What should serious conservatives do about the election?
Donald Trump is certainly not George Washington or Ronald Reagan; but they are not on the ballot.
What about for Kamala Harris?
Her main selling point is that Trump is a threat to democracy — even though her party has a long-standing history of questioning elections. Watch her in the edited 60 Minutes interview. What is she saying? Her woke record and her many changes of opinion complicate an evaluation. But come on. Like Joe Biden who promised before his election to bring America together, she will quickly revert to her real ideology, which made her the “second-most liberal U.S. senator,” or she will just do what she is told.
We certainly know about her — but what about Trump? It is reasonable to question a man introduced to the political world as a threat to national security. But as Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr. has made clear, it is simply empirically true that the intelligence agencies, bureaucrats, and media have been biased active disinformation opponents to Trump from the beginning and still are today. Even Washington Post media editor and active anti-Trumper Ruth Marcus had to concede that the one Trump legal conviction was based on a “creative interpretation” of the law. Jan. 6 undoubtedly was inspired by Trump and his fiery rhetoric, but felony prosecutions for merely inspiring it are wholly unjustified.
The issue is what kind of president Trump would make. To determine this, there is a four-year record with which to evaluate him. On domestic policy, Trump transformed the judiciary and especially the Supreme Court with conservative appointees, reforming one whole branch of the tripartite national government and influencing state and local courts in the process. Roe v. Wade was repealed and sent back to the states, advancing federalism and tailoring solutions to different constituencies.
On economic policy, Trump cut taxes, including on businesses, making them more competitive, which extended economic prosperity. COVID did disrupt the economy and became a bureaucratic mess but was saved by federalizing the major decisions to the states. Regulations were reduced, broadly and substantially. Obamacare remained but the individual mandate and the medical device tax were repealed. Tariffs were too numerous but not especially costly. There was support for homeschooling and school choice and major reform at the Department of Education. It may be a somewhat mixed domestic record, but it clearly had a strong conservative orientation.
On foreign policy and immigration, a former George W. Bush senior White House staffer published a very revealing interview assessing Trump. Marc Thiessen, now at the Washington Post, has been a supporter of an active foreign policy — and has even been somewhat sympathetic to what a fellow former Bush White House staffer labeled Bush’s “unpopular wars.” But Thiessen’s interview comes to the surprising conclusion that:
[A]ny fair examination of Trump’s first-term record shows that he is no isolationist. This is a president who destroyed the Islamic State’s caliphate, bombed Syria (twice) for using chemical weapons on its own people, killed Iranian terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani, launched a cyberattack on Russia, approved an attack that killed hundreds of Russian Wagner Group mercenaries, armed Ukraine with Javelin missiles, and warned he would unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if North Korea continued to threaten the United States.
He reported that Trump told him: “[I]f he were in office, Russia would never have invaded Ukraine and Iran would never have attacked Israel.” In support, Thiessen noted that “Trump is the only president in the 21st century on whose watch Putin did not invade his neighbors.” Trump added that Putin did not get aggressive about Ukraine until after Biden’s “disastrous handling of the U.S. withdrawal” from Afghanistan. Similarly, Trump claimed that China will not attack Taiwan while he is president. But he was not optimistic about the future since Taiwan spends 2.6 percent of GNP on defense even though, given its distance from U.S. help, it needs to spend 10 percent.
On immigration, Thiessen was impressed that while Trump is often overaggressive in speeches on illegal immigration, he is an enthusiastic supporter of legal immigration. Thiessen reported that Trump has “an entrepreneurial view of immigration” that is “true to his roots,” given that his father was born to German immigrant parents and his mother immigrated from Scotland. Trump considered them wonderful parents, and supported the fact that his mother properly came to the U.S. to work. Thiessen noted that this was a difficult matter for Trump to discuss since many of his supporters would disagree. Even so, Trump recently publicly supported permanent residency for foreign graduates of American colleges.
Going beyond the rhetoric, Thiessen suggests the real Trump’s strategy to maintain peace is not to retreat from the world, but to make our enemies retreat. Trump employs escalation dominance, using both private and public channels to signal to our adversaries that he is ready to jump high up the escalation ladder in a single bound — daring them to do that same — while simultaneously offering them a way down the ladder through negotiation.
In fact, during his presidency, Thiessen wrote, “Trump killed Soleimani and then warned Iran’s leaders that he had picked out 52 targets inside Iran in honor of the 52 hostages they took in 1979. He added that if Iran retaliated, he would hit them.”
Beyond Thiessen, a recent letter from national security professionals and Gold Star parents who support Trump was signed by former Attorney Generals Edwin Meese and William Barr, former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller, former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, former National Security Adviser Robert C. O’Brien, former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, former Directors of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and Richard A. Grenell, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, and former President of the World Bank Group David Malpass — followed by several hundred other former government experts who mostly worked for him.
The Thiessen article described it, and the broad support from his former top officials seems to confirm it but, as a former top personnel officer for Ronald Reagan, I was surprised when I read former Attorney General Bill Barr’s earlier book and observed an open-minded President Trump. Without Barr emphasizing it, I came to realize how often he went to Trump and was successful in convincing him to override earlier decisions made in his name by his own White House staff. Reading Interior Secretary David Bernhardt’s’ bio of his service likewise demonstrated to me how he also had open access and success in overturning supposed White House decisions. No recent president has provided such immediate access to themselves for their advisers to question such decisions.
It may be true, as was argued in a Wall Street Journal editorial, that as president, Trump showed “no resistance to the $2 trillion Covid blowout” on spending and “didn’t build the military as much as he claims.” That same editorial likewise found him to have been weak on trade (without comparison to Reagan’s 1984 tariffs). Moreover, it complained that his “successes on judges, tax reform and deregulation were based on conventional ideas that were teed up for him” by conventional conservatives. But isn’t such a reliance what we want from a president?
Can a conservative consider a candidate a danger to the country with this four-year record as president? The fact is, even if belatedly, he did turn over the government to his successor. Yes, he made mistakes and he is often maddeningly off-putting. Though there are legitimate concerns that he may have changed, the Theissen interview and the endorsements are encouraging.
Read the Robert Caro biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson and ask yourself: What is the public standard to be president? Or consider Richard Nixon and, actually, quite a few recent others. Reagans and Washingtons are rare. And even they had flaws. So, the only rational conclusion is that the consequence of sitting it out and waiting for some Platonic ideal is a Harris presidency; and that is just too much to ask of any conservative.
Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles, and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.
