The only two conversations I have.
The only two conversations I have.
T here are only two kinds of arguments about the former president at this time.
The first goes something like this:
Donald Trump is just not up to the political task his voters and the Republican coalition have in mind. We knew that in 2016 based on his character. And we know it in 2023 based on his record as president.
Ultimately, the desire expressed in “Make America Great Again” is to make America feel like a home for conservatives again. Like a place where your basic religious convictions aren’t a potential civil-rights problem for your employer. Or like a place where the institutions of government work again in the interests of voters rather than in the service of some ideology that was made up a few weeks ago. Trump’s foreign policy, for example, which was a sometimes-contradictory mess of promises to not fight and also to win big, was an attempt to address the scandal of two decades of failure, mismanagement, and mistrust that has led even military families to start abandoning the armed forces.
If a critical number of government and private institutions are monopolized by progressives who act in concert for ideological purposes, and if the next Republican president must address this in order to preserve something like full political liberty — speech rights, the right to assembly, the right to organize — then Trump has proven himself manifestly unfit for the job. Wokeness got worse in every measurable way on his watch. The intelligence agencies constantly thwarted him and put severe limits on his ability to govern. Many of his own subordinates disobeyed him or just waited him out. Mostly he let them get away with it. In the ultimate test during the Covid-19 pandemic, he let people who hated him set the terms by which Americans would live their day-to-day lives, with the unsubtle promise that we would remain partly penned up until we elected someone else. In many ways, the election of Trump — an executive who could not execute — was indistinguishable from the election of Trump’s enemies. It was the latter who ruled while Trump feigned.
We need someone like Ron DeSantis, who can serve two terms. At least that much is required to even begin draining the swamp. We also need someone with DeSantis’s follow-through, his willingness to stick with a fight until it’s really finished. We can’t afford Trump’s lack of attention to detail.
The second conversation proceeds more like this:
What is the point of electing any of the other Republicans, whom Democrats and the corrupt intel agencies and the political risk-taking prosecutors don’t even bother to persecute?
I completely understand that Trump is not great, but he’s the focus of their opposition. If you want to defeat the enemy, you have to defeat them where they are fighting, and they are fighting around him.
There’s only one issue in the 2024 election, which is the election itself. That is, whether Americans can choose someone whom the progressive institutions dislike, even if that’s Trump, and whether that man gets to exercise the powers of the presidency as normal. And the best way to prove that our political liberties still matter is to send them precisely the bastard they do not want. The Left has to learn to live with election results, without setting up fake intel operations like Russiagate to constrain our man.
All the other Republicans are limited in their fight against a corrupt political establishment because they are exclusively political creatures. They all grew up dreaming of running for high office and have spent their careers building their résumés just for that. That formation leaves them fundamentally warped and unfit. In a direct conflict with the institutions, these Republicans can only fold because their life’s ambition has only been to be accepted by those institutions or lead them gracefully. Only Trump can confront this establishment in the way it deserves to be confronted, because only Trump has his footing in other sources of power and charisma such as his wealth, business, and — most important — celebrity.
They’re going after Trump with everything because they sense the danger for them. And they sense that they can tame the rest of the Republicans whenever they want to do so.
We have to bring this story to a final confrontation: 2024 is about whether the 2016 election was legitimate and whether we ever get to have another one like it again.
* * *
Sometimes the first conversation is had with other conservatives in the movement and sometimes with my superego. Sometimes the second conversation represents my darkest suspicions getting their voice in; sometimes I have it with friends and family members. But I never have any other conversation. For the American Right, this primary is a referendum on Trump. Was he tried and found wanting, or is his reelection the only fitting punishment for the misdeeds and norm-breaking of his enemies?
The problem for Republicans is that the answer to both questions is probably yes.