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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
I don’t consider myself an NT anymore (I’m pretty close to Jon’s position) but for me it was a total rejection of the “binary” argument. I found reprehensible the argument that I somehow owed my support to someone whom I found personally obnoxious, opposed to many of my deeply held beliefs (most notably on trade), and untrustworthy even on those policies where we did agree, simply because his opponent was worse. My position was, and still is, that it is entirely reasonable to find both major party candidates unworthy, and that those who claimed that a refusal to vote for Trump was a de facto vote for Clinton were not only wrong, but frighteningly so.
Isn’t that the only reason for voting for someone, in any election?
If one candidate is better, it is tautological that the other is worse. And vice versa.
Yes, there were multiple candidates, but realistically only two possible results. Mr. Bad or Mrs. Worse.
There are a lot of decent left leaning people who voted for Hillary even though they found her to be dishonest and repulsive. They felt that Trump was worse, and didn’t want to throw their vote away. They are the counterparts to us Reluctant Trumpers. What do think of their reasoning?
They obviously didn’t find her unacceptable.
I don’t care whether you voted for Trump or not.* All that means is that the line you will not cross, which everybody has, is drawn in a different place than mine. There’s nothing wrong with that.
What I take issue with is the notion that I had some sort of duty to vote for someone I (at the time) considered unacceptable, that my drawing the line in a different place than you was somehow traitorous. I did, and still do, object to the idea that Clinton’s terribleness reflected positively on Trump. I judged each candidate on their own merits, and found all of them (including Johnson, McMullin, and Steyn) unacceptable.
*And, in the interest of transparency, I will confess that I actually did vote for Trump in the end, but I will continue to oppose the idea that I was obligated to.
Very insightful.
They’re not looking to gain something, they’re looking to lose something; Trump.
Which “it” is a well written article? David Brooks’ column, or Jon Gabriel‘s post? If you think that David Brooks’ column is well written, you certainly don’t agree with his analysis
I’m a Reagan Republican who reluctantly voted for Trump, but who today admits the obvious: Trump has advanced more traditional conservative policies than even Ronald Reagan did. He’s promoted and signed the biggest income tax cut since Reagan, he’s promoted a robust foreign policy backed by a strengthened military. He’s been far more aggressive than Reagan on deregulation.
The most significant difference between Trump policies and Reagan policies is with respect to free trade, and Trump’s closest economic adviser is now free trade superstar Larry Kudlow (that’s a good thing).
What anti-Trumpers cannot seem to grasp is that the Republican brand was already destroyed, that’s how we got Trump. Voters elected both a Republican House and a Republican Senate, on the promise of “a return to regular order.” Under regular order, the Republican Congress would send single issue bills to President Obama e.g., repealing ObamaCare, cutting taxes, defunding Planned Parenthood, so that Democrats and President Obama would be on the record opposing issues that were important to, and helpful to a majority of Americans.
Not a single such bill was sent to Obama. To be fair, the Senate and especially Mitch McConnell deserve the lion’s share of the blame for that cowardly failure, not the House of Representatives.
The Republican brand is dead. Long live the Republican brand!
[Edited to link Ricochet member and free trade superstar Larry Kudlow.]
You’re not being fair to John McCain. He also opposed tax cuts, and was forever wrong on immigration. And open up that parenthesis – John McCain authored a bill that unconstitutionally restricted political speech.
I was horrified to vote for McCain, who clearly was not a Republican, but I recognized he was better than the alternative, Jeremiah Wright’s star parishioner Barack Obama.
Why was there no anti-McCain movement among conservative Republicans?
There was. McCain choosing Palin as #2 was an olive branch to that crowd.
Had McCain won, it would have been reasonable to expect many conservative complaints about him.
Up front though, National Review could have chosen not to endorse him.
Trump is not “one of us” and thus is hated by Conservatism, Inc. on those grounds alone.
I meant Brooks’ column, but also liked Jon’s post. I disagree with their conclusions, however I am resigned to Trump, provided that the Mueller probe runs its course.
Wrong. You do not speak for me.
Yep, I do not think Trump is the one doing the destroying.
I was not yet ten (10) years old when the Social Security “Trust Fund” was explained to me on the Winchell-Mahoney Time television show. The show’s set was a clubhouse where dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff met. In one episode, they needed to buy something to improve their clubhouse, so they opened up the “lock box” where they stored the dues that both Jerry and Knucklehead had been faithfully contributing each week. Yet when they opened the “lock box,” it was filled with nothing but IOUs from Knucklehead Smiff, who had used the money to buy candy that he had already eaten. Since of course Knucklehead had no money, the club was out of luck.
The federal government has for decades been raiding the Social Security “Trust Fund” and replacing the “Trust Fund” with IOUs. When they (soon) find it necessary to open the Social Security “Trust Fund” “lock box,” they’ll be in the same position that Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff were in. Worthless IOUs.
