Not a single moment of regret

Five years ago, I willingly chose to occupy the slenderest sliver of ideological real estate possible, and I'm glad I did

There hasn’t been much in the way of rewards for insisting on fealty to conservative principles while characterizing Trumpism as as much of a danger to America as progressivism.

By late 2015, his cult was fully formed. In retrospect, we can see that none of the other Republican presidential candidates still running had anything nearly as formidable in the way of a support base. He already had the army of radio talk-show barkers in his corner. The mainstream media, while it didn’t care for him, had to give him outsized coverage just for the sheer outrageousness of the phenomenon.

I was already on the case at my blog, Late in the Day, pointing out where we were headed:

Consider our current juncture. As of mid-December 2015, the two presidential candidates likely to face each other are a.) a bitter, power-mad radical leftist with an axe to grind due to her far more likable yet incorrigibly womanizing husband, and b.) a narcissistic, bombastic, shallow huckster with no regard for the way government is Constitutionally arranged. Also consider that they are both 69 years old.  Then consider that the current person holding the office of president - or, more accurately, the office of dictator of post-America - combines Candidate A's power lust and radical leftism with Candidate B's narcissism and bombast.

Then there is a Congress comprised of roughly equal parts Republican establishment squishes, radical leftist Democrats, and principled conservatives with great ideas for restoring America.


Then there is a society more bitterly polarized by the day, and a culture more crude, raw and addicted to distraction by the day.


The sum total is not a good formula for a bright future for the nation.

Indeed - and I'm far from the first to point this out - each succeeding outburst of Squirrel-Hair's - from "how-stupid-are-the-people-of-Iowa" to "Israel-doesn't-seem-interested-in-the-sacrifices-needed-for-peace" to "I'take-my-little-wine-and-my-little-cracker-and-I-guess-it-makes-me-feel-cleansed" to this latest utterance - only further stokes his following.

And a certain type of supposedly principled conservative opinion leader in the right-of-center pundit-sphere - primarily found on talk radio, but in some print and online forums as well - tries to castigate as an elitist anyone who points out that the cycle of new outrageous pronouncements and ever-greater zeal for he who pronounces is an unhealthy development. They say it is us who endanger the GOP's chances for, as they see it, calling S-H's base a mob of ill-informed pitchfork-wielders.

That same month and year, I documented a behavior pattern he’s come to exhibit regularly - namely personally denigrating anyone who doesn’t sign onto his agenda and glorify him. At the time, he called the publisher of the Manchester Union-Leader a “lowlife” and a “bad guy,” after having called him a “fantastic man” six months earlier. The change in characterization came about because the paper had the temerity to endorse Chris Christie. Trey Gowdy, then a House member from South Carolina, similarly came in for abuse for opting to go with Marco Rubio:

So S-H goes after the Manchester Union-Leader's publisher in the wake of the paper endorsing another candidate (Christie). A fairly true-to-type move. But consider what he's had to say about McQuaid in the recent past:

To be sure, the Union Leader’s endorsement usually boosts a candidate (though not in 2008). However, failing to obtain that paper’s blessing can hardly be viewed as much of a setback. And even if it were, the proper response of a candidate to this or any other such “snub” is a shrug of the shoulders, if that.

But Donald Trump isn’t the shoulder shrugging kind. He’s all about winning. Thus, in a sneak preview of what a Trump presidency would look like, he is lashing out. And not just against the Union Leader (which endorsed Chris Christie) but also at South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy who had audacity to endorse Marco Rubio.

In New Hampshire, Trump has called Union Leader publisher Joe McQuaid a “lowlife” and “just a bad guy.” McQuaid says Trump’s attack is merely a product of the paper’s position on his candidacy:

He says our newspaper is failing and I am ‘absolutely terrible,’ yet six months ago, in June, he said we were all ‘terrific,’

According to the Union Leader, Trump said in June that “The Union Leader, by the way, they’ve been so fair to me, and they are terrific, and Mr. McQuaid is a fantastic man.” 

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, Trey Gowdy is experiencing the wrath of Donald. Almost immediately after Gowdy endorsed Rubio, Trump tweeted:

Face it, Trey Gowdy failed miserably on Benghazi. He allowed it to drag out and in the end, let Hillary get away with murder.

