You can never turn back the clock. About that, Modern Age magazine editor Daniel McCarthy is right. In a triumphalist New York Times op-ed, he touts the final victory of Trumpism over the traditional Republican ethic as the inevitable verdict of history. Winning is the highest virtue. And, in McCarthy’s view, the president is winning in the same way that the GOP’s winners have always won. But winning over whom?
Like many of his Trumpist compatriots, McCarthy condemns us to a purgatorial ordeal in which we are cursed to forever relitigate the 2016 election. But the species of victory McCarthy celebrates here is a strange one. From the perspective of the anti-Trump conservative in 2016, the Donald Trump who governs from behind the Resolute Desk is a stark departure from the Donald Trump of the campaign trail. The campaign Donald Trump seems to have been so co-opted by the dreaded “establishment” that you might think his more consistent supporters would consider the president compromised.
Donald Trump campaigned very differently from the way he has governed. He released a relatively detailed tax-policy proposal in 2015 that he said would “cost me a fortune” by eliminating provisions and loopholes favored by investors—provisions that survived in the GOP’s 2017 tax code reform law.
“I like the [individual] mandate,” Trump told a CNN town hall in February of 2016. “I don’t want people dying on the street.” In the end, Trump signed the repeal of Obamacare’s requirement that individuals purchase insurance.
The reality-television host tried to advertise his conservative credentials by insisting that there had to be “some form of punishment” for women who had abortions—a draconian assertion that repulsed genuine pro-life voters and which he wisely dropped. So, too, did Trump abandon his “deportation force” and his “database” for Muslims in America, citizens or otherwise. Similarly, the border wall remains unbuilt amid Republican reluctance to appropriate a measly $25 billion for a boondoggle in the desert.
As for foreign affairs, the man in the Oval Office doesn’t bear the remotest resemblance to the candidate who campaigned for the presidency in 2016. That earlier Trump promised to bring back waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse,” and he pledged to force his officers and the soldiers under their command to carry out these war crimes. The brand of “America First” nationalism Trump once articulated sounded to foreign-policy professionals like retrenchment and withdrawal, but Trump has presided over as extroverted a government as his last two predecessors. There has been no rapprochement with Russia, and America’s commitment to NATO remains as firm as ever despite our allies’ continued failure to spend the equivalent of 2 percent of GDP on defense.
This looks to Trump’s detractors like an affirmation of the criticisms the GOP’s governing class made of his policy preferences before his ascension to the presidency. McCarthy appears to see this as a strange species of victory for the president.
McCarthy dwells for some time on Trump’s protectionism and trade antagonism. He insists this is consistent with the GOP’s historic outlook on global commerce, but that’s an odd conceit since this is one of the few areas where Trump has governed as he campaigned. “Reagan was an economic nationalist, too,” McCarthy wrote. Arguably so, but Reagan’s quotas (more so than tariffs) were the product of negotiations with America’s trade partners, and they were reflective of an entirely different international trade environment. The perverse effects of protectionism are, however, the same as they ever were—a burden on American consumers and, on balance, a millstone around the neck of American industry. Today, the layoffs in American steel production continue, the rewards afforded to the beneficiaries of Trumpian cronyism do not trickle down to laborers, and U.S. manufacturing maintains its inexorable drive toward automation even as productivity increases.
McCarthy insists that Trump’s unlikely coalition of Southern evangelicals, Chamber of Commerce types, economically displaced Midwestern whites, foreign-policy hawks, and semi-isolationist libertarians “looks like an impossible contradiction.” What he’s identified is, in fact, the backbone of the GOP’s Obama-era base. The exertions he makes to elide the GOP’s successes under Trump’s predecessor gives away the game. Donald Trump didn’t fashion a new coalition of voters together as much as he didn’t destroy the one that delivered the GOP more than 1,000 offices at the local, state, and federal level during Obama’s eight years in office. But that could be changing.
For all of McCarthy’s bravado, the Republican Party has found Trumpism a tough thing to replicate apart from Trump. We’ve seen Republican aspirants seek to mimic the president’s prickly affectation more than his mercurial policy preferences, but we’ve not seen them enjoy many successes at the polls. Candidates who have embraced Trump’s puerile name-calling or who secured their party’s nomination amid displays of obsequiousness toward their party’s leader face uphill battles on Tuesday. Those candidates who evinced the president’s worse traits—his contempt for decency, sobriety, and constitutional probity—have lost or are all but certain to lose their races.
McCarthy insists that Trump’s departure from conservatism allowed him to win in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania when other Republicans could not. But McCarthy had the misfortune of sharing the New York Times op-ed page with Timothy P. Carney, who ably demonstrated that these were the states where the GOP seems set to receive the harshest rebuke on Tuesday. “Trump made these Rust Belt voters into Trump voters,” Carney wrote, “but he never made them Republicans.” McCarthy seems to believe this is a distinction without a difference, but voters know otherwise.
When the president governs as he campaigned—excusing Vladimir Putin’s thuggish autocracy in Helsinki or executing a heartless policy of family separations at the border—the party unity McCarthy observed in his op-ed dissolves. That suggests that the relationship McCarthy touts as a permanent realignment is more transactional than he’s willing to admit. And if Trump stops upholding his end of the bargain and the “winning” ends, a snap back to the status quo ante of 2016 isn’t just imaginable. It will be imperative.
