In an op-ed earlier this week, I explained why, despite having not pulled the lever for Donald Trump in the 2016 general election, I fully intend to do so in 2020. I offered three primary reasons for my change of heart: (1) the results are in, and the reality is that Trump governs as a conservative president; (2) to the extent there is a moral stain on the conservative movement and the Republican Party, that is now a sunk cost; and (3) it is impossible to overstate the extent to which the Left has become full-on crazy. At the Trump-skeptical site, The Bulwark, Andrew Egger has written a partial criticism of my piece. I say “partial criticism,” because Egger effectively concedes my first point and does not respond to my third point. He focuses, instead, on my second argument that the moral stain on the conservative movement and/or the GOP from the nomination and election of Trump is now a sunk cost.
Egger’s piece is fair. I do not object in the slightest to his framing my argument as “realist, even cynical” — indeed, that is our role, as conservatives. Idealism, by definition untethered to reality, is for the Left. And I even concede that the “sunk cost” point is likely the weakest of my three reasons for aligning with Trump in 2020.
Indeed, I actually agree with a fair bit of Egger’s piece. But let’s start with what I actually said:
The jury is still out on the effect that Trump’s “checkered” personal past and current habits — including but hardly limited to his trigger-happy tweeting thumbs — will have on the intellectual gravitas and solemnity of the conservative cause. But Trump has already been elected and is already our president. Therefore, in economic terms, whatever stain may afflict the movement and/or the GOP is, henceforth, necessarily a sunk cost: A cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recouped. That ought to make a monumental difference in how morally/socially conservative voters approach the 2020 presidential election, in contradistinction to the 2016 presidential election.
The key line is this: “[W]hatever stain may afflict the [conservative] movement and/or the GOP is, henceforth, necessarily a sunk cost: A cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recouped.” Egger not wholly unfairly interprets that line as my “suggest[ing] that by the time Donald Trump was sworn into office, the damage to conservatism was already done.”
Egger dismisses this by citing some of Trump’s substantive and rhetorical mistakes since being elected president. Some of these citations are real — for example, I still consider Trump’s infamous statement made in the wake of the vile August 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville to be the single lowest point of his presidency, to-date. But some of Egger’s citations are, at best, tendentious. Egger takes fault with the Trump Administration’s purported separation policy last summer for illegal alien parents and children; but that policy was enacted in the chaotic midst of a hitherto “unprecedented” influx of almost uniformly bogus asylum claims inundating our southern border, and the Trump Administration was completely hamstrung by the highly flawed Flores consent decree from 1997. Consider what Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro wrote last summer, at the time:
This is a lie. …
1. Trump Created Separation Of Children From Illegal Immigrant Parents. This is plainly false. In 1997, the federal government made an agreement in a case called Flores not to keep unaccompanied illegal immigrant children in custody beyond 20 days. The settlement said nothing about accompanied illegal immigrant children — children who crossed the border with their parents. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals then ruled that accompanied children also could not be held in custody under the terms of the settlement. This meant that the government either had to release whole families, or that the government had to separate parents from children.
More generally, I suspect Egger — and, if I had to guess, most of his Bulwark colleagues — and I have a substantive difference of opinion on the issue of illegal immigration. I am, and always have been, an unabashed immigration hardliner. My decision not to pull the lever for Trump in 2016 was therefore very much in spite of, and not in any way because of, his claimed dedication to border security and national sovereignty. Indeed, even while writing frequent “NeverTrump” columns in the heat of the 2016 election cycle, I wrote one piece entitled, “Lamentations of a #NeverTrump Border Hawk”:
I think a border fence/wall with Mexico makes perfect sense. I oppose any and all forms of amnesty — be it a full pathway to citizenship, or merely a pathway to legal status — because it is manifestly unfair to those who immigrate legally, instills tremendous perverse incentives and abets humanitarian disasters in the form of horrible Central American human trafficking, is an affront to the rule of law, and distorts the very concept of sovereignty of which the Constitution’s Preamble speaks. In my first piece I ever wrote for a conservative website back in August 2014, “Why We Fight,” I even put illegal immigration at the very top of my list of grievances with the Left. … [I]n November 2014, I argued (and still think) that President Obama’s DAPA executive amnesty amounted to such a willful, bad faith constitutional distortion so as to clearly fall under the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” criterion of justifying the commencement of impeachment proceedings.
