President Trump’s embrace of the conservative agenda has healed one rift in the Republican agenda. But he’s exacerbated another with his latest tweets, one featuring a video in which he clotheslines a “CNN” character, the other attacking MSNBC commentator Mika Brzezinski.
This other crack in GOP ranks has always been there. It’s stylistic, behavioral, and often class-based. It fades when Trump lays off provocative, mean, or highly personal tweets. But his abstinence only lasts so long before the bad-boy behavior returns.
Trump’s base loves the edgy tweets. And the more the media, Democrats, feminists, Hollywood types, and foreigners react hysterically, the more the Trump partisans savor the tweets. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York notes, the president, having been a TV entertainer, “knows how to communicate in the style of an entertainer.”
But the other half of the Republican coalition is turned off by these antics. That’s the college-educated, middle- and upper-middle class wing. These folks worry that Trump is driving voters away and crippling the party’s future, especially by alienating younger voters.
And indeed, Trump’s boisterous behavior does have that effect. I’ve seen it in my own family. Trump says he’s simply adopted the ways of a “modern” president. But so far, his leadership style—tweets and all—is his alone.
It was Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield who first touched on the core of the GOP split. A year ago, shortly after Trump announced his candidacy, Mansfield wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the “most obvious observation” about Trump is that he’s “not a gentleman.” Worse, “as a vulgar man [Trump] has an affinity for whatever is vulgar.”
I suspect millions of Republicans agree with Mansfield, even if they voted for Trump. When they recall Republican presidents in their lifetime, they think of Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and both George Bushes. These men qualify as gentlemen and were models of how presidents should act.
Trump would have been wise to follow Nixon’s advice to “never shoot down.” Criticizing peers is fine—for instance, German chancellor Angela Merkel or Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer—but a president doesn’t have many of those. And they are too small a crowd for Trump anyway.
He’s willing and eager to go after anyone who criticizes him, even if they’re far down the totem pole of power and influence. Pre-Trump presidents either ignored critics or left the counter-punching to minions. But in Trump’s case, the list of his personal targets is long. He’s the counter-puncher-in-chief.
His tweets and blurted comments are also a difficult cross for Republican officeholders to bear, since the press delights in badgering them to comment on what the president has said. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell says his concern is not that Trump tweets but what he tweets.
Neither polls that show the unpopularity of his tweeting nor the advice of pro-Trump conservatives such Victor Davis Hanson have persuaded the president to stop the tweet-storms.
“I would urge the president to stop tweeting about nothings and to keep his powder dry for bigger game,” Hanson wrote in American Greatness. “But considering that I have been urging just such pruning of tweets as a matter of strategy for Trump for a long time and that I have been mostly wrong about the downsides of his twitter invective for just as long, perhaps the president knows something I don’t.”
Yes, maybe he does. And perhaps he’s found the solution to the rift among Republicans caused by his style and conduct. If so, he hasn’t tweeted it yet.
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Liberal intolerance is everywhere these days. The best example I’ve encountered came in a piece after the Georgia special House election by Molly Ball, the Atlantic’s excellent political writer. “It’s very sad,” a woman who backed the losing Democrat told Ball. “It tells me that despite all the wonderful people I met in the campaign, there are still a lot of people who support meanness and ignorance and tearing each other apart.” They’re known as Republicans.
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After more than 200 years as our capital, you might think Washington would have inspired many great books. But that’s not the case. The best book on the subject was published in 1941 by historian and novelist Margaret Leach. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Reveille in Washington: 1860 – 1865. As the book’s jacket says, it’s the “story of Our National Capital in its Greatest Ordeal,” the Civil War.
However, two recent books capture Washington in unique ways. One is Prince of Darkness, the chronicle of a half-century in Washington and writing about national politics by the late, great columnist Robert Novak. He died in 2009.
The other is what I have dubbed “The Buchanan Trilogy.” That’s Patrick J. Buchanan, the conservative author, adviser to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, and presidential candidate. Buchanan has the advantage of having grown up in Washington and has spent most of his life in the city. (Leach was from New York, Novak from Illinois.)
As far as I know, the three Buchanan books have never been packaged as a trilogy. But they fit together neatly. The trilogy begins with Right from the Beginning, published in 1991. It’s as enthralling an autobiography as I’ve ever read and the setting is Washington. The highlight is Pat’s punching a cop in Georgetown and being hauled off in a paddy wagon.
Buchanan wrote a raft of conservative books before he got back to Nixon and eventually to Washington with The Greatest Comeback in 2014. It’s about Nixon’s rising from the ashes after losing the 1962 governor’s race in California and winning the presidency in 1968. Buchanan was at Nixon’s side most of the time.
The third book is Nixon’s White House Wars, published this past spring. It’s a tale of a president’s failure to save himself from being engulfed in a scandal. Buchanan makes it clear that Nixon wasn’t a conservative and that he had filled his staff with liberals or mushy moderates. Buchanan was nearly alone as the White House conservative.
For all I know, Buchanan may be writing a book about his two years as communications director for President Reagan. If so, the trilogy would have to morph into “The Buchanan Quartet.” Stranger things have happened.
