Ignore the deceptive voices who try to argue that Trump’s grievances are equivalent to his supporters’ interests.
Ignore the deceptive voices who try to argue that Trump’s grievances are equivalent to his supporters' interests.
I n 1975, Irving Kristol was contemplating populism. He wrote that it
is a temper and state of mind which too easily degenerates into political paranoia, with “enemies of the people” being constantly discovered and exorcized and convulsively purged.
This brings us to the current situation of the Republican Party, and to a considerable extent, the conservative movement as well. Many defenders of former president Donald Trump, as well as Trump himself, have actively been pushing a narrative very similar to what Kristol described. In this narrative, criticizing or even disliking Donald Trump is to have contempt for his supporters. Critics become “enemies of the people”; Trump himself becomes the people’s sole acceptable vessel and steward. By this logic, Trump’s supporters are led to believe that anyone who criticizes Trump is just using him as a way to attack them.
The clearest example came shortly after the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump for the first time. Trump posted on social media a picture of himself with the caption: “In reality, they’re not after me. They are after you. I’m just in the way.” It’s quite the stereotypical play for a populist seeking to stir up his supporters in the hope that they rally to his defense. But what is troubling, and even deeply saddening, is that many of his supporters have fallen for this idea so willingly. A recent article by Samuel Mangold-Lenett in the Federalist also seems to be trying to push this same narrative. He writes,
What unites these people — the anti-populist pundit class, the elitist politicians, and their acolytes — isn’t just their opposition to Trump as a political candidate. They are utterly repulsed by the people Trump represents, and they are nothing short of disdainful of the American people who told them to shove it.
In the cases of Hillary Clinton and some other instances of liberal bigotry and arrogance, the author is right to point out that some of Trump’s harshest critics are indeed also not the biggest fans of his voters. And there were many policies that Trump enacted in office that reflected conservative priorities and are worth praising. To name a few: deregulation; three new conservative justices, who tipped the Supreme Court toward a more originalist viewpoint; increased domestic-energy production; the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act; the Abraham Accords; and more.
But now, defenders of Trump have gone far beyond what these arguments can support. Many of Trump’s followers on the MAGA side of the Republican Party, people such as Charlie Kirk, Benny Johnson, or various wannabes, claim that decent, well-meaning people both within both the Republican Party and the conservative movement aren’t criticizing Trump because his policies, such as tariffs, were misguided, or because his narcissistic tendencies repel voters. Instead, they assert that our criticism is actually due to our disgust for his supporters.
It’s laughable to think that someone such as Mike Pence, who has grown critical of the former president, is only making such arguments because he has some burning hatred for the people who put him in office. The same goes for the many people who voted for Trump and supported him but are now tired of him. It’s extremely asinine to assume that, just because people have issues with Trump, those people are just sublimating their hate for the former manufacturing worker in Ohio, the 74-year-old living in retirement in Florida, or the farmer from Iowa.
For one thing, even with the Trump administration’s conservative accomplishments, there are policy grounds on which to criticize Trump’s record in office. That Ohio manufacturer may have suffered from the Trump administration’s tariffs on steel, which cost more jobs than they saved given that the U.S. has more industries dependent on steel than that manufacture it. That Florida retiree may have moved to Florida because of how governor Ron DeSantis — the same governor Trump has criticized as “DeSanctimonious” — dealt with Covid, often directly defying Trump’s own Fauci-backed guidance. And that Iowa farmer may have been hurt by Trump’s ill-conceived trade war with China.
Or take the case of the Wisconsin dairy farmers, who faced a 25 percent tariff on their goods as a response to Trump’s trade policies with Canada, Europe, China, and Mexico. In 2019, China even cut its purchase of American dairy products by 50 percent. Is criticizing Donald Trump’s trade policies the moral equivalent of attacking steelworkers and dairy farmers and pushing them out of their jobs? An article at the New York Times interviewed many of these farmers. One of them, Josh Murray, said that “in every aspect, it’s not worth it — it’s not worth the fight.” The cost to Trump’s reckless trade policy, all done in the name of the people he wants to protect, was the loss of 10 percent of Wisconsin’s dairy farmers in 2019 alone — the state’s biggest one-year decline ever. Trump’s trade policy could have very well have lost him Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes in the 2020 election.