He added, “My prediction on the Trey Gowdy endorsement of Rubio is that it will do nothing for Rubio and finish Gowdy.”
In late July, however, Trump tweeted that Gowdy would be his pick for Attorney General. To be sure, this tweet predated the Benghazi hearings. But what would it say about Trump’s judgment if the man he tabbed for Attorney General turned out a few months later to be a miserable failure in such an important event as the Benghazi hearings?

And what would it say about the Republican Party if it were to nominate a thin-skinned, vindictive, inconstant jerk for president? A President Trump would make Richard Nixon seem easygoing, lighthearted, and non-threatening. 

Still somebody in that bleak, grim land known as post-America still loves S-H, to the point of showing up at his rallies to fist-pump, to cheerlead for him in all caps in comment threads, and put him over the top on all polls.

We end this year on a pretty terrifying note.

I won’t belabor the documentation over the five intervening years showing that my view of the Very Stable Genius did not get modified. I acknowledged laudable policy moves - the judicial appointments, pulling out of the Paris climate accord and the JCPOA, moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, tax cuts, words of support for the rights of fetal Americans, words of alarm about education being rife with indoctrination - but made clear that such initiatives could not have germinated in such an incoherent mind, but were rather acted on because he’d been told they’d make him look like a winner. And I amply documented the moves that countered the advancement of a conservative agenda, for instance, the tariffs that negated the effect of the tax cuts.

My stance has done nothing to advance my work as an opinion writer. It has cost me friendships. I’ve been accused of having signed on to the Left (generally by those who have not bothered to investigate my body of pronouncements on the matter).

The point here is that it never got better. The baggage has always outweighed anything that would be gratifying to a conservative.

And he’s determined to demonstrate his unfitness up to 11:59 AM on January 20. (Actually, he’ll no doubt continue to do so for a long time afterward.)

The latest evidence of his looniness came this morning:

President Donald Trump called into a bizarre “hearing” on voter fraud organized by Rudy Giuliani and Pennsylvania Republicans on Thursday—part of a doomed attempt to overturn an election result that has been certified by the state.

After canceling an in-person appearance, Trump called in to campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis’ phone, which was held up to a microphone as people in the Gettysburg hotel room cheered.

“We have to turn the election over because there’s no doubt we have all the evidence, we have all the affidavits, we just need some judge to listen to it properly,” Trump said, after weeks of not producing any evidence of mass fraud. “Evidence is pouring in now as we speak.”

Giuliani, who previously admitted to a Pennsylvania judge in a failed lawsuit that the campaign was not alleging massive fraud, once again hyped the hearing as an exercise in uncovering massive fraud.

He rolled out witnesses that included a lawyer not licensed in Pennsylvania, a statistician who said he was not good at math, and other first-time polling place volunteers, local bureaucrats and voters who complained about what appeared to be legal procedures, or one-off incidents presented without corroborating evidence.

One woman, who said she was a Democrat and volunteered as a minority observer, complained about an argument that broke out over how to submit one woman’s mail-in ballot. She said someone threatened to slap her.

An elderly woman complained that she voted for Trump but, when she printed off her vote, she couldn’t see his name.

The “hearing” won’t change the election outcome in the state that Joe Biden won by 80,555 votes.

In his rambling phone call from the Oval Office, Trump repeated his vague claims about the entire election being rigged, about winning every swing state, and about Republican poll watchers in Pennsylvania being “treated like dogs.” (In fact, COVID-19 restrictions meant all observers couldn’t be nearer than 25 feet to counters—a decision the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld.)

“This election was lost by the Democrats, they cheated, it was a fraudulent election, they flooded the market, they flooded everybody with ballots and I just want to thank everybody for being there,” Trump said. “This is a very important moment in the history of our country.”

And the cult that formed around him five years ago is still on board, parroting the delusional nonsense.

And consider that there are still approximately seven weeks to go in the Trump era. The nation is always somewhat vulnerable during transitions, but its rivals, adversaries and enemies are surely taking note of what’s going on now, saying, “Day-um, we could really cause some mischief.”

So, no, I have no second thoughts. Trumpism, even if it is successful in the long term in making the Republican Party the repository for its faux-ideology, has not extinguished actual conservatism. (If it does take over the GOP, that just means the GOP will be on its way to obsolescence as a foil to the Democrats.)

You can’t become a big star defending actual conservatism, but it’s positioned to outlast this hiccup in America’s political and intellectual history. It’s possible to have a future upholding the timeless verities. The slavish devotion to the jumble of emotional responses to ever-changing times known as Trumpism or populism or nationalism is a dead-end street.