Trump Fights — but for What?

O ne can only wonder what old Erwin Schrödinger would have made of the Donald Trump for President campaign — which, as it hurtles toward victory for the third primary season in a row, continues to suffer from the sort of profound logical schizophrenia that one is usually obliged to decipher on a chalkboard. Were he to take the case, one suspects that the good professor would need to put something a whole lot stronger than tobacco in that famous pipe of his.

I am, quite clearly, not Trump’s target audience — not least because I am not going to vote for him come hell or high water. But this does not mean that, as a moderately prominent conservative, I am not pitched on his candidacy every day by readers, acolytes, flacks, and more. I get emails, phone calls, and, occasionally, personal entreaties, and, when I do, I am always struck by how remarkably unclear the 2024 pro-Trump pitch has become. Simply put, when proselytizing to me as a conservative, Trump’s fans seem unable to decide whether to explain that their candidate intends to serve me or to vanquish me. On some occasions, I am told that Trump’s supposedly ineluctable victory in the election of 2024 will send me and my fellow “dinosaurs” out into the wilderness. On others, I am promised the world. Sometimes, this happens back to back: On Monday, Trump is cast as the mortal enemy of “Conservatism Inc.,” to which I supposedly belong; on Tuesday, he will be Reagan reincarnate, the apparent man of my dreams; on Wednesday, he’ll back to conquering and banishing; on Thursday, he’ll be some heady mix of the two; and on Friday he’ll be anyone’s guess. It can be enough to make one seasick.

In the New York Times this week, I learned that if Trump wins a second term, his team will seek out “a more aggressive breed of right-wing lawyer, dispensing with traditional conservatives who they believe stymied his agenda in his first term.” Last time around, the Times relates, “his administration relied on the influential Federalist Society.” Now, his “allies are building new recruiting pipelines separate from the Federalist Society.” This, of course, is their prerogative; there is nothing written in stone that accords the Federalist Society a role within our judicial-nomination process. But, surely, there are some obvious political consequences to this shift? I honestly cannot count how many times I have been told that traditional conservatives should be grateful to Trump for “saving the Supreme Court,” and, by extension, that they should be keen to help him do it again. “Are mean tweets more important than Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett?” I am asked. On its own terms, I can understand this argument. But if Trump is not going to do that again — if, rather, he believes that the people he appointed during his first term were failures, and wishes to look elsewhere as a result — then that case surely falls apart? The injunction, “Vote for me because I’ll do different things than the ones you liked four years ago” belongs in a madhouse, not a republic.

A similar problem attaches to Trump’s record defending unborn life. I am routinely pitched on Trump’s record as the “most pro-life president ever.” But, if he believed that once, he doesn’t seem to now. Last year, Trump blamed pro-lifers for the Republican Party’s disappointing midterm push, and more recently, he has vowed to work with the Democrats in Congress to enshrine a “compromise” on the issue into federal law. May I ask which of these men is the one currently seeking office? Is it the pro-life stalwart who finally helped to kill Roe, or the snarling, equivocating critic who described the practical consequences of that shift as a “terrible thing”? Does Trump wish to build on his work or repudiate it? Naturally, he cannot do both.

From what I can see, there are almost no parts of his record that Trump has not in some way disavowed. When his team is seeking my approval, I am informed that he will return the country to how it was before Joe Biden became president. Unfortunately, I am also told that every single person who was on his team was a traitor who ought to be in jail. Trump hates Paul Ryan, who was largely responsible for his tax bill. He wishes to cut ties with the Federalist Society, which was responsible for his judicial appointments. He harbors great animosity toward John Bolton, Jared Kushner, David Friedman, Mike Pompeo, H. R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson, and James Mattis, who, together, were the architects of the foreign policy he touts as a great success. He loathes his vice president, Mike Pence. He abhors his attorney general, Bill Barr. He thinks that Nikki Haley, his ambassador to the U.N., is a moron. He has even turned on the state of Florida — not merely Ron DeSantis, but the entire state of Florida — which he now insists is “among the worst states” to live in, having been driven into “misery and despair” by precisely the type of economic policies that he continues to promise conservatives he will adopt.

For those of us whose political worldviews do not shift wildly in the wind, the whole thing is thoroughly disorienting. I am, of course, accustomed to a certain level of incoherence in American politics, but this is something else entirely. Certain only of their indispensability, Trump and his friends seem unable to work out whether they wish to kill conservatives or to kiss us, to praise us or to bury us, to deliver us into the promised land or to force a permanent exile. “He fights,” I’m still told. Okay, but for what?