Trump train shows no sign of slowing
Over the past year, those of us in the anti-Trump camp have churned out billions of words critiquing the US president. The point of this work is to expose the harm Donald Trump is doing, weaken his support and prevent him from doing worse. And by that standard, the anti-Trump movement is a failure.
We have persuaded no one. Mr Trump’s approval rating is around 40%, which is basically unchanged from where it’s been all along.
We have not hindered him. Mr Trump has more power than he did a year ago, not less. With more mainstream figures like H R McMaster, Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn gone, the administration is growing more nationalist, not less.
We have not dislodged him. For all the hype, the Mueller investigation looks less and less likely to fundamentally alter the course of the administration.
We have not contained him. Mr Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is complete. Some 89% of Republicans now have a positive impression of the man. According to an NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll, 59% of Republicans consider themselves more a supporter of Mr Trump than of the Republican Party.
On trade, immigration, entitlement reform, spending, foreign policy, race relations and personal morality, this is Mr Trump’s party, not Reagan’s.
A lot of us never-Trumpers assumed momentum would be on our side as his scandals and incompetence mounted. It hasn’t turned out that way. I almost never meet a Trump supporter who has become disillusioned. I often meet Republicans who were once ambivalent but who have now joined the Trump train.
The surest evidence of Mr Trump’s dominance is on the campaign trail. As The Times’ Jonathan Martin reported, many Republicans, including Ted Cruz, are making the argument that if Democrats take over Congress, they will impeach the president. In other words, far from ignoring Mr Trump, these Republicans are making defending him the centre of their campaigns.
Democratic anti-Trumpers had better hope they win in 2020 because their attacks have only served to entrench Trumpism on the right. Meanwhile, if Republican never-Trumpers were an army, they’d be freezing their buns off in Valley Forge tweeting over and over that these are the times that try men’s souls.
Why has Mr Trump dominated? Part of it is tribalism. In any tribal war people tend to bury individual concerns and rally to their leader and the party line. As late as 2015, Republican voters overwhelmingly supported free trade. Now they overwhelmingly oppose it. The shift didn’t happen because of some mass reappraisal of the evidence; it’s just that tribal orthodoxy shifted and everyone followed.
Part of the problem is that antiTrumpism has a tendency to be insufferably condescending. For example, my colleague Thomas B Edsall beautifully summarised the recent academic analyses of what personality traits supposedly determine Mr Trump’s support.
Mr Trump’s opponents are openminded and value independence and novelty, while his supporters are closedminded and desperate for security.
This analysis strikes me as psychologically wrong (every human being requires both a secure base and an open field — we can’t be divided into opposing camps), journalistically wrong (Mr Trump’s supporters voted for the man precisely because they wanted transformational change) and an epic attempt to offend 40% of our fellow citizens by reducing them to psychological inferiors.
The main reason Mr Trump won the presidency is that tens of millions of Americans rightly feel that their local economies are under attack, their communities are dissolving and their religious liberties are under threat. Mr Trump understood the problems of large parts of America better than anyone else. He has been able to strengthen his grip on power over the past year because he has governed as he campaigned.
Until somebody comes up with a better defence strategy, Mr Trump and Trumpism will dominate.
Just after the election, Luigi Zingales wrote a Times op-ed on how not to fight Mr Trump, based on the Italian experience fighting Silvio Berlusconi. Don’t focus on personality or the man, Mr Zingales advised. That will just make Mr Trump the people’s hero against the Washington caste. Focus instead on the social problems that gave rise to Trumpism.
That is the advice we anti-Trumpers still need to learn.
David Brooks is a columnist with The New York Times.