There is far more reason for conservatives to disapprove of former President Donald Trump than just his divisiveness and lies about the 2020 election.
By Washington Examiner – Quin Hillyer
Feb 7, 2022
The Republican National Committee’s “censure” last week of conservative Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming, coming the same day that former Vice President Mike Pence pronounced Trump “wrong” to suggest that the election should have been “overturned,” continues to make fealty to Trump and his “big lie” the single biggest fault line in today’s Republican Party.
Some of us, though, believe Trump has been a disaster for the Republican Party from the start, in terms of both politics and policy.
Politically speaking, we reject the idea that Trump was the only Republican who could have won the presidency in 2016. Hillary Clinton was the most emotionally unattractive major party nominee in living memory, with a long and continuing record of ethics problems. Arguably, 10 or 11 of the 17 Republicans seeking the presidential nomination that year could have defeated her, most of them more easily than through the political “inside straight” that Trump pulled to eke out an Electoral College majority.
After that, Trump repeatedly harmed Republican hopes by driving away suburban voters in droves while energizing the Left in opposition. The results included the ignominious loss of the House in 2018, the loss of the presidency in 2020 to a doddering, ethically compromised mediocrity who spent the campaign hiding in his basement, and the silver platter gift of the Senate to Democrats by Trump’s deliberate torpedoing of GOP efforts in the Georgia Senate runoff elections.
On policy, we can give Trump kudos on five fronts, but only with asterisks on 3 1/2 of them. The one without an asterisk came in the form of superlative and effective support for Israel, which is a beach-hold for liberty and stability in the Middle East. The second conservative victory came on tax cuts, but – here’s the asterisk – any Republican president could have achieved those without effort: Former House Speaker Paul Ryan had them teed up for years, just waiting for a Republican president and Senate to rubber-stamp them. Likewise with the third success, Trump’s appointment of conservative judges: By the time Trump took office, the conservative legal bench (in both senses) was so extensive that finding and securing confirmation of good ones was virtual child’s play. (As for his three Supreme Court nominations, let’s not celebrate them until they have about 10 years to prove themselves worthy.)
The story is the same in area four: the strengthening of the military. That’s just what Republican presidents do. As it is, Trump barely pushed military spending in 2020 to where former President Barack Obama had it in 2011 before Obama began cutting – and Trump’s defense spending was less than in 2011 after taking inflation into account. Finally, in area five, Trump merits credit with only half an asterisk. Namely: A number of Trump’s Cabinet members did a superb job at reducing or substantively improving federal regulations toward conservative ends. Many of these just effectively and rather easily repealed the damage Obama had done (the half asterisk), but some, such as in healthcare , truly reduced costs and improved consumer choice even amid Obamacare’s systemic burdens. Major kudos are due there.
Against all this must be weighed Trump’s failures, bad choices, and outright harms. Begin here: Until Trump came along, the single most consistent element of American conservatism for 60 years had been the desire to limit government’s reach, size, and cost. From Buckley through Goldwater through Ford (yes, Ford), Reagan and Gingrich to the Tea Party movement and Ryan and former House Speaker John Boehner, conservatives worked to cut domestic spending and limit Washington’s power. Trump blew that out of the water. Even before the pandemic, Trump enthusiastically exceeded even Obama as the biggest spender in U.S. history , in both raw numbers and the size of debt compared to GDP.
Trump also repeatedly pressed the Federal Reserve to adopt loose-money policies. While President Joe Biden has reaped the whirlwind for today’s dangerous levels of inflation (and deservedly so!), it was Trump who created the damaging conditions Biden now has exacerbated.
If Trump deliberately embraced big spending and loose money, his failures born of ineptitude were equally damaging. First, he deserves significant blame for fumbling the repeal of Obamacare . At various times during the attempts to do so, he provided either no guidance or conflicting guidance or back-stabbed members of Congress who made the efforts or insulted lawmakers whose help he needed.
Trump also failed to build anywhere near enough of his promised wall on the Mexican border. Indeed, his negotiating tactics were so ham-handed that he eventually secured less spending for the wall than opposing Democrats initially offered!
In foreign affairs, he weakened the cohesion of the NATO alliance, bugged out of Syria so precipitously that Russia reaped manifold rewards, set the table for disaster in Afghanistan by rashly negotiating a withdrawal date with the Taliban without even consulting Afghanistan’s government, completely fumbled an effort to upend the communist government in Venezuela, kowtowed symbolically to authoritarians across the globe, and embarrassingly sent virtual love letters to North Korea’s crazy dictator without gaining any substantive change in North Korea’s behavior.
Meanwhile, true conservatives understand (with Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and others) that a crucial part of maintaining a healthy national policy involves the maintenance of norms and standards of the sort Trump regularly and flagrantly ground to dust. Also profoundly damaging to American traditions was Trump’s Caesarism and his deliberate divisiveness.
And then, of course, came his unforgivable assault on the bedrock of American constitutionalism, which is the acceptance of established processes for the electoral ratification and transfer of the presidency itself. Trump left behind a system far less stable, one enjoying the bedrock confidence of a far lower percentage of the public, than at any time since the Civil War.
Trump’s reign wasn’t conservatism. It was catastrophe.
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