The Trump administration is endlessly contradictory. The president’s instincts are to indulge corporate cronyism and to lean on the public sector to remedy society’s ills. These are hardly conservative impulses. Yet the nascent Trump White House occasionally acts in admirably republican ways. Those gestures toward conservative governance have not received due attention.

When Trump became the president, the Beltway suddenly saw in the White House Correspondents Dinner as conservatives of all stripes had always seen it: an unseemly, status-seeking display in which those tasked with holding the powerful to account abdicated that responsibility. Suddenly, center-left media joined the center-right media in questioning the value and appropriateness of the affair. Trump had, after all, been humiliated by President Barack Obama at the annual dinner in 2011. He would surely revel in the opportunity to turn the tables on his tormenters. Trump appeared to shock those who assume the worst of him when the president simply declined the opportunity.

“I will not be attending the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this year,” read an uncharacteristic mid-February Trump tweet. “Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!” And that was the end of it.

Now, it is unlikely that Trump suddenly developed a healthy perspective on the treatment he received from Obama and an audience of cackling reporters six years ago. Nor has the president shed his desire to occupy the spotlight. More likely, Trump is employing the power of the presidency to undermine the event in a way that was new for him: withholding it. The president’s authority is just as potent when it is held in reserve. By starving the White House Correspondents Dinner of oxygen, he may extinguish it. That would be a remarkably Coolidgean approach to the application of presidential influence from any president, but it is downright disorienting coming from Trump.

If Trump’s effort to quietly suffocate the WHCD is an atypically conservative move for him, so, too, are the outlines of what the president will propose in his budget. According to the Washington Post, economists and analysts are anticipating a proposal that would represent the largest drawdown of the federal government since that which immediately followed World War II. The proposal will prioritize defense and homeland security while paring back discretionary federal initiatives that have ballooned over the course of the country’s post-War history. On the chopping block are programs that deal with housing, foreign aid, enforcing environmental regulations, research, public broadcasting, and more.

The usual suspects are already panicking as they do every time the growth of federal spending is curtailed, to say nothing of genuine budget cuts. For the millions of Americans who think Washington D.C. is part of the problem—an imperial capital that has grown fat and complacent off the public’s dime—these cuts may seem necessary. The Washington Post made the case of Washington skeptics for them by quoting a Moody’s economist who warned that D.C. and its suburbs will see home prices, full-time employment, and personal incomes reduced as a result of Trump’s discretionary cuts.

There is nothing noble about wishing hardship on anyone, but these are not times characterized by an abundance of magnanimity. If the public needs to be convinced of the necessity of budget cuts, noting the geographically localized impact it would have on an area that hardly resembles the rest of America in terms of household income, educate levels, and outcomes might do the trick.

Even for those liberal economists who do not believe that the private sector is crowded out of certain activities by federal intervention, the regulatory state’s reckless and indiscrete expansionism over the course of both the Bush and Obama eras invited a backlash. Barack Obama may have agreed to limited the growth of federal salaries and curbed pay hikes for civilian contractors, but he still left behind a record-setting number of people receiving pay checks from the federal government. The correction that Trump has been empowered to pursue did not arise in a vacuum.

Creatures of Washington who cannot abide a single dollar slashed from the budget will encounter a political challenge in the fact that Trump’s budget, while conservative in some areas, is unlikely to be tough on spending. America will still dole out over $4 trillion next year, and two-thirds of it will be dedicated to non-discretionary entitlements and poverty programs. Trump has repeatedly insisted that he would seek no changes to either Social Security or Medicare, which are both existentially threatened by insolvency in the next ten to fifteen years. Trump contends that the structural problems these programs face can be solved with growth; Democrats, taxation. Both agree that the major drivers of America’s spending must not be reformed. The standard Democratic play does not apply to Trump. His is not an austerity plan.

While Trump’s instincts are rarely conservative, some of the policies and personnel that have shaped is his early administration certainly are. What’s more, these are welcome developments. Presuming they’d like to see more of it, conservatives should offer their support.