The Colorado Springs Gazette final

DITCH TRUMP OR LOSE

The former president is a drag on his party’s fortunes and integrity

TIM CARNEY

Donald Trump has just leaped into the 2024 presidential race with his announcement that he will again seek the Republican nomination. This is a lamentable development, for until the former president is out of the picture, the Republican Party and American conservatism cannot thrive.

Trump did deliver many conservative wins for America — nominating originalist judges who then overturned Roe v. Wade , cutting taxes, and staying out of disastrous regime-change wars, to name just three. But along the way, he corrupted his party and conservatism by dragging it into a cult of personality and conspiracy theories. Conservatism and the Republican Party need to escape these pits of Trumpism, and so they need to get rid of Trump.

Trump is back, at Republicans’ peril

This has nothing to do with policy preferences. Tariffs, immigration policy, and entitlement spending are all fair subjects of intramural debate on the Right. And moving beyond Trump will enable those debates to get the attention they deserve because they have always been secondary to Trump and their discussion routinely back-burnered or disrupted by some controversy or another. Indeed, on some policy matters, the former president healthily shook Republicans from their dead dogmas.

Trump harmed conservatism by replacing political philosophy and policy preferences with a petty grievance mindset. He harmed the Republican Party by converting it into a cult of personality. These transformations were morally damaging, replacing love of the good with bottomless distrust and resentment. For those reasons, a Trumpified party is crippled politically.

Whether you care about America’s civic health, conservatives’ souls, or simply the Republican Party’s electoral chances, and regardless of whether you supported him in 2016 and 2020, you should want Trump to exit presidential politics permanently for these reasons and those that follow.

Accountability for Democrats, too

Democracy, the liberal media told us endlessly, was under threat in the 2022 election. In the end, there was a grain of truth to what they said, but not in the way they meant. Democracy lost in the midterm elections because democracy requires accountability for those in power. In 2022, Democrats were not held accountable.

President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress were and still are deeply unpopular thanks to their failures and misdeeds. Only 20% of the country approves of Congress’s job performance, two-thirds of the country says we’re headed in the wrong direction, and Biden has hardly ever had above-water approval ratings.

He earned this disapproval. His reckless spending predictably fueled inflation, his spiteful rhetoric demonized half the country, and his attempt to buy upper-middle-class votes with student loan forgiveness was transparently illegal.

Democrats, meanwhile, nominated poor candidates who seemed totally unfit for their jobs. Katie Hobbs in Arizona and John Fetterman in Pennsylvania are the two clearest examples.

So why didn’t voters more seriously punish Democrats for their incompetence and corruption?

The answer is that they weren’t offered a decent alternative. The candidates Trump picked in the GOP primaries, such as Dr. Mehmet Oz and Kari Lake, ranged from unserious and clueless celebrities to conspiracy-theorizing demagogues. Voters don’t like Democratic failures, but absent sane and normal alternatives, they’ll stay home or suck up another two years of Democratic rule.

In competitive House districts, candidates whom Trump endorsed ran 5 points behind expectations, while those he didn’t endorse ran 2 points ahead of expectations, an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute’s Phil Wallach showed . Either Trump’s endorsement was a net negative in swing districts, or Trump backed inferior candidates. Most likely, it was some combination of both.

In any event, a Trump-led Republican Party is a less competitive Republican Party. That allows Democrats to get away with more extremism and incompetence.

It’s no surprise that Trump

would be bad at picking candidates, given that he judges them almost entirely according to the extent of their loyalty to himself. Fealty to a narcissist, it turns out, is not correlated with effectiveness, either at campaigning or governing. These days, fealty to Trump largely means echoing the conspiracy theories about a stolen 2020 presidential election.

Trumpism isn’t merely politically unpopular. It’s politically unpopular because it’s grounded in petty nastiness, promises no solutions, and is based on no broader principles.

Trump himself embodies this self-serving solipsism. In 2020, he handed the Democrats the Senate with his “Stop the Steal” inanity, undermining confidence in the election and thus keeping Republican voters away from the polls where they were vitally necessary to keep Georgia’s two seats in the Senate in GOP hands. Trump demands allegiance for everything he does, perhaps especially his most destructive and idiotic behavior. This puts Republicans in an invidious and self-destructive position.

The most recent election shows how Trump is a political black hole, drawing all benefits to himself and actually undermining the candidates he supposedly supports. In the 2022 campaign’s final week, after Trump appeared with Blake Masters in Arizona, the “Official Trump Final Countdown Fund” asked donors to help Masters win an upset with their dollars. What wasn’t clear from the email was that, by default, only $1 out of every $100 donated to the “Final Countdown Fund” would go to Masters’s campaign . The other $99 would go to Trump’s own fundraising committee. He was using his dud candidates to enrich his own campaign.

Likewise, if after Election Day you got Trump’s email and contributed “IMMEDIATELY to the Official Georgia Runoff Fundraising Goal,” by default, only 5% of your money went to Hershel Walker’s campaign.

