It's not looking good

VSG 2.0 is making frogs in boiling water out of people who demonstrated principles in recent memory

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I suppose a cogent argument can be made that making the best of how Trump’s second administration is shaping up is the grown-up way to deal with it. I would posit, though, that there are equally cogent arguments for other perspectives.

Even there, though, things get ideologically mixed up, just as they do in MAGA-land, where actually conservative policy positions and cultural takes have been hopelessly folded into the mix of cartoonish showboating, extra-constitutional maneuvering and a stomp-’em-into-the-dust view of all outside the perimeter.

But more on that later. First, let’s look at the state of - is it too late in the day to call it anti-Trump conservatism? - and see the lines of demarcation within it.

The lineup of speakers for the 2025 Principles First summit includes some folks who have come through the last decade with their rooted-in-fusionism worldviews relatively unscathed: David French, George Conway, Asa Hutchinson, Alyssa Farah, Geoff Duncan and Noah Rothman, to name a few. But a different faction is at least as well represented: Bill Kristol and Adam Kinzinger, who have publicly declared that the only sensible move to make is to become Democrats, and Tom Nichols, who has similarly made common cause with those who ostensibly have a very different vision of America than he at least used to profess.

There’s yet another faction in that camp, well-represented by The Freemen News-letter, to which I occasionally contribute. The folks there remain staunchly committed to the Narrow Sliver of Terrain. They admirably refuse to enter into alignments that compromise the conservative worldview’s fundamentals. I think most of my colleagues there understand the uphill-battle nature of what they’re engaged in, but see that it’s key to keeping their self-respect intact.

What perplexes me is the detectable scent of resignation on the part of some with a record of understanding that Trumpsim is not conservatism.

Consider Matthew Continetti, who demonstrated a thorough understanding of this entire matter in his 2022 book The Right: the Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. He knows the fine distinctions to be made between paleo, neo, Randian, libertarian, war-hawk and religious. He’s nobody’s yay-hoo.

In a recent piece at the American Enterprise Institute site, he seems awfully optimistic that the present moment isn’t really too abnormal, especially when compared to the present moments that some other Western nations are experiencing:

You’ve heard it before: American democracy is dying. Our 237-year-old Constitution is out of date. The U.S. Senate and the Electoral College are bulwarks of white supremacy. The legislative filibuster thwarts reform. The two-party system is stifling. Our political institutions are broken beyond repair. There’s no saving this corrupt polity. Only radical change will do the trick.

What country are the experts talking about? Last year’s election proceeded without incident. The winner was determined not long after polls closed. The presidential transition has been smooth. Republicans elected their party leaders and assumed control of the House and Senate. On January 6, in a change from the recent past, not a single member of Congress objected to the certification of Donald Trump as president and JD Vance as vice president. Trump returns to the Oval Office amid a presidential honeymoon. Americans are optimistic about the future. Freedom’s guardrails are strong.

Look abroad, though, and you see a different picture. Canada’s liberal cover boy Justin Trudeau has been forced into retirement by his own party. South Korea’s impeached president relies on barricades to protect him from arrest. Germany is headed to elections after the collapse of its center-left government. France’s president was humiliated when the National Assembly fell apart over basic math. Japan’s ruling coalition is teetering. Britain’s Labour prime minister is deeply unpopular.

In an irony that ought to scramble the brains of MSNBC anchors, America remains the world’s most stable democracy as Donald Trump takes office and the country prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

He makes sure to qualify his point:

The point of this contrast is neither to gloat nor to suggest that America’s affairs are hunky-dory. It would be silly to pretend that inflation, illegal immigration, public safety, addiction, homelessness, anti-Semitism, and mental illness will vanish with the change in pre-sidencies. Threats to the Constitution and rule of law come from all sides and from both parties. The moment doesn’t call for complacency. On the contrary: It calls for gratitude.

Yes, we can be grateful we are not French. More important, however, is appreciation of America’s tradition of liberty and her remarkable powers of resilience, adaptation, and growth. “In many respects,” writes my American Enterprise Institute colleague Hal Brands, “America remains a rising power—which should be a source of confidence in addressing the dangers abroad.” Brands points to U.S. GDP, productivity, technology, demographics, alliances, and democracy as sources of strength. All true.

The “adaptation” framing kind of bugs me. Adapting can be interpreted in ways that take us far afield from a Burkean vision.

