Trumpism’s next act

So it remains an open question how much economic populism and skepticism of foreign entanglements, two things that distinguished Trump ideologically from at least the previous three Republican presidential nominees and arguably more, contributed to making him president, as opposed to his celebrity and reputation as a businessman.

But we now know that, at the least, it wasn’t just Hillary Clinton. Joe Biden was a more popular candidate overall than his predecessor as Democratic standard-bearer, and, nevertheless, Trump competed. Whatever the final results are in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania after various lawsuits work their way through the courts, the Rust Belt plus the Sunbelt remains a viable path for a Republican majority in the Electoral College.

Trump, as a businessman, did not understand that personnel was policy, so he built an administration in which some people were committed to his policy program, some were loyal to him personally, and some were competent at wielding the levers of government, but very few checked all three boxes. Trump spent 2017 not building bridges across the country — “Infrastructure Week” became a punchline — but building them with Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. It was understandable given their poor relations during the campaign but was ultimately a missed opportunity at a time when Trump had the most political capital to spend.

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz may be the only full-spectrum Trumpist to have emerged. Some Republicans are with Trump on trade or immigration but not ending “endless wars”; others are with Trump on foreign policy but not immigration or populism; still others share his ability to connect with conservative cable news viewers but no distinctive policy program. Gaetz channels Trump in all three areas. Is that enough to carry this particular torch effectively?

COVID-19 complicates any evaluation of Trumpism. With the benefit of hindsight, a convincing Trump win without the pandemic or with a pandemic response that inspired greater public confidence no longer seems absurd. Even in spite of Trump, a working-class conservatism that appeals to more black and Hispanic voters than anything Jack Kemp earnestly and admirably attempted to do can be seen in nascent form if you squint hard enough. Will anyone take up its mantle?

W. James Antle III is the Washington Examiner’s politics editor.

Matt Welch:
A confounding feature of the late, can’t-really-call-it-great Trump era of American politics, if current results hold and Joe Biden becomes president-elect, was that the self-appointed theoreticians of this electoral asteroid strike were, much like the public at large, unresolvably polarized on the basic facts of the case. Was President Trump the last atavistic gasp of our wheezing white supremacy or the blunt-talking vanguard of a multiethnic class war against political correctness? There were arguments, and careers to leverage, on both sides, with every incentive to pretend the opposing interpretation had zero merit.

Trapped in such gaseous clouds, I grasp for the handholds of tangible policy on issues I hold dear. Trump grew the size of government more in four years than his predecessor did in eight, at the irresponsible end of a historically long boom. He submitted America’s resignation from its long-standing job as the world’s chief tariff-reducer and refugee-absorber. He broke stuff, bad and good, without thought of replacement.

But assessing Trumpism as literal policy or even aspirational ideology willfully ignores that his connection to voters was, and probably will continue to be, more primal than attachments to individual policies. Trump exposed something that political journalists and think-tank thumb-suckers still haven’t quite come to grips with five years later: Policy is malleable, secondary; people consume politics for the thrill (and in his case, hilarity) of belonging, and also as a gesture of collective self-defense from a scary, overhyped Other.

Democrats would like to believe the preceding sentence only applies to one side; if only we were so lucky. Trump is merely the leading American avatar thus far of an irrational populism that crosses borders and political aisles. Having understandably lost faith in elites and mediating institutions, populations around the world now seek protection, revenge … or at least a little humor at the expense of those failing institutions. Now that such market demand has presented itself, the main question is who next will rise to supply it. Because someone will.

Matt Welch is editor-at-large of Reason magazine.

Carrie Severino:
If one word could capture what Trumpism means in the context of the judiciary, it would be constitutionalism. More than any president in living memory, President Trump selected nominees for the federal bench based on their commitment to originalism and textualism. That means that the text and original public meaning of the Constitution, not any policy agenda or public opinion poll, reigns supreme in the courtroom.

While this may sound like a straightforward guidepost for any judge, it has long been a struggle for Republican presidents to find nominees dedicated to that ideal. One reason is that the dominant legal culture in the United States long encouraged judges to blur the lines between law and policy. Politicizing the bench, combined with raw numbers and later the threat of the filibuster in the Senate, translated into a preference for nominees who had not stuck their necks out and gone against the grain.

That is not how Trump and Trumpism approach the public square, and in the face of a determined president and Senate leadership, that changed during this administration. Trump nominated to various courts prospects who had taken professional risks in the service of their principles. Attorneys who had worked with organizations such as the Becket Fund and the Alliance Defending Freedom — which the Left has vilified but which have scored key litigation victories for religious freedom — now sit on both trial courts and courts of appeals. Three circuit courts of appeals have flipped from a majority of Democratic-appointed judges to a Republican-appointed majority.

Particularly on the appellate level, whether we look at circuit courts or the Supreme Court, Trump-appointed judges have distinguished themselves for their protectiveness of both constitutional rights and constitutional structure.

That is in the spirit of the greatest justices of modern times, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Both of them understood the importance of the structural Constitution to the preservation of liberty, as well as the importance of respecting what the Constitution left to the people’s elected representatives. But both were selected by different presidents — presidents who, despite good intentions, fared decidedly worse with the other associate justices they appointed.

Now, of course, all three of President Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court are unabashed originalists and textualists. The president’s paramount judicial legacy is a court that finally has a majority of originalists, a goal that was a long time coming.

Carrie Severino is chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network and co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court.

Noah Rothman:
Even despite the Republican Party’s triumphs over the course of Barack Obama’s presidency, Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House in 2016 was a symptom of a movement in crisis.

Trump’s campaign was explicitly hostile toward the party’s long-dominant conservative philosophical orientation. But President Trump has not governed as he campaigned, in part because Trumpism was never a governing philosophy but a prickly disposition. As such, this period in Republican history, if Trump’s presidential loss holds, may be less a realignment than a brief identity crisis.

The president’s administration was staffed with significant input from Beltway-based conservative think tanks. The judges he appointed were vetted and endorsed by Republican legal experts with George W. Bush-era bona fides and confirmed by eight-term Sen. Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s majority leader.

Trump’s hawkish policies toward traditional adversaries such as Russia were crafted by veterans such as H.R. McMaster, James Mattis, John Bolton, and others. Maybe the most far-reaching achievement of Trump’s presidency, securing stable diplomatic relationships between Israel and the Middle East’s Sunni states, is attributable partly to Trump’s hostility toward sclerotic consensuses around the so-called “peace process” and partly to the vast intellectual infrastructure within the conservative movement that has been of the same opinion for decades, a combination in which both sides were necessary but neither was sufficient.

On the other hand, the fiasco around the president’s executive order prohibiting nationals from predominantly Muslim countries, rebranding family separations at the border, and a government shutdown to force Democrats to finance a border wall all were purer expressions of the Trumpist disposition without much, if any, establishment buy-in, and all were failures.

So, where does that leave us?

The path of least resistance will always be to fight the last war — in this case, to recreate the last winning coalition. The unavoidable conclusion that Republican politicians will draw from election results both in 2018 and 2020 is that Donald Trump helped Republicans when he was on the ballot and hurt them when he was not. That fact alone will serve to reinforce (or, at least, stifle critics of) some preferred myths about the Republican Party that are cherished by Republican voters. Namely, failures in both governance and at the polls are attributable to saboteurs within the party’s own ranks.

But if the Republican Party concludes that the best way forward is to reanimate Trumpism ahead of 2024, it will struggle in the execution. As it was in the Obama-era, the GOP may soon again be an opposition party. As was the case in the Obama era, opportunists will arise who will insist that the only thing preventing Republicans from passing an affirmative agenda against the wishes of the sitting president and his majorities in Congress is the will to see it through. While it’s a seductive promise — progressives are seduced by the same criticisms of Democratic leaders in the House — it is not a governing program, but a disposition.

Noah Rothman is associate editor of Commentary magazine.

Park MacDougald:
As I write this, the 2020 presidential election is still undecided. Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia are too close to call; both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have expressed confidence in their eventual victory; Trump has accused Democrats of trying to “steal” the election and has asked for a recount in Wisconsin; and Republicans have filed lawsuits in Pennsylvania and Michigan. It looks right now as if Biden will take the presidency by the skin of his teeth, but there’s still a lot of uncertainty mere days after the election.

Still and all, Trump, as he did in 2016, seriously overperformed the preelection polling and defied experts on both the Left and Right who predicted a historic Democratic landslide (clued-in Republicans I spoke to before the election were giving Trump a 10% or lower chance of victory). Although early exit polls are notoriously imprecise, the president appears to have improved on his 2016 performance in cities (Cuban-heavy Miami in particular) and among black and Latino voters, especially men. In fact, if those notoriously imprecise early exit poll numbers hold up, Trump’s share of the nonwhite vote was the largest by any Republican candidate since Richard Nixon in 1960, and he appears to have doubled his share of the gay and transgender vote, from 14% to 28%. You play to win, and it looks like Trump lost. But these results suggest that without the external shock of COVID-19, Trump could have won a comfortable victory, and done so in part by winning over voters whom many believed he had permanently alienated from the Republican Party.

