Normalizing Trump

by | Jan 3, 2018 | Editor's Blog | 2 comments

Establishment Republicans are apparently coming around to normalizing Trump. They got their tax cuts, their Supreme Court justice, fewer regulations and a more aggressive foreign policy. In the process, they’ve lost the meaning of conservative. Instead of respecting norms and traditions, they’ve thrown them out the window to embrace policy wins.

National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru began a push to give Trump a pass on his behavior. As he points out, Trump’s accomplishments have been those of an establishment Republican, not a raging populist. The tax cuts, in particular, make everything else just an inconvenience.

They’ll defend or ignore his attacks on the press. They’ll excuse his blatant and persistent lies. They won’t even glance at his conflicts of interest or violations of the emoluments clause. They may have been a bit relieved when Roy Moore lost, but they won’t hold Trump accountable for his support of an alleged child molester or for his own alleged sexual abuse. His appeals to racism and defense of white supremacists in Charlottesville are embarrassing but not disqualifying. And they’ll go along with his campaign to discredit the FBI and law enforcement as long as he keeps signing their bills.

Trump may have turned the GOP coalition on its head, but he really didn’t change who was in it. It’s been an alliance of the business-oriented free market ideologues, corporate America and social conservatives, many of whom have always harbored ugly resentments against minorities, for a very long time. Trump just shifted the balance. While before the corporate folks and free marketeers drove the agenda and paid lip service to others, today, it’s the populist social conservatives who are the face of the party.

The populists will excuse all of Trump’s ugliest behavior and even embrace a guy like Roy Moore if we can just keep the brown people in check and make abortions illegal. Ponnuru and others are acknowledging that the new order is ok and not really that different if you just ignore the damage to the norms and traditions and the dignity of the office. Being conservative no longer is about conserving decorum.

We’ve seen it here in North Carolina. Conservatives look the other way when the legislature is overriding the will of the people by redistricting local elections against the wishes of the local residents. They pretend to believe in debunked voter fraud theories when the legislature is embracing policies that target older African-Americans to make voting harder. They stay quiet while the legislature upends the judicial system to provide a partisan advantage. And they say little as the legislature micromanages the business of the university system.

The only people who can contain Trump are the Republicans who control the House and Senate and they’re clearly not going to. More disturbing, though, are the conservative columnists, pundits and donors who could exert influence on the Republican leadership. While they may criticize the president, they are silent about the people like Ryan and McConnell who could possibly curb Trump’s behavior but who are too scared or opportunistic to do so. They’ll take their policy wins, deregulation and tax cuts and pretend like Trump is just another president.

2 Comments

  1. ebrun

    More disgusting, over-the-top invective against Republicans from a liberal ideologue. Apparently, you are just not intellectually inclined to debate political issues on the merits. Anyone who does not share your ideology is evil, unethical or bigoted. Playing the race card will be applauded by those on the far left, but will have little impact on the national debate over domestic policies.

    Hard line partisans on the left are poisoning the political debate and polluting the body politic. Yes, there are those on the hard right who are also engaged in reprehensible invective, but their exposure and visibility does not begin to match left’s national cadre of pundits, advocacy groups, newspapers and left of center media outlets like the three major networks along with CNN and MSNBC. And if you were really devoted to intellectual honesty, you would have to concede that there is little over-the-top vitriol coming from those mainstream Republicans who you besmirch in this latest rant.

  2. Norma Munn

    So, Republican elected officials are either (1) dupes (2) unethical (3) cynical (4) bigots.or maybe all of these. While I would not ascribe those descriptions to all GOP politicians, very few would escape at least one of those words. However, they earned those descriptions long before Trump, but especially throughout the eight years of the Obama presidency. Many of them seem to be using Trump as both an excuse and a vehicle for their long held aims. Some sell their souls for a Supreme Court appointee of their ilk, others for the tax legislation which they hope will lead to curtailing entitlements, others just to stay in office and a few are just downright stupid. I have certainly seen some Democrats over the decades about whom I would say the same thing, but never a majority, much less the leadership.

    Heaven help me. I got side tracked. Sarah Sanders, in response to a reporter asking about Trump’s tweets about NK’s leader, described Kim Jong-un as irrational, unpredictable, and threatening the US — AFTER the reporter used most of those words to describe Trumps recent tweets. All with zero awareness of the irony. Followed a few minutes later by a statement that critics of Trump are entitled to their views, but not their facts. Please add “loony” the list of descriptive words above.

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