The former president portrays any attempt to appeal to voters beyond his core base as a sign of weakness.
The former president portrays any attempt to appeal to voters beyond his core base as a sign of weakness.
D espite his preferred approach to politics having been responsible for grievous Republican losses in the last three national elections, Donald Trump is once again seeking to cast himself as the savior of the American Right. During his chaotic speech at CPAC on Saturday, Trump boasted to the crowd that, until he came along, “the Republican Party was ruled by freaks, neocons, open-border zealots, and fools,” before reassuring attendees that, under his continued leadership, the GOP is not at risk of “going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush.”
This was not an offhand comment. Increasingly, Trump likes to point to Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, Jeb Bush, and even Ronald Reagan as examples of what has historically been wrong with the GOP — as well as a warning of what the party will become again if any of the other candidates for the Republican nomination prevail in 2024. In recent months, Trump has begun to fuse these critiques with his attacks on Ron DeSantis, having complained variously that DeSantis is being pushed by “Jeb Bush, Karl Rove, Paul Ryan,” that Fox News’s coverage of DeSantis “reminds me of 2016 when they were pushing ‘JEB!’,” and that DeSantis is suspect because “he used to be a Reagan Republican.”
Substantively, it is extremely odd that Trump and his acolytes have taken to using Jeb Bush and Paul Ryan as stand-ins for “squishy Republicans,” given that neither of them is any such thing. Jeb Bush was probably the best governor in the history of Florida, and the reforms that were made during his tenure are the primary reason why the state has become as attractive as it has to conservatives of all ages. During his eight years in office (until Bush, no Republican in Florida’s history had ever won a second gubernatorial term), Florida cut the state’s workforce by more than 10 percent and eliminated civil-service protections for many of those who remained; slashed taxes and spending across the board — including abolishing state taxes on cash savings, stocks, bonds, and mutual funds; ended affirmative action in both higher education and in state contracts; achieved medical-tort reform; nixed a costly high-speed-rail bill; passed school choice; privatized as much of Medicaid as it could; and adopted the nation’s first “stand your ground” bill.
Paul Ryan’s record is equally solid. Ryan was a pro-life, pro–Second Amendment, pro-Israel, fiscal conservative who spent most of his career issuing warnings that our entitlement programs were about to go bankrupt. Certainly, like Jeb Bush, Ryan was willing to criticize Trump when criticism was warranted. But he did not get in Trump’s way on policy. Indeed, in 2015, Ryan was endorsed for speaker of the House by the same Freedom Caucus that, a few weeks earlier, had declined to endorse Kevin McCarthy — Trump’s preferred candidate for speaker in 2022 — for the role. As speaker, Ryan ushered through a repeal of Obamacare in the House; helped write and pass Trump’s signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017; helped shape the partial repeal of Dodd-Frank; blocked immigration proposals that he himself supported on the grounds that the broader party was opposed; and left Devin Nunes in place as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
As for the deployment of “Reagan Republican” as an insult? Suffice it to say that if that’s where we are now, the world is truly upside down.
Still, let’s assume for a moment that Trump is correct, and that, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, Paul Ryan and Jeb Bush were, indeed, squishy conservatives. What, exactly, is this supposed to tell us about DeSantis, or about anyone else whom those people have praised? As far as I can see, the argument here seems to be that if, in addition to all of the solid conservatives who are backing a given candidate, that candidate also has fans who are more politically moderate, he must, ipso facto, be a fraud. Which . . . well, which is completely backwards, isn’t it?
In 1967, William F. Buckley offered up a two-step test for Republican primary voters to follow: Conservatives, he wrote, ought to nominate “the most right, viable candidate who could win.” The first part of this test requires an eligible candidate to have fans on the right side of the party; the second part requires the candidate to have fans everywhere else. Nothing much has changed since the 1960s. Now, as back then, a successful Republican nominee will need to appeal to all manner of people if he is to make it into the White House. He’ll need to win conservatives, semi-conservatives, moderates, and maybe even a few left-leaning apostates — and to do so deliberately, happily, and without regret.
To take Trump’s objection to its logical end is to conclude that the broad popularity of certain aspiring politicians represents a problem to be solved rather than the foundation upon which movements are built — a ridiculous contention within a democratic republic such as ours. In both 1980 and 1984, Ronald Reagan won a sizeable number of Democrats in his successful bids for the presidency. In 2021, Glenn Youngkin won a majority of independents in Virginia. In 2022, Ron DeSantis won over hundreds of thousands of Florida voters who had not backed him in 2018. Are we really to assume that these achievements represented black marks against those figures? If we are, I’m starting to understand why, despite all the evidence that it isn’t working, Trump continues to behave as he does — and why, on each of the last three times he has attempted to compete in American elections, he has proven himself to be such a bewildering loser.