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Yes, Anti-Trumpism Is a Failure — And It Was Always Destined to Be One
From the moment Donald Trump descended the golden escalator, David Brooks opposed him. The New York Times columnist condemned him in the primaries, then in the general, in the transition and the presidency, with the harshness only growing over time. But in a fascinating column today, Brooks admits defeat.
Titled “The Failures of Anti-Trumpism,” Brooks confesses that the past two years of “Never Trump” derision has only made The Donald stronger. His approval rating hasn’t budged, his policies haven’t changed, and Republicans — pundits, party leadership, and base alike — support him more firmly than ever.
And the promised Mueller-fueled impeachment? It’s abandoned collusion with Vladimir Putin for collusion with Stormy Daniels.
Where did all the Trump mockery go wrong? Brooks finds the central issue:
A lot of us never-Trumpers assumed momentum would be on our side as his scandals and incompetences mounted. It hasn’t turned out that way. I almost never meet a Trump supporter who has become disillusioned. I often meet Republicans who were once ambivalent but who have now joined the Trump train….
Meanwhile, if Republican never-Trumpers were an army, they’d be freezing their buns off in Valley Forge tweeting over and over again that these are the times that try men’s souls….
Part of the problem is that anti-Trumpism has a tendency to be insufferably condescending. For example, my colleague Thomas B. Edsall beautifully summarized the recent academic analyses of what personality traits supposedly determine Trump support.
Trump opponents, the academics say, are open-minded and value independence and novelty. Trump supporters, they continue, are closed-minded, change-averse and desperate for security.
This analysis strikes me as psychologically wrong (every human being requires both a secure base and an open field — we can’t be divided into opposing camps), journalistically wrong (Trump supporters voted for the man precisely because they wanted transformational change) and an epic attempt to offend 40 percent of our fellow citizens by reducing them to psychological inferiors.
As any longtime reader knows, I was a Never Trumper throughout the election. But when the nation selected him, I laid down that label and accepted reality. Trump was my president for the next four to eight years, I earnestly hoped for his and my country’s success, and I would praise or criticize him based on his actions.
But if I were one of those dead-enders who kept fighting reality, the last thing I’d do is rehash the same failed strategy that didn’t stop him in 2016. What is obvious to any Army captain or novice entrepreneur was utterly lost on several of our most celebrated pundits and political strategists.
With Trump’s election, the political landscape changed, just as it did when Obama was elected. Declaring either presidency invalid — due to a Russian conspiracy or a forged birth certificate — was doomed to failure since the voters chose both of them. And mocking a president is easily blurred with mocking the millions who selected him.
There’s an old maxim in marketing: people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Likewise, no reader will take advice from a pundit who despises them.
Published in Politics
Exactly.
Reality
More questions.
Would you have said the same thing if we nominated John Kasich?
How did you feel about the nomination of John McCain, whose visceral dislike for free markets (and the first amendment) is well known?
The next question is admittedly irrelevant because none of us would have known this on election day. Seeing how Trump has governed for the past year, would you still call it an abandonment of Reaganism, or a partial return to it?
Surely you mean ‘stand up to Trump on a finished investigation that demonstrates he was engaged in criminal activity’, not, ‘stand up to Trump for being under investigation’.
Because Trump is so far guilty of nothing. You are a lawyer, right?
Funny joke!
But, I have studied Alcibiades. I have made a character in a game based on Alcibiades. Alcibiades is well known to me. Gary is no Alcibiades.
Touche!
Haha! I liked that exchange even though I have no idea who Alcibiades is.
The treasuries can’t be cashed as they’re just book keeping entries. They have to be sold to the public as if new debt or funded with taxes. You know that, what are you saying?
Um, maybe I don’t.
I heard it described that way on a podcast, recently. Prior to that, my understanding was it was a bunch of certificates in a filing cabinet in Virginia.
In any case, it seems like another reason they will lose control of interest rates and the government will run out of money. It’s one of Social Security’s “assets”. lol In reality, it’s just future, put off taxation.
Government is how we steal from each other.
And each other’s children.
It’s interesting. Why isn’t “Government is how we steal from each other” the main way we think about things on the right? Just modern central banking is theft that goes right into government and the already wealthy.
I’ll tell you why. They just want to get past the next election.