Anyway, he substantiates his position by pointing to the sturdiness of America’s constitutional form of government:

Let’s be more specific: It is not just democracy in the abstract that maintains America’s edge. It is our distinctive form of constitutional government. After all, our allies are democracies, too. The difference is they, by and large, subscribe to a European-style form of parliamentary democracy that, while perhaps more efficient in execution, is less effective in harnessing individual and social agency to promote innovation and resist encroachments on freedom.

Parliamentary sovereignty, proportional representation, coalition government, and technocratic administration more easily promote bureaucratic centralization, cultural conformity, and economic planning and redistribution. That is why such institutions are beloved by left-wing intellectuals. Yet the very features of the U.S. Constitution the left so detests have kept America from sliding into the stagnation and disorder that afflict the developed world.

Begin with America’s fixed elections. Frequent elections are a reliable check on the party in power and provide a constant flow of new entrants into the system. While it is fashionable to complain that America’s campaign season doesn’t end, the “permanent campaign” has an upside. Elected officials never feel entirely secure in their jobs. That is a boon for accountability.

Though the Founders did not anticipate or welcome the advent of political parties, the Electoral College inadvertently encouraged their rise. It incen-tivized presidential candidates to have broad geographic appeal. Later, after ratification of the 12th Amendment, the Electoral College forced presidential and vice-presidential candidates to run as a ticket. The Electoral College also established America’s two-party system: Niche parties that cannot win a majority in more than 10 states have no viability at the presidential level and therefore no national future.

America’s two-party, winner-take-all elections eliminate the messy bargaining that takes place in parliamentary systems as parties jostle for privilege and form coalitions. More important, America’s elections force the two major parties to incorporate into their coalitions a broad range of material interests and ideological tendencies.

Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, leader of the socialist Squad, has said that if America were Europe, she and Joe Biden would not be in the same party. It’s one of the few true statements she’s ever made. Yet Ocasio-Cortez laments what she ought to celebrate. The Constitution set up an electoral and party system that is much more open and accommodating to populist grievances and insurgencies than parliamentary democracies.

Continetti may be making too much of the differences between AOC and Biden here. That’s because the Overton Window has shifted so markedly. They both are cool with transgenderism. They’re both climate alarmists. They’re both redistributionists. They’re both fine with snuffing people who aren’t born yet. They both think Israel should humbly take the blows of its neighbors without a resolute response.

I’m speaking plainly here, but I’m comfortable doing so, because I am solidly on record as being vehemently opposed to Trump, Trumpsim, and what’s become of the Republican Party.

Then there’s Rich Lowry. He’s editor-in-chief at National Review, and held that position in the spring of 2016, when the magazine devoted an entire issue to opposing the Very Stable Genius. The conclusion of the unsigned editorial in the front of the book is unequivocal:

Some conservatives have made it their business to make excuses for Trump and duly get pats on the head from him. Count us out. Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.

So what’s with this hee-hee-hee-Trump-the-real-estate-developer-looks-poised-to-launch-a-new-expansionist-era stance in Lowry’s recent syndicated column?

In business, Donald Trump was a real-estate guy. In the presidency, he might be one, too.

The prospective foreign policy of his second term has taken an unexpected turn, with his recent talk of annexing Canada, buying Greenland and taking back the Panama Canal. Rather than the neo-isolationist that he's often accused of being, Trump is talking like a neo-imperialist, at least in our own hemisphere.

Even if a President Trump does none of these things — he's largely joking about the Great White North — his musings are a reminder of the crucial importance of geography and the control of territory.

The first thing you need to do to understand the world, and to a large extent the behavior of nations, is to look at a map.

"Geography is the most fundamental factor in the foreign policy of states because it is the most permanent," the 20th century strategist Nicholas Spykman observed. "Ministers come and go, even dictators die, but mountain ranges stand unperturbed."

The world was never "flat," in the formulation of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that became the catchphrase of a complacent globalism.

No, the world is full of mountains and steppes; rivers and coastlines; temperate, tropical and dry zones. Some nations, by virtue of their location, are secure, others vulnerable; some naturally rich, others resource-starved.

The first thing you need to know about Britain, for instance, is that it is an island, "this precious stone set in the silver sea," as Shakespeare had it. This basic, ineluctable fact has crucially shaped Britain's strategic orientation and its national character. It is why it became a naval power committed to global trade, and why it considered far-flung places — courtesy of the waves — relatively nearby.

