It has been a little over 10 years since Donald Trump, with characteristic flair, descended the escalators at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for the presidency of the United States.
Today, we can say in the words of Henry Olsen, the always astute political analyst, that “Trumpism is here to stay,” and that “there will be no conservative return to a pre-Trump consensus.” Advocates of such a return claim to represent republican rectitude and fidelity to constitutional norms now under threat from a supposedly reckless and demagogic populism.
In truth, however, whatever the virtues of the old consensus, its adherents were far from perfect or imitable in important respects. They were slow to resist “the culture of repudiation” (in Roger Scruton’s arresting phrase) that had colonized the educational and entertainment worlds, as well as the commanding heights of civil society, including large swaths of the business sector. In recent decades, these quarters hectored Americans and instructed them to hate themselves. Much of our elite class obsessed about race and gender in ways that undermined self-respect and propagandized groups based on accidents of birth to give themselves over to anger and despair.
Market fundamentalism and a one-sided affirmation of globalization and trade arrangements that were far from free or fair replaced a prudent and principled defense of an opportunity society. The needs of human beings struggling with the loss of manufacturing jobs and the hollowing out of social and moral norms in the decades after the 1960s were often casually dismissed. A blind and self-defeating economism led conservative elites to downplay the revolutionary import of same-sex marriage, which severed human sexuality from authoritative norms rooted in the nature of things, and the excessive valorization of autonomy, which made individual and collective self-government all but impossible.
“Forever wars” undermined the credibility of American foreign policy elites and eroded the willingness of the American people to support utopian and ill-defined adventures abroad. The United States promoted “democracy” across the world while increasingly losing sight of its meaning at home.
One does not want to paint with too broad a brush, however. The Republican Party remained the only viable vehicle for political good sense. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, with very few exceptions, had contempt for our founding principles, hostility to traditional religion and morals, and enforced mandatory political correctness, the new racialism, the cult of transgenderism, and the heavy-handed use of government power to “save democracy” by subverting it. Lawfare, government-inspired social media censorship, the deliberate equating of democratic conservatism with anti-democratic “extremism,” the sacramentalization of abortion-on-demand, hatred of “Zionism” and the State of Israel, and deference to the ideological cult of settler colonialism (which also condemns the United States as an illegitimate colonial entity) became defining features of the American Left, and occupied an increasingly respectable position within the Democratic Party.
There was nothing “liberal” or “democratic” about this emerging political and ideological dispensation that left moderation and good sense far behind—and that cried out for a manly resistance from conservatives that was too often lacking.
Perhaps my friend and colleague Glenn Ellmers is right that this blatant and accelerating progressivist subversion of democracy could only be resisted by a fighting man, an “hombre” who eschewed gentlemanly niceties even as he “understands the nature of the problem” the country faces. To be sure, there are few gentlemen on the other side, dominated as it is by an ideological worldview that divides the world into the camp of “progress” and the retrograde camp of reaction, racism, privilege, sexism, and transphobia.
Moreover, Trump is more than a street fighter. His rhetorical provocations are almost always tempered by humor and the self-effacing use of hyperbole that makes him endearing to at least half the nation. Finally, his pugnacity is at the service of saving the country and its republican institutions, not subverting or replacing them. Pseudo-sophisticates like Anne Applebaum and the editors of The Economist love to put Trump in the same authoritarian camp as Putin and Xi, which says nothing about Trump and everything about their incapacity to make distinctions.
As the admirably anti-woke Democratic commentator Julian Epstein has argued recently in his columns in the New York Post, Trump is in important respects a pragmatist and centrist who has the support of 70% of the American people on vital issues that are as substantial as they are symbolic: closing the border to a massive influx of illegals (a goal he has already accomplished), attacking and easing the stranglehold of political correctness in educational and cultural institutions, replacing “forever wars” with the calibrated use of force and peace through strength, ending the use of American soft power to promote moral insanity and polymorphous perversity abroad, and an adroit mixture of deregulation and fairer trade policy to make the American Dream a living proposition for those who had begun to lose hope.
Whatever the purists in the conservative camp might say, no one at home or abroad confuses Trump with a socialist or a dirigiste. However clumsily, he has restored politics to political economy, which is no bad thing. Authentic conservatism cannot be governed by ideological abstractions impervious to human experience without becoming petrified and politically irrelevant. This is what it was in danger of becoming before Trump’s rise.
About the big picture, Mark Kremer is right: Trump’s candidacies in 2016, 2020, and 2024 were “a declaration of war against a despotism that has restricted free speech and freedom of the mind more effectively than could any Roman emperor or European monarch.” As Kremer points out, this despotism has been “named” by Trump but far from adequately “explained”: the epithets “political correctness,” “globalism,” “Cultural Marxism,” “the Deep State,” “the uniparty,” “the Swamp,” “the establishment,” and “the blob” are imprecise populist efforts to unveil the systematic misappropriation of democratic rhetoric and categories by elites who have severed democracy from political liberty, common sense, and a healthy regard for American traditions. Nonetheless, “[b]y challenging it, Trump forced it to drop its mask and reveal itself.” For that, he deserves a great deal of credit. But that is only the beginning of a long effort to recover our moral and political patrimony.
