Where have all the ‘Never Trumpers’ gone? I don’t mean the Republicans who went over to the other side and voted for Kamala Harris. They have joined the opposition, so to speak. No, I mean Mike Pence and Paul Ryan and the other conservatives who, in pre-MAGA days, were recognized as the backbone of the Right.
Everything that they were worried about has come to pass. Donald Trump is taking power again, only this time with no checks on his power. Both houses are slavishly loyal. The few Republican members of Congress who managed to get reselected while retaining a modicum of independence have been removed from positions of authority.
Typical is Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH), who was removed as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee because of “concerns from Mar-a-Lago.” Turner is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a leftie. Nor was he a committed Trump critic. He opposed the impeachment and backed Trump’s 2024 campaign. However, he refused to pretend that the 2020 election was stolen or that the people invading the Capitol were decent patriots. Trump is not interested in qualified support.
The critics have, in their own terms, been wholly vindicated. The personality cult they feared is stronger and more exclusive than ever. During Trump’s first term, he had to work within established GOP structures. Not everyone who served under him was prepared to place the president’s interests above the nation’s. Even some who spent years excusing his boorishness, infidelity, dishonesty, neediness, and cruelty drew the line at being asked to violate their oath to the Constitution.
All those fastidious and patriotic types are out. Trump owns his party now — and, by extension, his entire government. Not since former President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and possibly not even then, has there been such a clear danger of one-man rule, what the founders called Caesarism. So why is there not more noise about it?
Are the policies better this time around? Or the personnel? Not really. For what it’s worth, I suspect that Trump will be good for the U.S. economy. His tariff proposals are terrible, but they will be more than outweighed by domestic deregulation and tax cuts. However, the objections to Trump, for conservatives, were never really about policy. They had to do with character.
Nor were they to do with personnel. Yes, Trump proposed some grotesque figures whose sole qualification was personal fealty to him. However, he has also appointed heavyweights, such as Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) as his national security adviser and the excellent Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes of Health. However, his people were never the problem. The problem was, and is, Trump’s contingent attitude to democracy and his insistence that elections don’t count unless he wins.
In any case, some of his policy positions are more dangerous than before. The fact that we have gotten used to him should not blind us to the extreme nature of some of what he is proposing. The president is threatening to annex Panama and Greenland by force, as well as demanding the absorption of Canada. For nearly a century, the United States was the leader of a group of nations that stood for a rules-based international order. Those nations defined themselves as opposing regimes, which, Putin-like, assumed the right to help themselves to slices of neighboring countries. All that is now at an end.
Some still laugh it off. Seriously, not literally, like a negotiating tactic or a way to focus the mind, yada yada. However, officials around Trump seem absolutely determined to use economic force to prize Greenland away from Denmark. They talk of tariffs and sanctions, of banning Denmark’s wonder drug Ozempic from the world’s fattest market.
To be clear, the U.S. is threatening a NATO ally in order to make an expansionist grab for a territory on which it has never had the least claim. To pretend that this is a calmer, more mature, more thoughtful Trump is pure cope.
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No, I suspect that there is only one reason the anti-Trumpers have fallen silent, and that is despair. At first, they told themselves that the problem was with one man. Then they thought that it was with one party. Now, they realize that the problem is with the electorate as a whole. Hardly anyone cares about process when they happen to favor a particular outcome. An alarming number of voters have a creepy soft spot for leader-worship.
We who warned against Trump did our best. We lost. We love America, and we want what is best for it. And, in any case, even Trump surely can’t bend the rules to give himself a third term … can he?