The English Channel has been an indispensable buffer between it and continental Europe. There's a reason Nazi Germany invaded Poland, France, the Soviet Union, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Greece, Yugoslavia and Italy — but not Britain.

As for Germany, Robert Kaplan writes in his illuminating book "The Revenge of Geography" it "faces both east and west with no mountain ranges to protect it, providing it with pathologies from militarism to nascent pacifism, so as to cope with its dangerous location."

The United States is uniquely blessed by its geography. It is of immeasurable importance that we are both a continental and island nation, combining the massive resources that come with the former, with the protection from hostile European and Asian powers that comes with the latter. We have abundant natural resources, ample coastlines, a massive river system and a disproportionate share of the world's best soil, among other advantages.

That we ended up stretching from sea to shining sea wasn't an accident. Our forefathers supported continental expansion as a matter of geopolitics, whether it was the Louisiana Purchase or the Mexican-American War. They believed that it would make us stronger and more secure, and — although their methods weren't always admirable — they were correct.

Control of territory matters, sometimes even relatively small pieces of territory. Consider Hawaii. It is of enormous consequence that the island archipelago sits in the middle of the Pacific athwart key sea lanes. Other powers circled it in the 19th century, while the great naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan urged us to acquire it. We all know the role of Pearl Harbor in World War II, and as the "Crossroads of the Pacific," Hawaii remains a major economic and military asset.

As for Greenland, the idea of buying it from Denmark is no more ridiculous than any other land purchase we've ever made, including of the U.S. Virgin Islands in 1917 ... from Denmark.

Greenland has attracted the interest of such estimable American statesmen as Harry Truman and William Seward. Given it's strategic location in the Arctic Circle and its wealth of mineral deposits, it's an alluring proposition.

But you see, Rich, there’s the matter of alliances. NATO comes to mind. Denmark, which still has an administrative role in Greenland, is none too keen on Trump’s bluster about that island of 58,000 people.

There’s also the matter of how one goes about any kind of major move like this. Having Elon Musk, whose brilliance in tech does not translate to other realms, and whose track record of sybaritic family life is a main qualification for his solid standing in MAGA-land, on board as an unelected-but-powerful influence on the incoming administration is already bearing fruit. He has found a way to concretely get the ball rolling, via his partying buddy Ken Howery:

Ken Howery is a quiet, unassuming tech investor who prioritizes discretion. And yet, he has ended up in the middle of two of the noisiest story lines of the incoming Trump administration.

One is the expanding ambition of Elon Musk, Mr. Howery’s close friend and fellow party-scene fixture since the two helped run PayPal 25 years ago.

The other is the expansionist ambition of Mr. Musk’s boss, President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has set his sights on buying Greenland, the world’s largest island.

As Mr. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Denmark, Mr. Howery is expected to be central to what Mr. Trump hopes will be a real-estate deal of epic proportions. The only hitch is that Denmark, which counts Greenland as its autonomous territory, says the island is not for sale.

Whether he likes it or not, Mr. Howery, a globe-trotter known for his taste for adventure and elaborate party planning, is likely to find himself in the middle of a geopolitical tempest.

Mr. Trump has been explicit about his expectations for his new ambassador filling a once-sleepy post. When he announced Mr. Howery for the role, which requires Senate confirmation, he reiterated his designs on Greenland for the first time since winning the presidency.

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social late last year. “Ken will do a wonderful job in representing the interests of the United States.”

This bears watching, but let us not permit it to distract us from the most important hot spot currently on the world stage: Ukraine.

The other day, House Speaker Mike Johnson called Intelligence Oversight Committee chair Mike Turner (R-OH) into his office to tell him he no longer had that position.

Turner has been a staunch advocate of NATO and aid to Ukraine. He’s being replaced by the solidly MAGA Rick Crawford:

Crawford, a 14-year veteran of Capitol Hill, voted last year against legislation providing billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine, citing more dire needs at home. The vote aligns him with President-elect Trump and his allies, who have sought to shift U.S. resources away from foreign entanglements and dedicate those energies instead toward domestic economic problems.

Crawford also voted in 2021 to challenge the presidential election results in both Pennsylvania and Arizona, where Trump was defeated but nonetheless claimed victory.

Both of those positions — Ukraine and the 2020 election — mark a sharp contrast to the track record of Rep. Mike Turner, the Ohio Republican who chaired the Intelligence Committee in the last Congress but now finds himself without a gavel.

