most of the Republican leadership in Congress is opposed to Trumpism, preferring some shriveled thing called “the Ryan agenda” that nobody other than a few thousand of his constituents in a corner of Wisconsin can be plausibly said to have voted for. Worse, significant figures in his Cabinet, and even more in the second and third tiers of his Administration, also reject Trumpism – including, one notes, members of his own family
.. What if, just what if, the fact that Trump has surrounded himself with people (cabinet members and family members alike) who don’t believe in Trumpism, the fact that he has gone along with budgets and health care bills and foreign policy moves that are not obviously congruent with Trumpism, the fact that he generally seems to lack any zeal for a fight when his campaign promises collide with Republican and/or center-left establishment opposition … what if all of this means that he never really believed in Trumpism himself? Or that he never believed in it to the extent required to govern on it, as opposed to just sloganeering on the stump? Or – my basic view at present — that he has a vague but consistent-over-the-years belief that America is getting taken advantage of on trade and defense spending (a theme he apparently returned to today on the European leg of his grand tour), but that he lacks the
- mixture of intellectual curiosity,
- mental creativity,
- seriousness of purpose and
- personal discipline
required to actually make any set of policy ideas his own in the way that a successful populist president would need to do?
.. A talented mountebank with zero policy knowledge who exploited a set of ideas with underappreciated appeal but lacks the aptitude or zeal to implement them, preferring to rage against his cable-news coverage while House backbenchers write “his” budget and the Pentagon conducts “his” foreign policy and the Freedom Caucus amends “his” health care bill to make it still more politically toxic.
.. If this is the case then it’s correct but also a little beside the point to complain about how the wreckers and establishment types and Ryanists are all betraying the voters by submarining Trumpism. The betrayal starts at the top, with a president who doesn’t care enough and probably never really did.
.. But Trump himself is likely to be the primary teacher of that lesson here, and it should have been entirely predictable, from watching the man on the campaign trail and pondering his history, that he was likely to leave many of his supporters more disillusioned than he found them
.. insisting that conservatives or populists must stick with this president no matter his incompetence, lest the establishment prevail and Trumpism go down, becomes a horribly self-defeating sort of loyalty – because it only proves to future politicians, future demagogues, that they too can promise you revolution, deliver only politics-as-usual, and still keep your support.
.. That Trump has any “core principles” beyond self-interest and a certain instinct that America is getting a raw deal is a claim with no foundation in Trump’s business record, personal life or political career.
.. And the idea that the issues Zmirak cares most about – abortion, religious liberty and the persecution of Christians overseas – are also sincerely Trump’s own seems completely implausible, not least because the president himself barely even pretends to fervor on any religious-conservative cause, offering instead a transactionalism that’s almost admirable in its cynicism.
.. it’s striking to me that a writer who has been so cold-eyed and unsentimental about so many institutions that others drape in piety – including his own conservative Catholic subculture — could be so trusting about Trump’s stated commitments and in his celebrity businessman’s capacities.