Conservative objection to Trump is not going away

The Bulwark is up and running. It's the site where many of The Weekly Standard's writers have landed. It's immensely gratifying to see them having regrouped and resumed their mission so quickly.

Charlie Sykes has a hugely important piece there this morning about the reactions to the Romney op-ed. He takes on Bill Bennett, David Perdue, Henry Olsen, and Roger Kimball throroughly and with gusto.

Sykes on Bennett:

Back in the 1990s, under a different president, Bill Bennett argued eloquently that:  “It is our character that supports the promise of our future—far more than particular government programs or policies.” And: “The President is the symbol of who the people of the United States are. He is the person who stands for us in the eyes of the world and the eyes of our children.”

But that was then.

Like so many other figures on the right, Bennett made his accommodation with Trump, becoming one of the first conservative intellectuals to make the case for overlooking questions of character in choosing a president. “Our country can survive the occasional infelicities and improprieties of Donald Trump,” Bennett wrote. “But it cannot survive losing the Supreme Court to liberals and allowing them to wreck our sacred republic. It would reshape the country for decades.”

That was one of the first attempts to codify the conservative accommodation of Trump’s full-spectrum mendacity. We know the rest.

On Senator Perdue, who wrote his own Washington Post op-ed a couple of days after Romney:

 Perdue’s op-ed is less of an argument than a reheated Trump tweet storm. He accuses Romney of engaging in “character assassination of the president,” but offers not a word of defense of that character. His main objection is that Romney has criticized a fellow Republicans out loud.

“Criticism of the president or his policy decisions is, of course, not off-limits,” Perdue concedes. “But I believe it is much more productive to have candid conversations behind the scenes.” In other words, daddy may be cheating, but let’s talk about it in whispers so the children don’t hear. Except in this case, the children are the American people; and Perdue’s version of moral populism apparently means not discussing issues like trustworthiness, responsibility, fairness, or decency in public.

On Henry Olsen:

This is the same argument mounted by Henry Olsen (with a slightly more intellectual gloss and a sprinkling of poll data) in his own response to Romney. Employing many of the familiar clichés of Trump world, Olsen claimed that Romney’s op-ed demonstrated all of the ways that the newly elected senator was “wildly out of touch” with Republican voters.
Those voters, Olsen tells us, don’t accept the argument that character is more important than Trump’s “accomplishments or principles [sic].”

Most Republicans simply don’t accept this argument. Many instead see Trump’s pugnacious and sometimes crude talk as an essential part of his virtue—he fights while other Republicans cower. Others would prefer he tweet less and do more, but still prefer Trump’s fallen angel to a Democratic devil.

Of course the problem with Trump is not his “pugnacity” or his “crudeness.” Mitch McConnell is pugnacious—he held a SCOTUS seat open in defiance of massive liberal push-back. And this pugnacity—whether you approve the ploy or not—achieved an actual policy goal. Lindsey Graham can be crude.Neither of these men could ever be accused of “cowering” from their political opponents. No, the problem with Trump is his grifting, bullying, and chronic deceit. (Also odd is Olsen’s description of Trump as a “fallen angel,” since fallen angel = Satan. But I suppose you can’t assume that a guy reads Milton just because a guy works at the “Ethics and Public Policy Center.”)
Olsen’s argument is that conservatives are positively obligated to embrace—or at least be silent about—Trump’s character, because that’s the only way to get what they want:

Romney would like you to believe you can have your cake and eat it, too — that you can be against Trump’s character but for his policies. But that doesn’t work in the real world. Railing about character hurts the president, and Republicans know that.

Well, yes. But since Olsen wants to cite polling to determine moral standards, it’s worth pointing out that Trump’s character clearly hurts the GOP with non-Trumpian voters. And in the wake of the Republican thumping in the midterms, it seems surpassingly strange to hear an expert in public opinion insisting that we should not talk about one of the factors that is an electoral millstone about the neck of the GOP. 

On Roger Kimball:

Neither Olsen nor Perdue, however, are Peak Trump Rationalizers. The championship belt for moral puffery is held, of course, by Jerry Falwell Jr. and his fellow evangelicals, who look at Donald Trump and see King David.

But there may be a new contender on the horizon. Roger Kimball has heroically taken up Jonah Goldberg’s challenge to “come up with a definition of good character that Donald Trump can clear.”

I use the term “heroically,” advisedly because Kimball brings to the task all of his formidable intellectual and rhetorical skills, including the use of original Greek, quotes from Voltaire, and commentary from Cardinal Newman.

In his book The Grammar of Assent, Newman devotes some interesting pages to Aristotle’s concept of φρόνησις, “prudence.” “Properly speaking,” Newman says, “there are as many kinds of phronesis as there are virtues: for the judgment, good sense, or tact which is conspicuous in a man’s conduct in one subject-matter, is not necessarily traceable in another.”

Rising to the challenge, Kimball writes that voters did not vote for Trump because they thought he was “a candidate for sainthood.”

On the contrary, people supported him, first, because of what he promised to do and, second, because of what, over the past two years, he has accomplished. These accomplishments, from rolling back the regulatory state and scores of conservative judicial appointments, from moving our Israeli embassy to Jerusalem to resuscitating our military, working to end Obamacare, and fighting to keep our borders secure, are not morally neutral data points.

These accomplishments, Kimball says, are “evidences of a political vision and of promises made and kept.”

And it is here that Kimball makes the audacious bid to redefine the meaning of the word “character.” Add up the list of Trump wins, Kimball concludes, “and I think they go a long way towards a definition of good character that Donald Trump can clear.”

Do not overlook Kimball’s accomplishment here: There as a time when character referred to such hoary values as justice, prudence, truth, temperance, and fortitude. But in this telling, character becomes simply a threshold to be clear by tabulating political outcomes.

In his response, Goldberg notes that Kimball “employs an enormous amount of logic-chopping and squirrel-spotting,” to come up with a “new and wholly instrumental definition of good character”:

He is saying that a man who bedded a porn star while his (third) wife was home with their newborn child now fits the—or at least a—definition of good character because he delivers tax cuts. A man, who by his own admission, “whines until he wins” and boasts of how he screwed over business partners, a man who lies more egregiously and incessantly than Bill Clinton and used his family charity in Clintonian ways, has a good character because he’s “working to end Obamacare, and fighting to keep our borders secure.” Is that really what conservatives should be telling presidents? That so long as you fulfill your promises to the base of the party, not only will we abstain from meaningful criticism, but we will in fact redefine good character to fit the president? I have deep admiration for Roger, but if I knew what the original Greek for “bologna” is, I would use it here.

But this is where I have to differ from Jonah a bit. The Trumpian celebration of strength over goodness and the sneering at traditional values as emblems of weakness is not utterly new. It is, in fact, somewhat surprising that Kimball would quote Newman and Voltaire, but not Nietzsche, since he seems to channeling his transvaluation of values.

Sykes concludes by framing Trumpists' defense of the Very Stable Genius as stemming from one of Western civilization's least admirable strains: Nietzchean philosophy. He sums his argument up quite tidily with this line:

Nietzsche would have fit seamlessly into the pages of American Greatness or on Fox News’ primetime lineup. 

I'm looking forward to more of this kind of courageous and incisive observation. The Bulwark looks to be a timely - indeed, urgently needed - voice in the cacophony of 2019 post-American discourse.