Turner, now in his 23rd year in Congress, fits the more traditional mold of Reagan-era conservatism, including support for extending government surveillance powers, maintaining strong ties with NATO allies and helping Ukraine repel Russia’s invasion. Those positions have put him at odds with Trump’s “America First” agenda and made him a target of some of the incoming president’s MAGA followers.

Turner was also among the minority of House Republicans who voted to certify Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania and Arizona four years ago.

And where did Johnson’s marching orders come from?

Turner told CBS News' Margaret Brennan that Johnson cited "concerns from Mar-a-Lago" when he explained why Turner needed to step down, referencing Trump's Florida estate.

James Madison, call your office. Where does the executive branch get off telling Congress how to structure committees?

Let’s move on to Pete Hegseth’s hearing for his Defense Secretary nomination.

Of course, the drool-besotted leg-humpers had the ready “he destroyed his interlocutors!” take pretty much instantly. They wanted to make Senator Tim Kaine into some kind of morality Nazi just for pointing out that Hegseth’s personal life has been quite different from that of those who have customary held that post. Here’s what Kaine actually asked Hegseth:

“Can you so casually cheat on a second wife and cheat on the mother of a child who had been born two months before, and you tell us you were completely cleared?” Kaine asked him. “You cheated on the mother of that child less than two months after that daughter was born, didn’t you?”

Hegseth downplayed a settlement and payment to the woman who accused him of sexual assault, saying it was a result of a “nuisance lawsuit.” He didn’t deny the infidelity.

“You’ve taken an oath, like you would take an oath to be secretary of defense and all of your weddings to be faithful to your wife,” Kaine told him.

“I have failed in things in my life, and thankfully, I’m redeemed by my lord and savior, Jesus,” Hegseth replied.

Oh, gee, well, that covers it.

Not.

Just because one is redeemed doesn’t mean one doesn’t have more spiritual and moral work to do.

How about this bit of excuse-making from the hearing?

Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., . . . went after Kaine and other Hegseth critics on the panel.

“The senator from Virginia starts bringing up the fact that, what if you showed up drunk to your job? How many senators have showed up drunk to vote at night? Have any of you guys asked them to step down and resign for their job?” he said. “How many senators do you know have got a divorce before cheating on their wives? Did you ask them to step down?”

Yeah, that’s the ticket. Lower the standards throughout government so the dissolute have the same standing as those who strive for behavior reflective of fidelity and self-control.

I guess Joni Ernst bought into the this-is-the-environment-in-which-us-Republican-lawmakers-are-going-to-have-our-array-of-choices mindset. In other words, she caved:

As a combat veteran and sexual assault survivor, Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, has long been seen as a linchpin of Hegseth’s path to 50 votes, as she has expressed concerns about him.

At Tuesday's hearing, she did little to challenge Hegseth. And after it ended, Ernst announced her support for his nomination.

She began by noting their “very productive” and “very frank” conversations while submitting into the record a letter from a Hegseth supporter. She asked him a question about assuring that the Pentagon can pass an audit in the future. She asked if women should have “the opportunity to serve in combat roles,” to which Hegseth replied in the affirmative, “exactly the way you caveated it.” She asked if he’ll appoint a senior official dedicated to sexual assault prevention, to which he noted he had already promised that to her: “As we have discussed, yes I will,” he said.

Then there’s the VSG himself. Here’s the kind of elevated tone with which the incoming president chooses to express himself:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonald Trump As of today, the incoming Trump Administration has hired over 1,000 people for The United States Government. They are outstanding in every way, and you will see the fruits of their labor over the coming years. We will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and it will happen very quickly! In order to save time, money, and effort, it would be helpful if you would not send, or recommend to us, people who worked with, or are endorsed by, Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), "Dumb as a Rock" John Bolton, "Birdbrain" Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho daughter, Liz, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, General(?) Mark Milley, James Mattis, Mark Yesper, or any of the other people suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, more commonly known as TDS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Yes, indeed, stomp ‘em into the dust, and use the most grade-school-playground articulation to do it.

I wonder how Birdbrain feels about this. After ending her presidential run last year, she campaigned for him.

I could go on, but the picture that emerges is unsettling in the extreme.

This is going to be darker than the Biden years were, and they’ve been dark.

I don’t share Continetti’s confidence in our constitutional and institutional safeguards.

Donald Trump doesn’t give a flying —- about them, and he’s going to show us the myriad ways in which that’s so as this nightmare unfolds.