A Trump nomination would bring GOP victories to a screeching halt
Quin Hillyer
It will be eight years on June 16 since Donald Trump made his theatrical entrance into the 2016 presidential race, descending an escalator into the lobby of Trump Tower in New York and dragging the nation’s politics down with him.
No reasonable assessment of his effect on public conduct and national unity can conclude anything other than that Trump has been a disaster. His lack of character and competence make him a chaos agent, attached like an incubus to the body politic. He always declares that he wants to make America great again, but he has not done so and never will. Voters should abandon any thoughts of returning him to the White House.
TRUMP PICKS HIS SPOTS RATHER THAN JUMPING FROM ONE GOP CAMPAIGN EVENT TO ANOTHER
If Trump’s good intentions are what he says they are, if he wants to put America first, he should withdraw from the race and let the country choose a new leader unencumbered by rage, vendettas, and investigations. He will not do that, of course, although polls consistently show he is deeply and irretrievably unpopular with the wide public and therefore capable only of leading Republicans to unwonted defeat.
Those who are ambiguous about Trump, generally approving of his policies while deploring his character, often exaggerate his success on the former. But he did not achieve as much as is claimed, especially by him.
Trump never came close to “draining the swamp” or to finishing the border “wall,” never came close to reducing the trade deficit or adding manufacturing jobs, and did not even remotely tame China.
He alienated all the “best people” who agreed through gritted teeth to serve in his first administration. He is left with only third-raters willing to put up with his abuse but who cannot offer any hope that they would rein in his ever-changing directives and destabilizing mood swings. Presidential second terms are usually less successful than first terms. A second Trump term would be appalling.
Let’s start by assessing his competence. After narrowly defeating Hillary Clinton, one of the most unappealing candidates ever to run for high office, Trump did several things that any Republican president in 2017 would have done. He signed a pro-growth tax reform that then-Speaker Paul Ryan had spent former President Barack Obama’s years teeing up for just such a moment. Trump likewise nominated judicial conservatives teed up by the Federalist Society. The nation was fortunate that Trump was able to fill the Supreme Court vacancy that happened during the election year, plus two vacancies that occurred during his four years, and he was fortunate that it gave him something substantial to boast about.
He also aggressively undid some of Obama’s executive orders and rule-making. He raised defense spending (again, as any GOP president would have done), and he accelerated the rapprochement between Israel and five Arab or Muslim nations that had been underway since Obama’s capitulation to Iran’s nuclear program, a deal Trump rightly pulled the United States out of.
These are not nothing, but even with the advantage of a Republican Congress, undivided for two years and with Senate control for all four, Trump failed in most legislative endeavors. He, more than anyone else, torpedoed the best chance of substantive rejection of Obamacare, and when Ryan picked up the pieces to send a bill limping to the Senate, appetite for full repeal had evaporated.
Trump grew the biggest government the U.S. had ever seen, even before throwing obscene sums of debt into his botched early response to the coronavirus pandemic. Trump also ruled out reform of so-called entitlements, without which American insolvency is inevitable.
Trump boasted of shutting down the country in the face of the pandemic — Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is attacking him aggressively for that — and praised China for its pandemic response. Under his leadership, the wealthiest nation on Earth experienced the third-highest number of coronavirus deaths per capita of any country in the world.
As for his signature issue, stopping illegal immigration, the record is patchy. In his four years, the 1,980,210 Border Patrol “encounters” of illegal immigrants exceeded those of either Obama’s first term (1,724,443) or second term (1,660,343). And as for Trump’s boasted negotiating skills? After he shut down the government for 35 days over his demand for $5.7 billion for a border wall, he secured less money for it, just $1.3 billion, than the $1.6 billion Democrats had offered seven weeks earlier.
In foreign affairs, Trump was mercurial and incompetent, pronouncing himself “in love” with nutcase North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, allowing the release of 5,000 vicious Taliban prisoners for almost nothing in return, and disgracing himself with a pandering and narcissistic joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland. He also abandoned a military base, tons of equipment, and key intelligence to Russia when precipitously withdrawing Americans from Syria.