But, oh sure, freak out about Trump.
Trump is the Zaphod Beeblebrox of our time.
Great post. And the above line may be true, but the order and amount matter. The voters increasingly coalesced behind Trump. And punished politicians who didn’t. Slowly and begrudgingly many politicians followed, at least publicly. And then pundits, who still have a lot of public holdouts.
To a large degree, Trump traded the political & pundit class for the Rust Belt working class.
It was a great deal. They actually produce things worth consuming.
Some of these guys are against big government and how it mucks up the economy and some of them aren’t. Some of them get whatever forms of reward from beltway norms or whatever. Some of them don’t pay much attention to some real social issues that people are pissed about.
So, if all you do is show losses, it’s easy to be dour. You could, if you wished to be even kinda fair, at least mention that the first five special elections after Trump was elected POTUS were won by Republicans. But that was before the Republican Congress failed to repeal Obamacare and failed to rebuff the coup against Trump. Some might say they even participated in it.
Moderator Note:
Personal attack[redacted]
He is the greatest political gun for hire ever. In the Peloponnesian wars he served every side.
And he died when his enemies set his home on fire and rushing out he was riddled with a shower of arrows. Lessons?
I agree completely with the sentiment in Jon’s post.
However, it is also possible that “Trumpism is a failure”. We will have to see whether the bus we are traveling on, with its erratic driver, gets us to the station, we end up in a ditch, or we do a sudden u-turn and head into oncoming traffic. I haven’t got a clue how this is going to turn out.
The comparison to Obama is apt. In Kenya, Trump is more popular than his predecessor – and he wasn’t even born there.
If 2016 was the flight 93 election, Democrats are hoping to make the midterms flight 3411…
Our margin of victory was greatly reduced in most of those elections. (UT-3 was an exception to that rule.)
It sounds like he died on his feet, instead of living on his knees.
I don’t remember ever feeling that dread when Reagan was our President.
Moderator Note:
Please note all-caps is treated as yelling by the CoC.This was not a [redacted] . It was a response to the quote of a remark seen by Gary Robbins…not written by Gary Robbins. Whoever is editing this got it wrong.
This is the basis for most of the NT movement and Trump opposition on the right. It isn’t about what he has done. It is about what he might do. I did not vote for Trump, and likely would not again. Of course, the idea of voting for Hillary Clinton (or any high ranking democrat) is so repulsive I have trouble not judging people who did so.
If you look at what he has done and take exception, I think that is fair. Tariffs are really about the only thing he has done that I have a problem with, although 2A is one of my largest issues so if he does manage to follow up his bluster on that, I will oppose him vehemently there as well.
Other opposition is mostly based on his personal conduct, gut feeling and CNN headlines. This is also the basis for things like the Mueller investigation. If we look into anything associated with him long enough and hard enough, we’ll finally have justification for our feelings and polls, right? The fact is, some of us are never going to like the man and feel that he isn’t what we wanted. That’s ok, this isn’t North Korea, but abusing our systems to prove our gut feelings is detrimental. Two years of investigation shows that he hasn’t done anything we didn’t know about and certainly nothing criminal. Now maybe they’ll turn up something next week, but I doubt it. If there was something it would already be out, and at some point someone will have to wrap this investigation up.
If you worry more about what he has done and less about what he might do, I think your fingernails will begin to grow back. After all, he mostly tells us in the most public possible way what he’s thinking. That kind of access to one of the most powerful positions in the world is a lot more comforting to the masses than most people credit. I think it’s also why there is such a discrepancy from polls and pundits to the average citizen. People higher up the food chain expect and appreciate information management and a certain level of cloak and dagger. People further down the food chain tend to prefer people that are straightforward, even if it doesn’t lead to the most consistency.
My theory is that the more conservative one is, the less likely one is to do these things.
Which is a serious catch-22 and why conservatives are–and will always be–a small minority of even the Republican Party.
It’s dysfunctional to have so much centralized power and central planning in this country. IMO, Keynesian statism precludes conservatism and libertarianism from actually working or even selling. You have to be stupid got to get your cut of the graft, dependency, and rent seeking.
One opinion.
You assume without evidence that the anti-Trump conservatives are looking to “gain” something as opposed to simply speaking their minds.