Trump doesn’t use his fame or wealth to build a party. He uses the party and his political power to build his fame and wealth and feed his insatiable ego.

Trump made us worse

The case against Trump isn’t merely the pragmatic political one that it doesn’t work. It’s a moral case, too. Trump’s gravest harm is his effect on the psyches and souls of Americans, particularly his supporters.

Leaders don’t merely implement policies. They also lead their supporters, sometimes into better places and sometimes into worse. Leaders, through persuasion, modeling, and drawing battle lines, alter the tastes, tones, preferences, and priorities of the people they lead. Leaders also affect their detractors. In short, leaders change people.

Trump has made us worse. He’s made his supporters worse — Republican politicians, grassroots supporters, conservative commentators. He’s also made his enemies worse — Democrats, the news media, and professional Never Trumpers.

There’s no reason to believe left-of-center news outlets will regain their composure or standards of fairness if Trump leaves the scene, but there is a hope that conservatism and the GOP can straighten out their bearings once Trump is gone.

Conspiracy theories, whether about stolen elections, dark cabals of child molesters, or anything else, are always present in politics. Democratic politicians in the Bush era, for instance, argued that Diebold election machines switched votes to Bush.

Trump, though, made conspiracy theories mainstream in the GOP. Recall how “Stop the Steal” got crazier by the day in late 2020, positing that Republican secretaries of state were in on the election theft. This insane argument dragged millions of voters along with it, inculcating a toxic blend of credulousness and cynicism and forming the habit of refusing to accept election losses.

Seeing dark conspiracies around every corner and behind every setback makes effective action impossible. A Republican Party that sees the world this way is one that is battling with phantoms rather than the real problems that voters care about. A conservatism grounded in total disbelief becomes nihilism.

“Stop the Steal” madness wasn’t merely about spreading conspiracy theories but actually about overturning elections. Trump endlessly cried that the election was stolen, and his team made the case that anyone with any say in vote counting, down to county election boards, ought to “right” this wrong by any means in their power. These efforts never made it far, but giving them oxygen destabilizes our elections.

Trump corrupted us in a more ordinary but perhaps more insidious way: by over-centralizing our attention.

Conservatives see politics as a lower-order good, a means to a greater good. The highest goods, we believe, are faith, family, and community. In contrast, liberals are disposed to see politics as the highest of goods and central government as the agent of the highest undertakings.

Trump, on this score, pushed the national psyche leftward. He made national politics the central organizing principle of society. By working tirelessly to make every battle, every debate, every moment about Trump, for him or against him, he pulled us away from the things conservatives believe matter more.

We shouldn’t overstate Trump’s impact on the base. He was, to some extent, filling a vacuum. It’s no coincidence that his earliest voter base in the GOP nomination battle was made up of Christians who did not have a church community and did not attend regularly.

Over time, though, Trump came to displace other forms of belonging both for his followers and his detractors. To whatever extent that Americans define themselves by their support of a national political party or the presidential candidate they back, it is a conservative loss. To the extent our attention is centralized, and Trump is the most powerful centralizer of attention in our lifetimes, we are drawn away from our families, our communities, our churches, and the other realms of civil society where we can make a difference and find meaning.

But it’s worse than that because Trump reduces politics to petty personal disputes.

Finally, Trump brought about the death of Republican outrage. In the 1990s, conservatives and Republicans were right to argue that former President Bill Clinton’s sexual immorality and serial dishonesty harmed the country and undermined his ability to lead. The major media mostly laughed this off as “morality policing,” but the major media were wrong.

By 2016, Republicans were likewise waving off Trump’s serial infidelities and even the fact that he paid hush money to a porn star to cover up one of his more recent affairs. The rationale was that if Democrats won’t hold their politicians accountable for such sins, why should Republicans?

The logical endpoint of this stance is that personal vices in our leaders don’t really matter, which is a position that undermines the case for virtue and impels us toward a wholly unconservative ethos.

Election losses

Basic utilitarian calculus would tell Republicans to cast off Trump. Yes, Trump won the presidency in 2016, carrying states where Republicans appeared to be flagging. Immediately after that election, it was plausible to argue that Trump was an exceptionally electable candidate. But three more elections have shown more clearly what harm this man does to the party’s chances.

Start with Trump’s 2016 win. First, Trump ran against the most unlikable major party nominee in memory. Hillary Clinton’s favorability rating was 38% when the general election began and didn’t improve by much. Still, she got nearly 3 million more votes than Trump did. In fact, Trump’s 46.1% of the popular vote in 2016 was lower than Sen. Mitt Romney’s 47.2% in 2012. Trump eked out victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, carrying those three states by a combined 77,744 votes, just over half a percentage point.

His 2016 victory was no dominating win. How has his record been since then?

Since Trump has been the face of the party, Republicans have flailed. They had 241 seats in Congress after the 2016 election. That fell to 197 in the 2018 midterm elections. The 2022 election will bring the GOP to around 220 seats, still about 20 seats below where they were when Trump took over. Republicans are down from 54 Senate seats to 49.