They raided the FICA taxes.
What’s the point of FICA taxation? #fiction
OMG I remember them! A perfect explanation.
I really have no problem with it either assuming it does “run its course”. I think the problem is what that timeline entails. We’re staring down the barrel of two years, with the big reveals being things I expect your average fifth grader could have gleaned from some pointed internet searching.
I think this investigation will run ad infinitum, until someone stops it. I think they want to be shut down, because it’s the only conceivable way they can retain credibility. I assume Trump being out of office or dead would end the witch hunt, but given the fervor of this particular Inquisition, it’s very plausible they’ll just start in on his family if that happens.
Granted I’d still be inclined to let them keep going, because they turn into a bigger joke every day. I’m sure they’ll eventually find fourth hand information that he pulled the legs off grasshoppers as a child.
Both sides have made this worse by accepting the notion that Mueller’s job is to find something, and if he doesn’t find something, he has therefore failed. When we treat finding nothing as a failure, whether it’s the left excoriating him for it or the right taunting him for it, we only extend the agony because Mueller feels compelled to keep looking until he’s found something. Both sides should be willing to accept, “There’s nothing there,” as a job well done. (This problem is not unique to Mueller, of course.)
Giving Mueller the benefit of the doubt, he has to be able to describe his findings as thorough and complete. Advancing him some Christian charity, this is going to be his entry in the history books and he will want it to be easy to summarize favorably.
The problems are legion. Ill defined scope, deadlines and unlimited budget.
As a white male living in the second largest county in the Continental US (Coconino County has 200,000 people living in an area bigger than New Jersey and Connecticut combined!), I am not a minority, a woman or live in the suburbs.
However, we have been slaughtered among minorities, women and the suburbs during the last six months as follows:
November: Virginia, Oklahoma, New York and Pennsylvania.
December: Alabama Senate.
January: Wisconsin State Senate LD-10.
February: Florida House LD-72.
March: Pennsylvania CD-18.
April: Wisconsin Supreme Court
Trump is acting like a guilty person. If the suspicions are true as to the extent of his personal corruption, he would be wise to find a pretext to retire to spend more time with his family in the hope that his children will not be exposed to liability.
“Acting like a guilty person” is a great standard.
Well said.
Great comment overall.
None of us knew this on election day, but Trump has turned out to be a continuation of the Reagan administration. We have been waiting for that since since January 20th, 1989.
28 years is a long time to wait.
Milton Friedman said that choosing George H. W. Bush for VP was Reagan’s worst mistake. Friedman didn’t know how right he was.
To me, he is acting like a ticked off New Yorker.
I started hearing the “acting guilty” bit right after the election. Almost a year and a half later, I’m still hearing it.
By contrast, actual evidence of Slick Willie’s corruption was accumulating even before he took office. And that was with the press on his side.
Lawyer^
I was a 32 year old adult when the Greatest President of the Twentieth Century was elected.
Reagan had been a student of history and political thought.
He had presented reasoned speeches about his principles which had a beginning, middle and an end, and he governed consistent with his stated principles.
He had been the successful Governor of California for eight years before becoming President.
Reagan reached out to Democrats, and embraced people who agreed with him 80% of the time.
He created the Eleveth Commandment and did not criticize fellow Republicans.
Not only did Reagan lower taxes, he reformed the Tax Code.
He raised the gas tax by 125% to plow the money into infrastructure.
Reagan brought people together and enacted entitlement reform, strengthening social security for decades.
Reagan disarmed the media, and was the Great Communicator.
He was inclusive, and brought people to his point of view.
He had a sign on his desk saying “There is no limit to what a man can do if he doesn’t care who gets the credit.
He was the loving and faithful husband of Nancy.
Reagan had stellar character.
Reagan eschewed those who would create a Cult of Personality about him.
Reagan did not demand loyalty, he inspired loyalty.
I was proud to be a Republican and promoted Reagan without ceasing.
I knew President Reagan. I admired President Reagan. I voted for President Reagan. Trump, you are no Ronald Reagan.
Who stuck 5 trillion of FICA taxes for Social Security into the general fund where it was spent? Now they have to general tax us again or borrow to cover it so old people can survive on it. How did that happen? I seriously have no idea.
I believe that that was LBJ, not RR.
Because the federal government can’t save money, can’t invest money. That’s why they created a special category of bonds for Social Security. Using that accounting fiction, the feds can put the money back into circulation.
There are three practical options for handling FICA tax receipts. First, the present system where we pretend to borrow the funds. Second, literally invest the funds collected in public company securities. Third, create individual ownership accounts for every tax payer and permit them to allocate the funds into some limited universe of investment plans. Otherwise, if you collect the taxes, turn them into currency and store the notes in a vault in the Robert Byrd Federal Savings Bank, you take the money out of the economy.
I’m all in favor of option three. I also favor an option for a discounted cash distribution at 66. Any transition to option three would take 40 or 50 years.