After ten years, there’s little worth saying about Trump’s character — but much still to be said about policies and results.
After ten years, there’s little worth saying about Trump’s character — but much still to be said about policies and results.
I don’t spend much time these days arguing about Donald Trump. It’s futile and boring. It may be worth explaining why this is, and the philosophical choice it reflects.
It’s not that I never write about Trump: I do, quite a lot. He is nearly the only figure in American national politics who matters right now, given how ossified Congress has become, how little the Democrats have to offer beyond reacting to Trump, and how difficult it is for any Republican to build a national profile without his favor.
So, I write often about Trump’s actions — his policy choices, the legality and wisdom of his uses of government power, his political decisions and impact on our elections, and egregious examples of his current uses of power for personal gain. Inevitably, that also means covering his rhetoric as it intersects with both policy and politics.
But I don’t write much these days about Trump’s personal and public character, and on the extent to which he acts, speaks, carries himself, and makes decisions in ways that a president should. I am reminded of that question yet again with the latest kerfuffle over Trump posting to social media a picture of himself as Jesus, then lying completely unconvincingly about it. Trump being Trump, there’s a controversy or three every week of this nature, including appalling spectacles such as Trump trashing Rob Reiner after Reiner and his wife were brutally murdered by their own son.
For a conservative commentator in 2026, what is the point of writing about this?
Coming to political writing from a background as a lawyer, I see my principal role as one of advocacy. Most political writing other than bare-bones hard-news reportage falls into one of three basic categories. At one end of the spectrum is punditry that seeks to explain what’s happening and what is likely to happen going forward. For the pure pundit, all that matters is being right — whether the causes you favor are winning or losing. At the other end is activism that is always pushing toward an intended goal. For the activist, whether you write the truth is only an instrumental question of what you can get away with. The goal is to “always be closing” — using everything you write to get closer to an objective, be it partisan or policy or cultural victory.
Both punditry and activism can be noble callings if done with some sense of ethics and conscience, and certainly some of my writing at times falls into one or the other bucket. But in between lies advocacy: making a sustained case for a particular set of principles, aims, and points of view that transcend any particular day’s controversies. For the advocate, persuasion is crucial, and the advocate’s own credibility is, too. The advocate need not always tell the whole truth, in the sense of giving equal emphasis and coverage to every fact, but credibility demands that you address facts and arguments challenging to your position — and never lie to your audience.
Now, far be it from me to argue that character and fitness in the chief executive is somehow irrelevant. Covering Trump’s fitness to be president was hugely important for a decade between 2015 and 2024 when he was a candidate for the nomination and the job in three consecutive election cycles — the first candidate to run as his party’s nominee three times since Richard Nixon, and the first to do so three times in a row since Franklin D. Roosevelt. As a result, just about everybody in political commentary has said just about everything along the way that they could possibly say on the topic, and just about every American who consumes political news has been more stuffed to the gills than Mr. Creosote with such commentary. Who has room for one more bite?
Trump is the president, now and for the next two and a half years, and then never again after that. He holds the constitutional powers of the presidency, and short of death or resignation, can be removed only by two mechanisms (impeachment and the 25th Amendment), neither of which stands a plausible chance of being successfully implemented. It is sensible, fair, and necessary to continue to critique what he does with those powers. But there is not much more to be gained at this juncture by criticizing who he is.
I don’t believe that a man of Trump’s character ought to be president, but I’ve made that case ad nauseam and into several bucketsful beyond that point, and those of us who share that view lost the argument. I retract nothing I’ve said on that score, and would not deceive my readers by attempting to conceal it; but it’s over. Trump’s character belongs to the history books now, where it will be weighed mainly as a means to explaining what he ends up having accomplished, for good and ill.
An activist against Republicans in general, or an advocate against policies that might be associated with Trump’s character, may still rationally believe that there is more juice to be squeezed out of mocking Trump; he does often make it easy for them, in ways that are politically unhelpful to his allies and supporters. But their case is not mine.
Seventeen million Republican primary voters decided in 2024 that Trump ought to be the party’s standard-bearer, and 77 million American voters decided that fall to restore him to the presidency. Some of those people are the sorts of Trump cultists who love having a leader of his personality and persona; many others just concluded for various instrumental reasons that Trump would get them better results than alternatives such as Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Ron DeSantis, or Nikki Haley.
To the extent I have more to say about the proper direction of the Republican Party and conservatism going forward, I’m not going to persuade anybody at this late date to regret that. To the extent that Trump’s character matters to those arguments, the best we can hope for is to convince people that it would be better if the next leader didn’t do some of the things Trump does that are not directly related to getting results. On the other hand, it remains vital for us to look at Trump policy and personnel choices — tariffs, war in Iran, the cabinet, judicial nominations, etc. — and contend for what works over what doesn’t. If people believe that “Trumpism” worked, they will want more of it — and then we can debate what “Trumpism” really means in that context. If people believe that this term didn’t work out so well for America, Republicans, or conservatism, we can also have that argument about what to change.
But none of those things is going to be accomplished by staging yet another round of “Is the Orange Man Bad?”