Republicans also now control significantly fewer state legislative chambers and governorships. Michigan, that glowing Trump triumph in 2016, has gone from total Republican control of government pre-trump — governor, House, and Senate — to total Democratic control. Republicans have also lost the governorship in Wisconsin and possibly the state House in Pennsylvania.

His endless focus on 2020 already hurt Republicans in 2022. Voters do not like candidates dwelling on the past or blaming others for their failures. They want someone who can make promises about the future. Trump can’t move on from his 2020 loss or learn from it because he won’t admit it happened. If you can’t admit the truth of your losses, you’re going to have trouble figuring out how to win.

The Democrats control the Senate because of Trump’s stupid and selfish behavior in 2020 and the damage he did in 2022. And Trump 2024 will be even weaker. He has handicapped himself by burning every single bridge he has crossed. He cannot run a top-tier campaign or administration because most of the people who could be his partners, including Vice President Mike Pence, have been branded by Trump as traitors. (Accusing straying sheep of being traitors erases the distinction between the nation and its leader, which is the wholly un-american position taken in the age of absolute monarchies by Louis XIV of France, the “sun king,” who notoriously proclaimed, “L’etat, c’est moi.”)

Trump drives good people away and replaces them with incompetents. There’s an old saying that could be repurposed for Trump’s presidency. If you find an ass in your Cabinet, you hired an ass. If find you’re surrounded by asses all day, you’re the ass.

Populism after Trump

Trump’s most vociferous critics on the Right often decried his populism. That’s off-target. Populism shouldn’t be a curse word to Republicans. What’s more, populism suffered from Trump.

Trump won the 2016 primaries and general election precisely because the electorate was thirsting for some sort of populism. The establishments of both parties were instead competing to be the parties of the rich, and neither had any interest in seriously courting working-class votes or taking any notice of working-class problems.

Romney famously wrote off the lower 47% of earners as freeloaders who refuse to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” This elitism was central to Romney’s 2012 loss. The best post-2012 analyses pinned Romney’s loss on “the missing white voter,” the very working-class people to whom Trump appealed. Meanwhile, Democratic leaders such as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Hillary Clinton have intentionally and aggressively tried to transform their party into the party of the wealthy elites.

Recall Schumer traveling to Lake Success, New York, to declare tax cuts for wealthy suburbanites was the Senate Democrats’ top priority. Recall Hillary Clinton bragging, “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. … So, I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

Trump, meanwhile, declared, “I love the poorly educated.” He traveled to the places with broken economies and crumbled civil society and told those people, the so-called deplorables, that he wanted their vote and would fight for them.

Too many Republicans believe that this “populism” is poison. If the GOP establishment takes that lesson, it will set itself up for more years of defeat, driving away the working-class white, Hispanic, and black voters it has recently attracted. If the Republicans try to win back the country club, they will lose more ground than they will reclaim.

Trump was right that the GOP can be the working man’s party. It should be. The problem was that Trump didn’t actually care about the working man because he only ever cared about himself. Rather than deliver pro-family policy or articulate a defense of religion, community, and tradition, Trump delivered entertainment. And by flying the populist flag while delivering very little else, Trump entrenched the alienation and disillusionment felt by the working class. Only a new, effective leader can bring the party beyond the rhetoric and turn the GOP into an actual working man’s party.

The future

A candidate stuck in the past will drag Republicans lower, and a candidate obsessed with petty grievances will corrupt conservatism. Although Trump is still notionally the leader of the party, his grip has weakened, which has shown that post-trump Republicans can be normal and that voters will reward them for being so.

Virginia, which elected a Democratic governor, handed Democrats control of the legislature, and reelected two Democratic senators in the Trump years, reversed course in 2021, installing a GOP majority in the lower chamber and electing Republican Glenn Youngkin as governor. In 2022, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who was excoriated by Trump for not playing along with his “Stop the Steal” antics, thrashed the Democratic conspiracy theorist “election denier” Stacey Abrams. Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, another Republican Trump enemy, easily won reelection, too.

Arizona provides probably a more telling lesson. Trump picked Kari Lake and Blake Masters, and both lost, along with the “Stop the Steal” purveyor running for secretary of state. But at the same time, Republicans won the statewide races for treasurer and school superintendent.

This shows that voters still like normal Republicans. In fact, even the Republicans most on board the Trump Train seem to have dismounted following the disappointment of 2022. Doug Mastriano, Masters, and Oz conceded their losses.

Republicans, to escape the Trump shadow, don’t need to “moderate,” abandon populism, or even adopt Reagan-era priorities.

They just need to ditch Trump.

A candidate stuck in the past will drag Republicans lower, and a candidate obsessed with petty grievances will corrupt conservatism.

SUNDAY PERSPECTIVE

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2022-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://daily.gazette.com/article/282617446760983

The Gazette, Colorado Springs