Now that we have one full year of the Trump presidency in the history books, isn’t it time for Trump’s conservative critics to acknowledge his election was worth it?
This is a question posed with increasing frequency by the president’s supporters. And they have a point: The accomplishments of the last year have been reasonably impressive.
Trump placed a stalwart conservative on the Supreme Court.
Trump authorized the U.S. military to prosecute a serious war on ISIS and, along with our coalition partners, has succeeded in dramatically reducing the land controlled by the genocidal Islamist terrorist organization.
The Trump administration has overturned many Obama-era regulations. Getting the federal government out of the way has enhanced the freedom of Americans and contributed to economic growth and a stock market boom.
Trump signed a tax-reform package that cut taxes for some 80 percent of American households. Final judgment about the tax bill, which also repealed Obamacare’s individual mandate and opened up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is best reserved for when we have a sense of how much it spurs growth and increases the federal deficit. On balance, though, it brought welcome changes to the corporate and individual tax rates.
Trump’s CIA director, Mike Pompeo, released 470,000 documents captured in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, giving the public access to information the Obama administration went to great lengths to keep buried.
Trump has reversed Barack Obama’s naïve and dangerous policy of helping the terror-sponsoring regime in Iran.
Yet similar ends would have come from almost any Republican president given a Republican Congress. The fact that almost all of Trump’s accomplishments could have been expected from a generic Republican should disappoint true-believing populists and belie Trump’s boast, “I alone can fix it.” But the policy achievements of the last year ought to be acknowledged and applauded by his conservative critics. Most of the conservatives who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump would have gladly crawled over broken glass to vote for any other Republican in a race against Clinton.
But for those conservatives who couldn’t back Trump or Clinton, questions about Trump’s ideology were secondary. For them—for us—it was Trump’s character and temperament that made him unfit for office. And the harm done in a single year by President Trump—to the country, the culture, the Republican party, and American conservatism—must also be acknowledged.
The president of the United States endorsed a credibly accused child molester to serve in the U.S. Senate.
The president fired the FBI director because he was unhappy with an investigation into his campaign and transition team.
The president sent antagonistic tweets about nuclear-armed North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, at one point boasting that his nuclear button is “bigger” than Kim’s.
The president revealed highly classified information to top Russian diplomats during an Oval Office meeting.
The president insulted American allies as “s—hole countries”—with the clear implication that the U.S. citizens who have immigrated from those countries have made our country worse.
The president, shortly after a neo-Nazi drove his car into and killed a peaceful protester in Charlottesville, issued a statement condemning the “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.” The violence of “antifa” is indeed condemnable, but antifa had not committed an act of terrorism that day, and the president could never bring himself to forcefully single out the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville. The president followed up that performance with a press conference in which he insisted there had been some “very fine people” participating in a torchlit neo-Nazi rally where marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us.”
The president is a serial liar—making false claims about matters large and small, consequential and trivial. Even by the low standards with which we’ve come to judge honesty in politicians, Trump is a singularly dishonest figure.
The president failed to fulfill his promises to repeal and replace Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood. He shares that blame with congressional Republicans, to be sure. But in his public comments and private discussions with lawmakers, Trump revealed both policy ignorance and lack of discipline, at one point complaining about a “mean” bill from House Republicans, though he himself had previously expressed support for it.
The president is often unfamiliar with his own policy positions—as when he embraced a “clean” DACA renewal at a bipartisan White House meeting in early January or when he tweeted skepticism about a crucial intelligence program that his White House had formally endorsed less than 12 hours earlier. (Trump had apparently been watching Fox & Friends when Judge Andrew Napolitano criticized the program.)
Any list compiling the worst moments of the chaotic first year of the Trump presidency will necessarily be incomplete; the sheer volume of the crazy statements and actions means that scandals that would have overwhelmed previous presidencies barely registered. Reports last week that the president had committed adultery with a pornographic actress months after his youngest son was born—reports strengthened by the release of an interview with the actress and the revelation of alleged “hush money” paid to her on the eve of the 2016 election—were relegated to the fourth or fifth story of the day on the news programs that cover politics.
Looking back on these follies and outrages, no conservative can in good faith maintain that Trump hasn’t done damage to the presidency, our politics, and conservatism.
Was it worth it? Does the good outweigh the bad?
The question isn’t answered by simply measuring the policy achievements of the first year against the president’s erratic and immoral behavior. The latter will very likely diminish the former in the long run. With a booming stock market, the president’s job approval rating hovers in the high 30s, young people are fleeing the party, and a Democratic wave in the midterm elections becomes likelier every week.
Whether or not the GOP gets demolished in 2018, however, conservatives must not abandon their belief that this nation’s political leaders should conduct themselves with moral probity and public decency. It was right to defend that belief in the 1990s, and it’s right to do so now.
One of the worst things about the Trump personality cult is that its adherents do not merely demand that he be credited for his achievements—they demand that his defects of character and temperament be denied or defended. This is not a propensity conservatives should adopt, for any reason.
There are patriotic Americans serving in the administration out of a sense of moral duty and civic obligation. There are conservatives in Congress who hold their tongues rather than risk a public fight with the president, and work quietly to advance conservative policies and principles. But if American conservatism is to survive and thrive it won’t be because its proponents keep quiet. It will be because the American people do not learn to equate conservatism with the worst excesses of Donald Trump.
