A party or movement that insists on cutting its ties with reality is choosing failure and abandoning any hope of delivering what it promises to its supporters.
The really big-picture question about a second Trump administration, should one happen, is who would staff it. Every presidency runs largely on personnel. The president depends for information on the people in the White House and the executive agencies and departments, and nearly everything the president does is to make decisions and communicate; the actual process of turning that into rules and federal policies is carried out by the people the president appoints. Personnel is even more important in the judiciary, given that life-tenured judges can neither be ordered around nor fired once confirmed.
Personally weak presidents, such as Joe Biden, are more dependent than usual on personnel. Donald Trump, in his first term, was a weak president. He wasn’t weak because he lacks a strong personality or authority within his party, but because he lacks clear philosophical convictions on policy, knowledge of the rules and functioning of the government, and the combination of great communication skills with a powerful base of public support needed to cow the system into submission. Trump was thus apt to pinball around based on whomever he heard from last, to be unaware of how people in his administration were undermining him, and to ask for things that either couldn’t be done or never got accomplished because he lacked subordinates capable of running the traps of the bureaucracy, the courts, and Capitol Hill.
As Michael Brendan Dougherty’s latest National Review cover story details, we don’t know yet whether a new Trump term would be a return of the “Limited Trump” of 2017–20 or the “Full Trump.” Limited Trump would mean yet again hiring many smart, competent people of the sort who would have populated any pre-Trump Republican administration and that still populate state governments under successful Republican governors; pursuing executive-branch policy and legislation in line with the sorts of Republican and conservative priorities found in Republican-run states and from serious people in Congress; and appointing originalist, textualist judges who take written law seriously. It would mean an administration in which — aside from the president himself, which is admittedly not a small thing — the executive branch attempts to work within the Constitution and actually produce policy that is implemented and advances conservative goals. That’s an administration that might not look so radically different from Ron DeSantis’s Florida, Greg Abbott’s Texas, Brian Kemp’s Georgia, or Kim Reynolds’s Iowa.
The Full Trump would mean hiring a lot of performative MAGA yahoos who neither know nor care how any of this works, so that Trump can complain about how the Deep State is conspiring against him. It would also mean retreating from the half-century project of remaking the courts around rigor and fidelity to written law. It would, ultimately, mean taking four years of Republican control of the executive branch and just discarding the chance to do anything with it.
There have been a lot of worrisome signs that not only Trump but the people around him are determined to go Full Trump this time around if they are given power. Trump is unable to let go of his fixation on stolen-election theories and revisionist history of January 6. For recent examples of this, see Byron York’s Washington Examiner cover story interview with Trump (“I knew I won the election by a lot. I have no doubt. And by the way, neither does 78% of the people, when you take a look. And you can’t have that, where a large majority of people in a country think that the elections are rigged and stolen”) or Shelby Talcott’s Semafor story about Trump’s embrace of the January 6 defendants.
Now, as Noah Rothman relays from reports in the Washington Post and CNN, it is claimed that the Republican National Committee has followed its purge of existing staff by asking prospective employees (including those re-applying for their old jobs), “Was the 2020 election stolen?” and by focusing heavily on election-integrity issues. There are good reasons to doubt that the Post or CNN can get the truth of what goes on inside the RNC (although Trumpworld has always had a weakness for leaks to hostile media), and there are good reasons why the RNC should devote some attention to the nuts and bolts of how votes are counted. But if it is true that fealty to the stolen-election theory is going to become a litmus test for hiring people to work for this party, campaign, and possibly the next administration, that would be a catastrophe.
Why? Because it’s not true, and because, even if you think it might be true, it can neither be proven by evidence nor justified in law. And filtering your hiring for people who cling to falsehoods that won’t stand up to factual or legal scrutiny — whether they believe them or not — is a great way to ensure that you’re hiring people who will consistently fail at any job that requires command of the facts and the law. Which is the bulk of executive-branch work, to say nothing of the judiciary. It’s making failure a choice — indeed, a priority.
Of course, most people — even smart, competent, principled people — believe some things that are nutty or conspiratorial. But these particular lies have been at the center of a political storm for years and have been deeply examined, without competent evidence ever produced to show that any of the states Trump lost would have gone the other way but for illegal votes. If you’re continuing to profess belief in that lie in the face of the evidence, it speaks exceptionally poorly of your capacity to distinguish reality from BS. And sure, there are otherwise respectable people in the GOP — people who should know better — who have played footsie with this stuff in the past. But that’s not quite the same as digging in this far after the fact, and it is also a reason why some of those people (even ones who are worth keeping around as legislators) should not be trusted with executive or judicial posts.
My concern is not that conservatives with the integrity to speak the truth about the 2020 election will lose out on career opportunities, although it is surely the case that it’s bad for building a bench as a movement when you shut the door for years on anybody who is capable of telling fact from fiction. It’s that staffing a whole administration — maybe worse, its judicial selections — with fools and liars is a recipe for failure and lost opportunity. One of the milestone events in the history not only of National Review but of the conservative movement came when William F. Buckley Jr. led the fight to run the leaders of the John Birch Society out of the movement. As I have detailed before, the fundamental problem with the Birchers was not that they had bad manners or fringe or eccentric ideas. The problem was that they were liars. Impervious to evidence, they had committed themselves to a set of conspiracy theories that were untrue. A successful political movement or party can tolerate heretics of many stripes and can abide by a certain amount of propaganda, because this ain’t beanbag. But a party or movement that insists on cutting its ties with reality is choosing failure and abandoning any hope of delivering what it promises to its supporters.