Trump’s laziness and incompetence are confirmed by those who were closest to him. When a single disgruntled former staffer hurls accusations at his former boss, such complaints may be dismissed as sour grapes. But when numerous former aides, each of high independent stature, all recount the same serious horror stories of an out-of-control president, reasonable people should believe them. Former Gens. H.R. McMaster, James Mattis, and John Kelly, two-time Attorney General William Barr, and longtime foreign policy leader John Bolton were Trump’s “best men.” But he drove them all away to tell harrowing tales of catastrophes averted only because Trump was so easily distracted that he did not follow through on his worst instincts.
Nevertheless, Trump managed to blow up Republicans’ chances of running Washington for the benefit of the country. The ills President Joe Biden is inflicting on America could not have happened without Trump’s ham-handed interventions in federal elections across the country. First, Trump’s unpopularity lost the House of Representatives in 2018, then he lost in 2020, then he sacrificed the Senate by torpedoing two Georgia Republican candidates in 2021, and finally, he endorsed awful candidates in 2022 and chased other good ones away from even running, thus solidifying radical Democrats’ control of the Senate. Now he is running again to continue his record of chaos and damage for another four years.
None of the foregoing touches the worst aspects of Trump’s character. Regardless of whether one thinks Trump deserved impeachment, he clearly stressed the system while being unethical. He was wrong to demand that a foreign government target his political opponents and, of course, not just wrong but malicious to try to overturn a valid presidential election and inspire a mob to attack the Capitol.
Trump’s bad character has stoked left-wing excess and grotesque and unprecedented abuses. He promised to eradicate the “deep state” but instead emboldened it and strengthened its power. If Trump is so good at defeating it, why is it so successfully running rampant against him and against any voters who don’t kowtow to the Left’s brave new world?
Trump’s idea of getting tough is merely to make loud noise. His histrionics have drowned out more sober, competent efforts to ensure systemic integrity. When Trump keeps pushing the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, for example, he helps discredit all other efforts to fight vote fraud, no matter how well founded.
All of this stems from major character defects by now so obvious that too many people discount them as old news. But they should be repeated lest we forget. They are more than merely “mean tweets” and extreme bumptiousness. Character flaws are important. They keep Trump from effectively performing his duties or even understanding that his desires and the nation’s needs are two distinct things.
“It is a horror show, you know, when … he’s left to his own devices,” said Barr, who was a notably loyal and effective attorney general until Trump pushed the Big Lie about a stolen election. “If you believe in his policies, what he’s advertising in his policies, he’s the last person who could actually execute them and achieve them. … He does not have the discipline. He does not have the ability for strategic thinking and linear thinking or setting priorities or how to get things done in the system. … He will deliver chaos and, if anything, lead to a backlash that will set his policies much further back than they otherwise would be.”
Much though too many people have forgotten this, it really is important for the president, who represents our citizens to the rest of the world and who is the repository of so much institutional trust, to exude propriety and dignity. The founding generation called it “republican virtue.” It is crucial to keeping representative democracy functional rather than so fractious that its fabric rips irreparably.
Trump fails this test more spectacularly than any president before. He denigrates women in private, and he publicly insults the looks of female opponents and of male opponents’ wives. He accuses the father of an opponent of helping assassinate President John F. Kennedy, calls on crowds to “knock the crap” out of silent protesters, and puts White House personnel in danger by keeping them close when he is in the contagious phase of COVID-19. Other presidents could be crass and boorish in private, but Trump’s coarseness and churlishness regularly poison the public square.
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Until Trump came along, people were not so at each other’s throats. Trump’s vulgarity not only dishonors the presidency but also pollutes civic society. Where Abraham Lincoln appealed to the “better angels of our nature,” Trump calls forth, and emotionally validates, the worst instincts of supporters and opponents alike.
Surely — surely! — Republicans can do better than a presidential nominee who pays off porn stars, says he grabs women by the p****, repeatedly stiffs small-business owners, cheats would-be “university” students, repels suburban women and young voters by margins never before seen by a major party nominee, uses extraordinarily violent language as a matter of course, bungles diplomacy, praises Putin, blows healthcare reform, throws around taxpayer money like confetti, erupts like Vesuvius with almost daily falsehoods, tries to overturn a valid election, and catalyzes an attack on the U.S. Capitol as his followers chant for the execution of his own vice president.
Quin Hillyer is the deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner.