The Trump Apocalypse
As a center-right columnist, my criticism of Donald Trump (and his defenders) has caused some friction with my old friends on the right. Interestingly, the most persuasive pushback I have received has come from folks who aren’t big fans of the president, either.
One conservative friend sent me an email a while back, chastising me for criticizing Ben Sasse. His theory is that Sasse’s newfound acquiescence to Trump was purely about political survival. “How do you regain the earth after an apocalypse?” my friend asked rhetorically. “You stay in your bunker, you survive and re-emerge when it is safe.”
We agree that Trump’s tenure is apocalyptic—but not that the best strategy is to hide out and hope that it passes.
More recently, another friend wrote me this about my criticism of Nikki Haley: “I see you're dishing on Nikki Haley today,” he said, telling me that if people like me discredit Haley, then “there's almost no one who is viable for the 2024 nomination you could back if Trump loses.”
Conservative talk radio host Erick Erickson made a very similar defense of Haley, writing that if you “want to return to the closest thing to normalcy” you cannot “cart all the good people off to the guillotine of pundit purity,” because, “pretty soon you’re left with the far left, Donald Trump’s family, and Matt Gaetz as his political heirs.”
This seems to be a tacit admission that all politicians are opportunists, and that anyone hoping for more is naïve or unrealistic. The best we can do, it seems, is to settle for the lesser of two evils—to prefer the suck-ups and cowards to the truly abhorrent. In this paradigm, the people who have high expectations for our elected leaders are the ones who are the problem.
Indeed, there is a problem. The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney recently made this prediction about the future: “Every center-left reporter will ask every GOP hopeful his/her opinion on Trump. One answer will alienate the Trump base and incur public curses from Trump. The other answer will embarrass the hopeful.”
Carney is right that Republicans have entered a lose-lose paradigm. But Trump is to blame for placing them in this “no win” predicament. Indeed, Trump has compromised a generation of young conservative politicians, forcing them to choose between intellectual honesty and loyalty to their president.
In a sense, this is a defining moment that tells us a lot about our potential future leaders.
If a politician can’t be counted on to stand up for what is right today, what makes you think they will be a courageous leader, tomorrow?
And who’s to say that yesterday’s “rising star” conservatives are, in fact, entitled to carry the mantle of Reagan into the future?
Just as few Americans in 2004 thought someone named Barack Obama would be elected president in 2008, it may be that the person who leads conservatism out of the wilderness will not come from this generation.
There’s nothing that says Sasse or Haley—or anyone currently on the political map—have to be the ones who lead us into the promised land.
In fact, I would venture to say that they have already ceded that opportunity.
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