There’s a risk of overinterpreting these numbers: Biden (again, according to exit polls) still won nearly three-quarters of nonwhite voters, a majority of union members, and a majority of those making under $100,000. So be skeptical of grand claims that Trump has turned the GOP into a multiracial, working-class party. But these results are, at minimum, a major challenge to anyone arguing that Trump’s brand of populist conservatism is nothing more than the death rattle of a dwindling white majority, or that the only future for Republicans is a return to the pre-2016 status quo of free trade, fiscal austerity, and foreign-policy interventionism. It’s unclear whether Trumpism is a viable electoral strategy for anyone other than Trump: a more staid populist, such as Josh Hawley, might do less than Trump to frighten suburban white women, but he’d also be unlikely to get as much love from Waka Flocka. What is clear is that Trumpism isn’t an obvious loser, so don’t expect it to go away — even if Trump does.

Park MacDougald is Life and Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.

Karol Markowicz:
The Donald Trump years were an extended break, for both sides, from ideology. It was the Age of Personality. And across the political spectrum, personal policy preferences suddenly mattered a lot less than what Trump was for or against.

“I’m not a Donald Trump fan, but…” began compliments or defenses of the president. He became an identity marker: supporter or resister.

All of which makes it difficult to pin down a historical judgment on the past few years on the basis of policy. So what lesson or lessons, then, will live on?

The big takeaway from the Trump years for conservatives should be that the era of politeness when dealing with an impossibly biased, and agenda-driven, legacy media has ended and should never return.

Republicans in general, and conservatives in particular, had come to expect that they would never be treated fairly by the news media. To compensate, we’ve created our own universe of publications and radio and TV stations, including internet-based shows and channels. To the legacy media, Republicans fell into two categories: Hitler or worse than Hitler. Republicans considered avoidance better than confrontation.

Donald Trump didn’t.

Supporters made Trump’s willingness to fight a key refrain. He does not take things in stride. He punches back. Even for conservatives who opposed him, such as myself, it was fun to watch. He called out everything and everyone.

The establishment media, so long completely irresponsible when covering nonliberals, became even more so when covering Trump. He did not let any of it slide. He exposed the absurdity of their open bias.

The press had treated good men such as George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney as if they were monsters. Now, they had an actual monster, and he was eating them. It was glorious.

“He fights” became a caricature, a joke on Trump supporters whenever Trump did something ridiculous or mean or unpresidential — and a taunt when he backed away from a fight. But here’s hoping the combat with the media is a lasting quality for future Republican presidential candidates. Much about Donald Trump’s personality shouldn’t be replicated. But conservatives should keep fighting.

Karol Markowicz is a New York Post columnist and a Washington Examiner contributing writer.

Daniel Foster:
I wrote after the election of 2016 — and it was no more an original thought then than it is now — that electoral landslides are easy to frame as monocausal, while squeakers are wildly overdetermined. Joseph Biden appears as of this writing to have won a squeaker, with a couple hundred thousand votes in just three or four critical states making the difference. A fellow once said that victory has a thousand fathers, while defeat is an orphan. But when the difference between the one and the other is such a fine slice, there’s plenty of paternity to go around for both.

Just as Hillary Clinton might be president if she’d managed to find a hotel with good water pressure in Milwaukee, the man who defeated her might have eked out another Electoral College win if he’d let John McCain requiescat in pace. If you find these examples capricious or trivial, that’s the point. We’re talking about moving a tenth of a percent of a tenth of a percent of voters.

Raw contingency doesn’t make for great politics or great punditry. But I remain as convinced now as I was four years ago that it is at the heart of the MAGA phenomenon. There were no Greek Fates that brought the unlikely president down the escalator. It was not his destiny to lead us out of the Obama era. He carried a plurality against a massive and divided Republican primary field and famously sucked out “an inside straight” against the most personally reviled, and thus the most consequential, Democratic candidate in recent history. He wasn’t going to stay lucky forever.

There are still lessons to be drawn from his win and his near miss. The early data makes it pretty clear that he appealed to slices of the electorate the GOP had previously struggled with: blue-collar workers (which is not the same as poor ones), some minorities, and people who’d previously been disengaged or nonvoters. But given that this time, he also ran behind his party’s Senate candidates in several states and in a number of congressional districts that the Republicans actually flipped, it’s also true that “Republicans for Biden,” however reviled by the redcaps, were a factor.

Again, that’s the point: Nearly everything was a factor, and there is enough data and anecdote to support a thousand pet theories about what it portends for the future of the party and the republic. As a chief executive, he supplied a comprehensive antagonism, two or three basic commitments (DEALS and LAW and ORDER), and, above all, a lifelong passion for entertainment. The rest of his presidency and his policy was furnished by a rotating gallery of Republicans, both alternative and establishment. Representatives of both groups, and many others, will be arguing about the legacy of MAGA long after the man at its center has moved on to selling something else.

Daniel Foster is a consultant and contributing editor at National Review.