But the president has done some ostensibly impossible things already. These include reestablishing the integrity of our national borders, taking the fight quite effectively to our woke elites and our most corrupt and influential universities, and challenging a transgender cult that until recently seemed to be riding high. Trump has also shown some important independence. Risking the opprobrium of high-profile and vociferous MAGA influencers, he disabled the nuclear weapons program of an Iranian theocracy that supported nonstop terrorism and threatened both the State of Israel and our moderate Arab allies in the Middle East.
Trump’s swift and calibrated actions showed that one can defend vital American interests and oppose palpable political evil without giving into ideological crusades or starting “forever wars.” I would call that an admirable example of the politics of prudence at work.
But there is a good deal to criticize, too, not out of hostility but in order to encourage a truly effective use of this golden political opportunity. President Trump needs to make the case for restoring republican constitutionalism to the American people and not just appeal to political sentiments through evocative imagery and pugnacious calls to battle.
Vice President Vance did the former quite effectively in a speech to the Claremont Institute on July 5, where he made clear, and quite eloquently, that “we” are for affirmation while the destructive Left stands for hatred, negation, and repudiation. Vance ably addressed the questions of purpose and meaning that transcend “purely material question[s],” and that remind a free people we are “human beings, made in the image of God” and not just “producers and consumers.”
The vice president spoke of the reasons why we must cherish our “sovereign” nation and cultivate the citizenship that preserves and sustains it. The Left, he pointed out, pursues an approach that cheapens citizenship, when it does not try to make it obsolete. Citizenship is more than the exercise of rights: it demands an active love of country and not servile deference to a government that engineers, instead of governs, a free people that grants it its consent. In that speech, we saw the elements of a public philosophy that builds on Trump’s accomplishments while moving beyond its animating clichés and slogans, however necessary and effective they are in the moment.
Trump needs to remember that a president must be presidential by respecting the forms of the office, including, perhaps especially, presidential speech or communication with the American people. That means less reliance on Truth Social and more thought-out discourses on matters of national import. Otherwise, he risks exhausting even the most sympathetic Americans.
Similarly, he should avoid pettiness (like renaming the Gulf of Mexico) and not undermine patriots in other countries who wish to be allies but not subordinates of the United States. One regrets his wholly unnecessary undermining of Canada’s Conservatives before that nation’s recent elections. Canada has its own political tradition, markedly different from the United States. Canadian globalists came to power in no small part because Trump was determined to insult our neighbor to the north, even after the loathsome Justin Trudeau was no longer in the picture. This was a failure of judgment, as much as or more than of speech.
In a matter dear to his heart, Trump could learn more about the roots of the Ukrainian tragedy, which was exacerbated by constant calls for NATO expansion and systematic Ukrainian disregard for its Russophone citizens, as well as Russian intransigence and insistence on goals, such as Ukrainian “demilitarization,” that are implausible, to say the least. Threatening all sides is not a sign of effective statecraft or a recipe for a viable peace.
As the foregoing indicates, I am a friend but not a flatterer of the Trump Administration, and, when necessary, a critic of the excesses and defects of MAGA enthusiasts. These days they tend to combine or oscillate between excessive praise and overwrought criticism, for example, with respect to the manufactured Jeffrey Epstein affair and (more importantly) growing hostility to our Israeli ally. Such overreaction does no good to a consequential president and patriot.
After a recent sojourn in France, I became more convinced than ever that European elites will remain implacably hostile to Trump and all his works. By attending solely to the French press, even the conservative newspaper Figaro, one could not begin to understand the last 20 years of American life. French coverage of American politics is almost exclusively recycled from the woke-adjacent and anti-Trump New York Times and Washington Post. The extent to which the American Left has left liberalism behind is, to say the least, insufficiently appreciated by Europeans, including conservatives.
Until a few months ago, many French centrists and establishment conservatives thought Biden was a statesman of the first order. Hostility to Israel is increasingly pathological in Europe. Trump is treated as a bad joke, when he is not dismissed as a grave threat to democracy. And the French political class, like the broader European political class, obsesses about “the extreme Right.” This includes anyone who challenges the Brussels oligarchy or the hegemony of “European values” (humanitarian, hyper-secular, post-national). In contemporary Europe, the only borders that are sacrosanct are Ukrainian ones.
The trans-Atlantic misunderstanding is here to stay, and Atlanticism, alas, largely belongs to the world that died in 1989, whatever leaders pretend. American conservatives still aspire to national greatness, however attenuated, while Europeans still largely dream of a post-political, post-national utopia, promises of increased defense spending notwithstanding. That fact is more fundamental than the person and presidency of Donald J. Trump and will continue to have to be dealt with when he leaves the stage.