Jonah Goldberg on Trumpism

He doesn't offer any completely fresh insights in his latest NRO piece, but for incisively spelling out what Trumpism is and isn't, what he says here can't be beat.

On the left there's an enormous investment in the idea that Trump isn't a break with conservatism but the apotheosis of it. This is a defensible, or at least understandable, claim if you believe conservatism has always been an intellectually vacuous bundle of racial and cultural resentments. But if that were the case, Commentary magazine’s Noah Rothman recently noted, you would not see so many mainstream and consistent conservatives objecting to Trump’s behavior.

Intellectuals and ideologically committed journalists on the left and right have a natural tendency to see events through the prism of ideas. Trump presents an insurmountable challenge to such approaches because, by his own admission, he doesn’t consult any serious and coherent body of ideas for his decisions. He trusts his instincts.

Trump has said countless times that he thinks his gut is a better guide than the brains of his advisers. He routinely argues that the presidents and policymakers who came before him were all fools and weaklings. That’s narcissism, not ideology, talking.

Even the “ideas” that he has championed consistently — despite countervailing evidence and expertise — are grounded not in arguments but in instincts. He dislikes regulations because, as a businessman, they got in his way. He dislikes trade because he has a childish, narrow understanding of what “winning” means. Foreigners are ripping us off. Other countries are laughing at us. He doesn’t actually care about, let alone understand, the arguments suggesting that protectionism can work. Indeed, he reportedly issued his recent diktat on steel tariffs in a fit of pique over negative media coverage and the investigation into Russian election interference. His administration was wholly unprepared for the announcement.

News emanating from the White House is always more understandable once you accept that Trumpist policy is downstream of Trump’s personality.

I think Rothman's observation, cited by Goldberg, bears contemplation. For nearly three years we've been hearing from "the base" that conservatives with strong objections to Trump were a dying breed, increasingly marginalized and irrelevant. Sorry, folks, but National Review, The Weekly Standard, Red State, The Resurgent, Daren Jonescu, Ben Shapiro, Brittany Pounders, and, dare I presume a place among such august company, LITD, are still thriving and wielding influence.

I think Mona Charen's panel-discussion appearance at this year's CPAC was a telling moment. She had to be escorted out by security, while the likes of Marine Le Pen and Sebastian Gorka were feted heartily. Everybody knows about that fault line.

And the spin that the faithful are driven to put on such developments as Trump's tweets about Sessions, or Hope Hicks and Gary Cohn suddenly leaving the administration, or the obvious foolishness of tariffs, or the suit that Stormy Daniels is filing against the Very Stable Genius has the same stench of reality-denial about it that leftist claims of the global climate being in some kind of trouble, or systemic police bigotry have. It has a definite whistling-past-the-graveyard ring to it.

It's an odd place for an actual conservative to be in. On the one hand, we are heartened to see that Trump's behavior bears out what we've been saying all along, but then there's the dismay of seeing the harm it's doing to this country.

As with Goldberg's observations today, there's nothing too new about it. It's the same situation we've been pointing out since July 2015.

The distraction factor is what disturbs me the most. Shiny objects, from the Mueller investigation to the public cringing that attends to the tweets to to the boneheaded policy moves that negate the good policy moves, take our eye off the the ongoing assault on all that is good and decent that is being waged by the left. The death threats and vile insults Dana Loesch endures on Twitter. The shouting down of Christina Hoff Summers at Lewis and Clark Law School. The gender-pronoun edicts being imposed by municipal governments. The erosion of the rule of law in the form of sanctuary-city status. Countering these developments requires a consistent body of principles, and we get no help from the Trumpists who claim that we're not crude and savage enough for the fight.

It just has to be taken day by day, development by development. And we must hang on to our clarity. There's none to be found anywhere else.