Similarly, Egger cites Trump’s unilateral declaration of a national emergency at the southern border to be an alleged violation of over-arching constitutional norms. I disagree. I am persuaded by John Eastman of the Claremont Institute and John Yoo of Berkeley Law and the American Enterprise Institute (both former U.S. Supreme Court law clerks for originalist stalwart Justice Clarence Thomas) that Trump acted well within his statutorily delegated authority in unilaterally declaring the national emergency at our beleaguered border. Furthermore, Egger calls Trump’s possibly closing the U.S.-Mexico border “economically ruinous,” but my immigration hawkishness leads me to a different conclusion — a conclusion, incidentally, that will allow us Millennials to still keep our beloved avocados flowing readily.
These may seem like tangential asides, but they really are not. To the extent Egger feels that some of Trump’s pro-border security moves/posturing and assertions of executive authority are constitutionally problematic and/or morally staining, that bears direct relevance on the issue of the alleged continuation of Trump’s (uncontested initial) moral stain on the conservative movement or the GOP. But for those of us who believe in a potentially more robust executive branch — especially in the realms of foreign affairs and national security — and are more intuitively sympathetic to Yoram Hazony-esque pleas for a sustainable mild nationalism, then some of Egger’s substantive points are seriously diluted.
I really do wonder just how much of our disagreement is substantive; does Egger find himself, as I do, in strong agreement with First Things’ recent manifesto against returning to the “dead consensus” of the pre-Trump prevailing right-of-center status quo ante? I suspect the likely answer is, “no.” The upshot here is that, when Egger discusses “the damage to conservatism,” we are likely operating from different starting positions over what “conservatism” itself is or ought to be.
Having therefore established that much of the “sunk cost” debate is actually rooted in substance, I want to finally address the extent to which Egger’s point is non-substantive and purely strategic. Egger argues that it is “harmful to a party or a movement to be constantly berated into hardening itself against those principles by a powerful leader,” and that “[t]his is not a one-time danger; the longer such a hardening continues, the worse it gets.” I actually do not really disagree with that, and perhaps I slightly misstated my case in my initial piece. Rather, my contention is that, on net, the moral effect on the alleged movement and party of “family values” of the initial nomination and election of a thrice-married cad who hangs Playboy covers around his gilded penthouse office drastically outweighs the relatively minor effect of any future morally problematic foibles that may arise. This seems to me uncontentious, and I’m not sure if Egger would rebut it. Ripping the Band-Aid off in 2016 amounts to a far, far bigger deal than does any future mollycoddling of a rogue dictator, no matter how egregious that mollycoddling might be.
My position all along in the Trump era, like that of Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, has been one of “Good Trump/Bad Trump.” As I wrote on Inauguration Day in January 2017: “Remember who we are, as conservatives. Our principles are timeless. Do not be afraid to stand up for them, when they inevitably clash with volatile Trumpism.” To be sure, that remains our solemn task. And we must continue to call out Trump’s rhetorical paroxysms and unpresidential mannerisms, when they inevitably surface.
But we also live in the real world. And 2019 is a very different landscape, for conservatism, than was 2016. Trump’s record thus far is a generally conservative one, and the Democratic Party has truly gone insane. To the extent those, like Egger, feel that any incremental moral stains — however small they be, in relative comparison to the initial moral stain of 2016 — are so overwhelmingly important so as to persuade conservatives to still oppose Trump in 2020, the firm burden is on them to make that case.
But they face an uphill battle in making that case, and I am unpersuaded. Trump is deserving of conservative support in 2020.