Donald Trump Is a Waste of the Right’s Political Energy

I t is sometimes necessary to restate the obvious. Donald Trump’s continued political career is an enormous waste of the political energy of the conservative movement, the Republican Party, and the American Right (as that is most broadly construed). Every day that it continues, we redirect our precious and finite resources away from doing things that matter to the lives of ordinary Americans and to the causes we believe in, and put those resources instead into things that are mainly of personal interest to Donald J. Trump.

Make no mistake: Political energy is finite. There are only so many people engaged in American politics, only so many of those who are at least occasionally on our side, and only so many of those who are genuinely active in advancing our causes and institutions on the right. Among politically active people, there are only so many hours in the day to devote to this stuff; among politically interested and engaged audiences, there is only so much time and attention to devote to it. Money is a finite resource. Airtime on TV, radio, YouTube, and podcasts is limited, if only by the energy of the people creating content and the interest of the people consuming it. So is print and Web space for the written word. Conservative organizations can hire only so many people; so can the Republican Party. Swing voters — people who might vote for Republicans or might vote for the Democrats or for a third party, or might stay home — consume only so much information in making their decisions. The same is true of young people in forming long-term political attachments.

Polarizing causes and inspirational leaders can expand these finite resources, but only at the margins. The limits are real, and they are hard.

Worse, some resources can be replenished daily, but not all of them. Others are unique, or have been accumulated over time. Moments cannot be recaptured. New generations, if lost, cannot be easily recaptured, nor substitutes found. Institutions, if debilitated or surrendered to foes, cannot be regained or replaced without considerable effort.

So, when we choose leaders for our party and our movement, a critical question is not just how much additional energy they can bring to the table, but how much of what we entrust to you will be wasted? How much water will leak out of the bucket?

With Donald Trump, as we all know by now, the answer is quite a lot of it. If you talk with conservative-leaning voters and activists anywhere, there’s any number of things they’re interested in and would like to see done: secure the border, get leftism out of the schools and the workplace, stand up to China, cut taxes and regulations, protect gun rights, stop abortions, etc. Trump says he’d like to do a number of these things, he devoted some of his energy and resources to them in office, and he had his accomplishments.

But Trump also wasted vast energy on petty personal feuds, on totally unnecessary scandals that were fed by his poor impulse control, on the defense of pointless lies, and on unforced errors. His Charlottesville comments, for example, were unfairly mischaracterized, but as I noted in 2020, “It is political malpractice of the highest order to hand your open enemies the one message they most want to use against you,” and to do so in offering a totally unnecessary defense of people you don’t need to defend in a way that was “more or less irrelevant to the entire point of why the event was national news.” You may think this is a silly thing to care about, but it sank Trump’s approval ratings to a nadir from which it took many months to recover — months in which he accomplished less with a Republican Congress than he should have, and during which Democrats built the message that led them to a high-turnout midterm wave in the House and the states.

On and on it has gone, through a litany that reads like a demented version of the Twelve Days of Christmas: one sexual-assault verdict, one Capitol riot, two criminal indictments, two impeachments, three wives, four White House chiefs of staff, five Trump states lost to Biden, six national-security advisers, six bankruptcies, seven Republican Senators voting to remove him from office, eight former Cabinet members insulted (at least), 61 lost-election lawsuits, etc.

Will American voters really be mostly concerned, in 2024, about the proper storage of boxes at Mar-a-Lago or the proper recording of hush-money payments to a porn actress? Will they even want the election and the focus of the next administration to be on the 2020 election and the January 6 riot at the Capitol? And yet, so long as Donald Trump is the central figure in the Republican Party, these will consume a massive proportion of our side’s energy, attention, and effort.

The Trump indictments present four different types of wasted energy for Republicans and conservatives. First, Trump has to spend money and his own time and attention defending the legal case and, if necessary, getting out of legal consequences that could impair his capacity to campaign and/or govern. Most likely, the legal defense of Trump will devour a big chunk of Republican donor money that could have been spent on party-building and elections. Second, Trump will take on political damage with at least some subset of potentially persuadable American voters who are less interested in voting for a candidate under criminal indictment. Third, most everybody in the party and the movement will inevitably get sucked into commenting on the cases (I have already expended vast amounts of my time on the Manhattan DA’s case, flimsy as it is, and will be writing in more depth on the Mar-a-Lago boxes case, and probably on the likely inevitable Georgia indictment, too). Among other things, this is also apt to lead other Republicans into saying and doing things that alienate either swing voters or Trump supporters or both. Fourth, even aside from the criminal proceeding itself, Trump and anyone who supports or opposes Trump within the party will also have their energy consumed by the underlying question of whether Trump’s handling of these documents, even if not criminal, was nonetheless disqualifyingly reckless behavior on the part of a prospective commander in chief.

Trump is also a waste of energy because he is so uniquely divisive within the Republican Party and within the conservative movement. For eight years now, we’ve seen elections lost because of candidates Trump endorsed solely because of his personal litmus tests, and because Trump turned his voters against fellow Republicans. We’ve seen people across the movement at each others’ throats; I’ve lost friends over Trump, and just about everybody else in any part of the politics business has, too. All that anger could have been turned outward.

Now, it is of course true that everybody we choose as a leader will inevitably waste some of the precious energy they are entrusted to deploy. On some occasions, they will choose poor political priorities, surrender on battles they ought to continue, or continue fights in which losses should be cut. Everyone has some imperfections in their biography, and some family, friends, donors, or appointees who are untrustworthy distractions. Nobody is entirely without baggage or without personality flaws. There is no such person as Generic Republican.

But then again, consider the old adage that friends come and go, but enemies accumulate. One of the reasons why it pays for political parties to change leaders every four to eight years is that you start with a clean slate. Trump’s old baggage never goes away, and the voters who have tuned him out permanently never come back.

It is also true that Trump has his political strengths: He is funny, entertaining, and charismatic in his own way; he speaks to voters disenchanted with everybody else; and he drives his enemies at times to unforced errors of rage of their own.

And it is true that not all of the distractions are Trump’s fault. Any Republican or conservative who is worth the candle will attract a lot of fire and have to spend a lot of time responding to made-up scandals, bogus investigations, and ludicrous controversies. One thinks back to the news cycles expended over Mitt Romney’s dog or Marco Rubio’s water bottle or the backside of the rock on Rick Perry’s dad’s property. But the flip side of that reality is twofold. One is that Trump’s own bad habits have contributed quite a lot to the credibility and persistence of a lot of those distractions. The other is that Trump’s diehards may tell you in one breath that the attacks on Trump expose real issues with the corruption of our institutions, justice system, elections, etc., and in the other breath that all the same stuff will be done to any Republican. But that also means that any Republican can, and will, confront the important part (the warped partisanship of the institutions) without pouring more gasoline on the fire and empowering his or her enemies.

There are so very many things more important than the things that Donald J. Trump wants or needs to care about and fight about, and that he will drag the rest of us into caring about and fighting about. He’s now been the main character in our politics for eight years. Why are we still doing this? Is there really nothing better we could do with our time and our talents? The men who signed the Declaration of Independence pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the formation of a great nation and the defense of God-given rights. We put ours into where one man stored his boxes, how he paid off one of his mistresses, and whether he really groped a lady in a department store. America deserves better.