Far too many conservatives excuse their embrace of President Trump by using the transactional argument that they must overlook his flaws because he supposedly delivers so many conservative policy victories. They are sadly mistaken.
Aside from a few key areas, Trump has been a disaster for long-term conservative interests.
Yes, Trump has kept his promise to make a priority of appointing highly qualified, solidly conservative judges. And yes, he has used the levers of executive power to reduce regulatory burdens in many areas of American life, to broaden healthcare choices, and to promote religious liberty. These are good things, for which he and his team deserve credit. On both fronts, though, he is doing little more than almost any Republican president would.
The reason Trump can deregulate so much by executive fiat is that President Barack Obama imposed so many regulations by executive fiat in the first place. In many cases, Trump is merely undoing what Obama did. Yet, unless Trump secures the changes legislatively, rather than bureaucratically, his changes could prove just as evanescent as Obama’s
On judges, Trump benefits by the elimination of the filibuster and other Senate rules changes or reinterpretations that make confirming nominees easier. Plus, three decades of organized conservative work has provided Trump a much more developed “farm team” of highly qualified conservative lawyers than ever existed before. Again, almost any Republican president with those advantages would do the same.
Indeed, Trump has secured only one significant legislative (as opposed to administrative) success of an unambiguously conservative nature, but even that required no heavy lifting from him. The corporate tax cut package of which he boasts was entirely former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s baby, painstakingly birthed and nourished by Ryan for years, just waiting for a two-chamber Republican congressional majority to pass it and a Republican president to sign it. Passed under “reconciliation” rules requiring simple majorities in both houses of Congress, it never faced serious headwinds.
Meanwhile, Trump’s failures have been significant. His ham-handedness was largely responsible for the failure to repeal and replace Obamacare, which he fumbled despite enjoying Republican majorities in Congress. He ended up with less money appropriated for a border wall than Democrats themselves originally offered. He shut down the government, causing massive problems for IRS responsiveness to frustrated taxpayers that persist to this day, without a single conservative victory to show for the shutdown.
On some fronts, Trump hasn’t merely failed but instead has moved rapidly in the wrong direction. To put things in context, Trump has been the single most profligate president in U.S. history, with the fiscal situation becoming steadily worse. On the single bedrock issue that has defined conservatism for the past 75 years, namely an antipathy to high federal spending and debt, Trump has been worse than any president, including Barack Obama. Trillion-dollar annual deficits at a time of full employment and no major war constitute a massive systemic threat to the American economy. It all but guarantees that the next cyclic downturn will be not just a slowdown, but a catastrophe far worse than the financial crisis of 2008-09.
In foreign affairs, Trump has been a hideous disaster. He kowtows to dictators throughout the world, especially to Russia’s murderous Vladimir Putin. Russia now owns American airfields and bases in Syria, has new tentacles throughout the Middle East, enjoys American sponsorship for readmission to the G-7 economic summits, and laughs as NATO experiences fissures unparalleled in the past three-quarters of a century. Trump pronounced himself “in love” with North Korea’s evil Kim Jong Un, who repays Trump’s obsequiousness by launching not fewer but more missile tests.
Contrarily, Trump made a big deal of the need to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Maduro has only solidified his power and made the United States look impotent.
Back in the U.S., conservatives of a Madisonian bent grieve as Trump tries, sometimes successfully, to accumulate more and more power in presidential hands, trampling on the proper division of governmental powers. Likewise, all Burkean emphases on the importance of societal norms, along with parental interests in pointing to leaders as role models for children to emulate, have been obliterated. Worse, the very notions of public ethics and of respect for the truth, both of them long staples of traditional conservative interest, have been trampled by a president who spreads falsehoods with rampant promiscuity.
The bill of conservative particulars against Trump would continue far longer than space permits here, but Trump’s threat to long-term conservative prospects must be recognized. He is turning off younger generations from the conservative cause in record numbers — the reverse of what happened after a few years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency when the media was surprised to see conservatism actually grow in popularity among the young.
If even 10 years ago, someone had said conservatives would be embracing a huge-spending, pro-Russian, habitually lying, profane, norm-destroying president who failed at what he had called his two biggest legislative initiatives, that person would have been dismissed as a pathetic crank. Alas, crankhood now is pandemic throughout organized conservatism, and it threatens to become incurable.
