“Complacency is our enemy,” Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel wrote on Twitter on Thursday morning.” Anyone that does not embrace the @realDonaldTrump agenda of making America great again will be making a mistake.”
This vaguely threatening tweet followed Tuesday’s primary in South Carolina where Rep. Mark Sanford, who has a fairly conservative voting record, was thrown out by GOP primary voters because he has repeatedly criticized Trump when he believes the president is wrong, while often siding with Trump when he thinks he’s right.
McDaniel later said her tweet was an imprecise paraphrase of a more sensible point she made on television earlier. Still, her message is consistently that the Republican Party is and ought to be the Trump’s party and everyone in it should get into line behind their leader.
This is a wrongheaded argument that would damage the Republican Party deeply if it were followed. It’s close to being the opposite of what is both strategically advisable and morally upright. No call to sacrifice principles for temporary advantage can be a long-term success.
Neither Republican lawmakers, nor the Right more broadly — the conservative movement, the free-market cause, the pro-life movement, and the right-of-center media — ought to pledge unquestioning allegiance to Trump just because he is powerful. Might does not make right. To the contrary, the best thing about Trump’s presidency has been the degree to which these other forces have harnessed Trump and pulled him in line behind their ideas and arguments.
Trump flipped from considering his liberal sister for a federal judicial vacancy to adopting a list of highly qualified conservative jurists from which to draw Supreme Court nominees and appointees to lower courts. He went from supporting abortion rights and the country’s leading abortionist, Planned Parenthood, to being the most aggressive advocate of the unborn. His biggest legislative achievement is a tax cut.
These are instances where the party and the movement pulled Trump along. This is the proper relationship for many reasons. Trump isn’t naturally a conservative. He’s new to politics, and though his instincts are often right, instinct needs to be tempered with knowledge, and careful thought, and values. The president is inconstant and intemperate, which means he cannot be relied on always to choose a path that either conservatives in general or his party in particular should follow.
This isn’t to say there’s nothing for Republicans and conservatives to learn from Trump. His populism sometimes goes awry, but it also taps into something important and true that the GOP establishment missed for decades. It is that there is real suffering in the working class, and tens of millions of blue-collar voters disdained by the Left’s culture warriors, who are ready to be Republicans.
The Right and the GOP need to learn from Trump and make space for the best of populism. This doesn’t require Republicans to abandon their principles, but it should influence priorities. The next tax cut could target payroll taxes, for instance. Fighting corporate welfare ought to be a priority.
There’s plenty for the GOP to learn from Trump, but the party should not be defined by the man. It should be a party of ideas, not personality. Trump the policymaker has plenty for conservatives to like, Trump the man is not a conservative icon, to put it gently.
