Trumpism Corrupts

Donald Trump is neither conservative nor especially Republican. He is given to fits of pique. He has neither a coherent political philosophy nor intellectual curiosity, which makes him unreliable as a champion of anything other than his own interests. We knew this before the debate.

What was clarified at the debate was not the nature of Trump but of Trumpism.

For the last eight months, the sophisticated view of Trump and Trumpism has gone something like this: Donald Trump may be a huckster, but he has done a service to the Republican party by bringing new, nontraditional voters into the tent. He has shown his fellow candidates that they can flatly reject the demands of political correctness and need not drop into turtle-guard whenever the New York Times takes a shot at them. And while Trump the man is not presidential material, Trumpism — that is, the collection of populist and nationalist concerns that have become wrapped up in the man’s campaign — is potentially very helpful. Over the last 16 years, the Republican party has been largely ineffectual, both in power and in opposition. It has been hostage to a donor class that is almost completely at odds with Republican voters.

Trumpism, in other words, looked like a political movement that could — and possibly even should — be incorporated into the GOP.

There is some truth to much of this. But it turns out that Trumpism has corrosive effects, too. Witness how it has corrupted people in its orbit.

Nine months ago, if you had asked Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, Jerry Falwell Jr., or Ann Coulter whether they would endorse a figure who takes the Code Pink, Michael Moore, MoveOn.org view of Iraq (“Bush lied, people died”), one suspects they all would have recoiled at the prospect. Yet in the hours after Trump insisted that George W. Bush intentionally lied the country into war, not one of the major figures who have endorsed him was willing to contradict his claim.

Sarah Palin — John McCain’s running mate — has been stonily silent on Trump’s conspiracy theory. Contacted through his spokesman, Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. declined to comment on it. Pressed by The Weekly Stand-ard’s Michael Warren, Scott Brown issued a mealy-mouthed non sequitur, saying, “I’m more focused on how we deal with terror challenges of today, not yesterday.” And Coulter, who has reached the stage in life where she is capable of falling in love serially with Mitt Romney and then Donald Trump, actually tweeted out a quasi-defense of Trump: “Bush also said Harriet Miers=qualified & amnesty wasn’t ‘amnesty,’ so he did lie.” Five days later she changed course somewhat in a column where she allowed that “Trump is right about President Bush not keeping us safe — though not about his ‘Bush lied’ argument that makes me want to strangle him.” But don’t worry, Coulter insisted that Trump didn’t actually mean what he said, that he was just a “scamp” just “doing wheelies” and “taunting” the rest of the Republican party. Like so many of the people in thrall to Trumpism, Coulter believes that Trump is fully committed to everything he says. Except for when he’s just posturing.

One needn’t be an admirer of George W. Bush, or a believer in his freedom agenda, or even a supporter of the Iraq war to understand how pernicious this is. Whatever your views on the wisdom of Iraq, no serious person believes that Bush masterminded a massive fraud, with the help of his cabinet and the entire national security apparatus; that his “lies” then managed to fool the governments and intelligence agencies of a dozen allies; and that, somehow, none of the evidence of this scheme ever managed to leak into the open.

It is almost certain that none of Trump’s endorsers actually believes this theory either. And yet these public figures refuse to contradict Trump’s assertion because they do believe that acceptance of every one of Trump’s utterances is the price of admission for Trumpism.

You see evidence of the ill-effects of Trumpism not just in Trump’s endorsers, but among his enablers in conservative media, too. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, admitted that with his “Bush lied” line, “Trump sounded like the Daily Kos blog.” “[O]n a Republican debate stage, defending Planned Parenthood in language used by the left, going after George W. Bush and Jeb Bush and the entire Bush family, for the most part, using the terminology of Democrats, people think that Trump was out of control, that he had emotional incontinence that night,” Limbaugh said.

But Limbaugh then proceeded to construct an alibi for Trump. He floated the idea that, because South Carolina is an open primary, Trump was really just “strategically” “making a move on independents and Democrats.”

People who ought to know better — who almost certainly do know better — seem to have embraced this article of faith: Trump is leading in the polls. Anyone leading in the polls is brilliant. So Trump is brilliant. Therefore everything Trump does or says must be brilliant, too.

This weird, unfalsifiable dogma winds up crowding out honest analysis among Trump’s endorsers and enablers. They see their suspension of rationality as the cost of doing business in promoting Trumpism. If that truly is the price of Trumpism — if one can’t be against illegal immigration and the donor class, yet also think that conspiracy theorists ought not be suffered in high office — then it is too high.

And so this is where we are, on the eve of South Carolina’s vote: Trump remains a figure not well-suited to the presidency. And Trumpism has been revealed not as a path forward for a party desperately in need of reform, but a zombie virus that is making fools of the people who embrace it.