Maybe President Trump can bring peace to the Middle East after all. He has already accomplished something nearly as improbable.
Trump has made the predominantly liberal media fall in love with former President George W. Bush.
“George W. Bush just laid a major smackdown on Trumpism,” enthused CNN’s Chris Cillizza. The Washington Post celebrated Bush’s “anti-Trump manifesto.”
“George W. Bush finally says what he thinks about Trump,” read Vanity Fair’s headline.
“Former President George W. Bush never mentioned his name but delivered what sounded like a sustained rebuke to President Trump on Thursday, decrying nationalism, protectionism and the coarsening of public debate while calling for a robust response to Russian interference in American democracy,” the New York Times reported.
It is now easier than ever for a Republican to gain what the American Spectator’s Tom Bethell has called “strange new respect,” the phenomenon whereby putative conservatives are rewarded with lavish praise for suddenly taking liberal positions. They can keep their old political stances and repudiate Trump.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Monday evening delivered a speech hitting many of the same themes as Bush’s and received nearly identical praise. But McCain has had an on-and-again, off-again relationship with liberal journalists for twenty years, most recently illustrated when he was alternately celebrated and denounced by the same people as his Obamacare “skinny repeal” vote hung in the balance in late July.
Mitt Romney is relatively new to this kind of adulation, however. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is among the latest converts to the idea that maybe binders full of women are not the worst thing ever visited upon the American public.
Bush, McCain, and Romney are all decent, honorable men. It is understandable why after a week of watching Trump refuse to take the high road in controversies about fallen soldiers that some people would begin to miss their leadership.
Yet it should not require a particularly long memory to recall that not long ago all three of these men were vilified in over-the-top terms by people eager to use them as a cudgel with which to beat their political party now. Bush and Romney are (mostly) off the hook not only because they criticize Trump, but because they no longer wield any real political power.
The treatment of the last three Republican presidential candidates played a role in making rank-and-file GOP voters eager to nominate someone who fails to turn the other cheek to a fault.
Nor are these three amigos without some share of the blame for Trump either, Bush and McCain especially. They have never grappled with the extent to which the “nationalism” and fear they now decry may have been bigger motivators of support for some of their own policies — such as responding to 9/11 by invading Iraq — than “values” or the American creed. Nor do they acknowledge the degree to which the failure of some of those policies made the electorate question whether “American security and prosperity were directly tied to the success of freedom in the world” by failing to deliver either American security or the success of freedom in the countries where we have been at war.
What was that about avoiding the temptation to “judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions”?
When the Republican base wanted immigration control, their leaders did not provide it. Neither did they persuade their own supporters of the rightness of their approach, which was a modified version of the bipartisan 1986 legislation that demonstrably failed to curtail illegal immigration. Republicans voted for Bush and McCain anyway, but by 2016 were willing to flirt with stronger stuff.
Republicans needed leaders who would responsibly address their concerns. They did not get them. Instead they got Trump, who (depending on your assessment of his motives) is either unwilling or unable to keep a lid on the worst people who speak in his name.
Trump is repeating his predecessors’ mistakes but in the opposite ideological direction, failing to address the concerns that led to his election and in the process rehabilitating the political forces he opposes. The conservative columnist Michael Brendan Dougherty warned last year that Trump “is instead making the causes of a pro-American trade policy and foreign policy more stupid, ugly, and repulsive to many who would benefit from them.”
In the current climate, those words seem prophetic. Now Trump must await the moment when he becomes useful for delivering thinly veiled rebukes of the next Republican president.