People who focus on these things while criticizing Trump don’t do so because they hate Trump’s voters. In fact, in these instances, as well as many others, there’s a policy-based case that Trump was failing the very people we’re now supposed to believe on whose behalf he unfailingly speaks.
Moreover, it’s worth noting that, rather conveniently, such voices don’t point out people, such as J. D. Vance, who have a clear record of insulting Trump as part of the problem. They get a pass, of course, because they bent the knee to Trump’s whims. That is their sole – or, at least, their main — test of whether one is serving the interests of “the people.”
Even more outrageous is that many avoid blaming one man who has repeatedly demonstrated contempt for Trump’s voters: Trump himself. Trump has continually attempted to frame his grievances as equivalent to his voters’ interests. One of the most obvious ways that he’s done this is by having his voters target Republican candidates, both incumbents not up for election and those standing in primaries, and supporting candidates who have pledged loyalty to the former president and his nonsense about the 2020 election, regardless of whether they are electable.
An example would be the case of Peter Meijer’s reelection bid for the House this year. Meijer, who represented Michigan’s third congressional district and replaced former congressman Justin Amash, had previously been a somewhat-generic Republican representing a relatively moderate district. Meijer drew the former president’s ire after Meijer and nine other Republicans voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 riot. The president, not pleased with being called out for the consequences of his actions, endorsed former Department of Urban Development official John Gibbs to run against Meijer. Gibbs won the primary but was subsequently defeated in the general election by his Democratic opponent.
Does Donald Trump really care about his supporters in Michigan’s third district so little that he was willing to place his ego above their representation by eliminating a viable candidate? Does that seem like concern for your base, or does it seem like contempt for them? Does it really help Trump’s voters that they are represented by a Democrat in Michigan’s third district now? Or does it instead help Donald Trump that one of the people who hurt his pride is left disgraced and out of office? Take this race and place identical outcomes all across the country, and you get a sense of Trump’s priorities. Republicans fell short of a Senate majority, for instance, as a direct result of candidates Trump backed.
Trump may claim to care about his supporters. And one can understand how, in an oppositional environment, he won their loyalty. But now it’s obvious that, rather than thinking of how he can help them, he is thinking of how they can help him. How he can convince them that soothing his ego and indulging his electoral fantasies should be the main things they desire out of politics. (This is to say nothing of how just a modicum of tact or restraint on Trump’s part could have won him reelection in 2020. How does his decision not to impose such self-discipline serve his supporters?)
Mangold-Lenett further strains credulity by posing a hypothetical. “If Hulk Hogan won the presidency in 2016 on the basis of re-establishing the U.S. as the global manufacturing hegemon while promising to restore national sovereignty at the southern border and reverse the cultural malaise that ate away at people across the heartland,” then Trump’s critics would just move on to being anti-Hogan,” he writes. Hypotheticals are always difficult to entertain. But this one is particularly defective. Left out of it is any admission that Trump himself may have failed at these goals, or any entertaining of the possibility that someone else could fulfill them better, without his foibles or baggage. If your interest were in these policy priorities, or in the people they are supposed to help, you wouldn’t make Trump your be-all and end-all. To do so is to give the game away.
What kind of leader would put his ego above the concerns of his people? The answer is one who, ultimately, holds his voters in contempt. And why would public supporters of that leader act as though only Trump can serve the people? Perhaps it’s from a mix of contempt, opportunism, and a lack of imagination.
What might be a better alternative? Turn, again, to Irving Kristol. About a decade after expressing reservations about populism, Kristol found himself “sympathetic” to the contemporary version, because it was “no kind of blind rebellion against good constitutional government.” It was, instead, an effort to bring our governing elites to their senses. The same “persistent un-wisdom” of governing elites that increased Kristol’s openness to populism is with us today, perhaps even worsened. But Trump has repeatedly shown himself unworthy as a representative of this popular discontent, which he would seek to harness for his own ends, not those of the people he claims to serve. Trump, in other words, is not a populist, but an egotist, focused on himself.
The Republican Party and the conservative movement can and should serve the people. But beware anyone who tells you that serving the people and placating Donald Trump are one and the same.