apologetics—they’re a good start. To sketch their case in the briefest terms: Trump has made good appointments through the highest levels of his administration. He is vigorously working to keep campaign promises. The first three meetings with foreign leaders went smoothly and, despite its rushed and clunky implementation, the travel ban has provoked the left into a disproportionate response and allowed Trump to seize the political center. As such, they believe the president ought to be vigorously defended from criticism.

Then there are the anti-Trumpers. My friend David Frum has been a persistent critic of Trump. His argument is that despite the areas of policy agreement between conservatives and Trump, Trump’s characterological problems present a larger peril. In short: What does it profit a conservative if he gains the Supreme Court, but loses the republic?

Which is not to say that Trump is a Mussolini-style authoritarian, but that he might be a soft-authoritarian. And that “might be” is crucial: Let’s say, for the sake of argument, the chances of Trump moving in an anti-democratic, authoritarian direction are very low. Maybe 1-in-100. On the one hand, those are pretty good odds. On the other hand, since the Civil War, the chances of authoritarianism manifesting in America has been roughly 0.0000 percent. As Peter Thiel would remind us, the biggest jump is from zero to one.

The difference between a sincere conservative Trumper and a sincere conservative anti-Trumper might be described like this: One thinks that the more-certain payoffs of a Trump administration are worth the tiny risk of an extinction-level event. The other thinks that even a small chance of such a radically bad outcome more than counterbalances any likely policy gains.

Which leads us to the anti-anti-Trumpers. There’s an emerging group of conservatives who seem reluctant to criticize Trump, but who aren’t particularly interested in defending him, directly. Instead, they tend to focus on the media reaction to Trump and the antics of the left. I think my friend Mollie Hemingway is a good example here.

Just as an objective matter, the mainstream media has been pretty awful on the subject of Trump. They’ve rushed out stories they shouldn’t have. They’ve airbrushed history, taking after Trump for policies they had no problem with under Obama. They’ve hyperventilated with outrageous charges.

And the professional left is even worse. They seem incapable of understanding that the real Donald Trump is worrisome enough that they don’t have to conjure up an imaginary Trump to oppose. It’s crying wolf. And it’s not helpful, either to the country at large or to their own political/ideological cause.

Here’s why I get the anti-anti-Trumpers: I do not like Milo Yiannopoulos. At all. He’s the worst sort of carnival barker and if he didn’t have a British accent, conservatives would understand that he’s nothing more than an attention-whore who has single white femaled Ann Coulter’s career—without bothering to learn anything first, unlike Coulter—and gotten rich by hurting conservatism. Not everyone the left hates is an ally of conservatives. Some of them are simply jerks. Just look at Donald Sterling.

I say this not to pile on, but as a way of proving my anti-Yiannopoulos bona fides. And with all that said, go read this hit piece on the guy from the smarty-pants liberal magazine the Pacific Standard and try not to root for him. You’ll succeed, I suspect. Yiannopoulos is that loathsome. But the attack is so overwrought and laden with identity-politics BS that it’s a close call. So I understand the place where anti-anti-Trumpism is coming from.

And yet, I increasingly find myself drawn to anti-anti-anti-Trumpism. If that’s a thing.

Certainly, the media are terrible. But this is not new. Are they worse now than when they were covering for Obama eight years ago? Or hounding George W. Bush 16 years ago? I’m open to the possibility that they might be—after all, one of the central tenets of conservatism is that everything is always getting worse.

But I don’t really see it yet. Or, at least, if they’re worse it seems to be a difference of degree, and not of kind.

And is the professional left worse? If anything, I think they’re actually better behaved, so far. Remember the Bush-Hitler stuff that was standard operating procedure through most of his administration? Remember the public assassination fantasies? Remember the serious talk about “war crimes”? We may get to the point where the left is more unhinged over Trump than they were over Bush. We’re not there yet. We’re not even in the same zipcode.

But when it comes to political norms, Trump does represent a difference in kind. He’s the first president in at least 40 years not to have released his tax returns. The first to remain entangled in his family business while in office. The first to have—possibly? maybe?—been the beneficiary of some—a lot? a little?—assistance from a foreign power during his campaign. (And on this last question we won’t know the full truth unless Congress decides to conduct a full investigation. Which it won’t.)

Now maybe you think this Trumpian re-norming is a bad thing. Maybe you think it’s not necessarily good, but that the policy-payoffs will make up for it. Or maybe you think it’s not really a problem.

But it’s a thing. Trump is the thing. And focusing on the excesses of the anti-Trump forces means focusing on a meta-issue rather than the primary issue.

Trump has already done good things. Mad Dog Mattis! Neil Gorsuch! Pulling out of the insufferable White House Correspondents’ Dinner! He’ll almost certainly do more good in the next four years.

But he is also likely to do things conservatives don’t like. Maybe it’ll be something small, like giving amnesty to the DREAMers. (Though conservatives didn’t see this as a “small” issue for anyone else.) Or maybe it’ll be something big and terrifying. Remember how Trump spent the last month of the campaign insisting that the election was being rigged and slyly hinting that he might not accept the results? That was worrisome behavior from a non-incumbent.

Now imagine if Trump were to say the exact same things in October of 2020 as the sitting president and commander-in-chief.

This nightmare scenario doesn’t require some imaginary Trump-Hitler. It just supposes that he repeats recent behavior in the same context. It’s the type of hypothetical that ought to concentrate the minds of conservatives.

As Jack Reacher likes to say: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.