RIP Ambassador Faith Whittlesey, a loyal Trump supporter

Numerous obituaries and tributes have been written about Whittlesey and her extraordinary career. She was twice President Reagan’s ambassador to Switzerland, the director of Reagan’s Office of Public Liaison and the most senior woman on Reagan’s White House staff, a Pennsylvania state legislator who helped deliver the state to Reagan in 1980, an ardent pro-lifer and supporter of the Second Amendment, chairman and president of the American Swiss Foundation, and an early and staunch supporter of President Trump.

I got to know her best as a fellow Trump loyalist.

When I first met her, distinguished members of the Republican political establishment daily ridiculed their party’s nominee. Some did so publicly, others privately. Many in the foreign policy establishment signed Never-Trump letters denouncing him. Numerous Republican politicians gave tortured responses to reporters’ questions about the candidate, and kept their distance.

By contrast, Whittlesey and I both publicly and enthusiastically advocated for Trump. I served as the deputy director of the Committee for American Sovereignty, a pro-Trump super PAC. Whittlesey was co-chair of Reaganites for Trump and a member of the Trump campaign Catholic advisory group.

Few people knew who I was. Whittlesey, on the other hand, lent the Trump campaign gravitas, experience, and credentials as a core member of the Reagan Revolution.

Foreign policy was her passion, and mine. We applauded Trump’s criticisms of “stupid, endless wars” waged by previous Republican and Democratic presidents. She had opposed the Iraq War when the George W. Bush administration and much of the Republican foreign policy establishment supported it. She abhorred what she called the “War Party,” which consisted of members of both parties who clamored for endless overseas interventions.

As for me, I hated the hubris that undergirded many of the assumptions of the Iraq War as well as the intellectual intolerance of prominent conservative institutions and individuals that advocated it.

Whittlesey and I disagreed, however, over how to confront America’s adversaries.

She supported policies that would better accommodate Russia’s grievances in its region, as well as China’s ambitions in Asia.

I believed China was engaged in a naked territorial grab in the South China Sea and was actively undermining the U.S.-led order in Asia. I also believed that Russian aggression, such as the annexation of Crimea, needed to be punished and deterred.

Whittlesey noted that the United States spent far too much time running around telling other countries how to behave, especially in their own backyard. In her long career, she had often invoked John Quincy Adams’s warning that “we do not go abroad for monsters to destroy.”

I underscored that there was a difference between interventionists who seem to never meet a war they do not like versus more traditional Republicans who believe the use of force should only be deployed to defend America’s vital national interests.

President Trump, in many ways, holds competing impulses that reflect some of my foreign policy disagreements with Whittlesey.

On the one hand, the president has repeatedly referred to the Iraq War as a blunder. On the other hand, he has noted that once U.S. troops were in Iraq, President Obama should not have withdrawn them prematurely to leave a vacuum that led to the rise of the Islamic State. The president does not want endless wars, but he also wants the United States to win and lead globally.

These competing priorities have been playing out in the Trump administration’s foreign policy.

Whittlesey, like various prominent Trump advisors, disagreed with the president’s troop surge in Afghanistan and exhorted him to follow his original instinct to pull out.

She also believed that Trump’s missile strikes to punish Syria’s use of chemical weapons was precisely the type of interventionism that Trump had pledged to avoid on the campaign trail.

I shared her skepticism, but was more sympathetic to the president’s decisions.

In the end, Whittlesey and I agreed on far more than we disagreed. Our support for Trump came to form the basis of our bond. We believed his electoral victory was about transferring power from Washington back to the people, and that he was elected to make bold changes and do big things, not tinker at the edges of Washington’s business as usual. We understood that however much the elites or the political establishment objected, the Trump revolution was ultimately about Americans’ reassertion of democratic sovereignty.

Being a vocal Trump supporter, however, is not an easy feat. You regularly lose friends, acquaintances, business, and professional opportunities. Which is why you need allies to offer moral, intellectual, and professional support, and to help stiffen your back. Whittlesey did that for me, and for many others.

Her passing offers a reminder that the Trump revolution was never just about him. It was always about the public, from supporters cheering at thunderous Trump rallies to sophisticates like Whittlesey — all of whom believed that the president could deliver a better future for the country.

It is a revolution that has been as exhilarating as frustrating — full of hope, bombast, big ideas, and real accomplishments, as well as human frailty, missed opportunities, and self-inflicted wounds.

In the middle of it all, I counted on the ambassador’s strength, support, friendship, and tutelage.

I was and remain a mere foot soldier in the Trump revolution. The president is unmistakably its leader, but Whittlesey was a guiding light, a voice of calm and authority, a reassuring presence that inspired and encouraged Trump supporters like me to remain unbowed against the nastiest backlash. For that, I will always be grateful.

Farewell, my friend. It was an honor and a privilege. Rest in peace.

Ying Ma (@GZtoGhetto) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is the former deputy director of the Committee for American Sovereignty, a pro-Trump super PAC, and the former deputy policy director of the Ben Carson presidential campaign. She is the author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto.