Never-Trumpers start to reconsider
But one year is not enough time to judge outcomes
When Donald Trump ran for president, some of his most outspoken critics were conservatives. In addition to his numerous personal shortcomings, it wasn’t at all clear that Trump was a conservative. This was, after all, a man who had once taken the liberal position on a long list of issues, including abortion, gun control, and health care.
As we come to the end of Trump’s first year in office, a remarkable number of those Never-Trump conservatives have changed their minds. Whatever else may be said of Trump’s first year, he did not turn out to be a closet liberal.
So is it time for conservative Never-Trumpers to quit their complaining and join the bandwagon? Even Powerline, one of the best of the conservative blogs and by no means a knee-jerk Trump supporter, recently ran a post entitled “It Is Time to Pull the Plug on Never-Trumpism.”
Before Republicans and conservatives try to make space for Trump on Mt. Rushmore, I have a modest suggestion: Wait. One year is much too soon to pronounce judgment on a presidency. The man still has at least three, maybe seven years left in the White House. Time to do a lot of very good things — but also time to make a lot of mistakes, or for the mistakes he has already made to become more glaringly apparent.
If you want a good example of how things might go, consider the case of George W. Bush. As of Jan. 20, 2003, two years into his presidency, most conservatives couldn’t say enough good things about the 43rd president. Bush had won all-but-universal approval for his response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan had been toppled, apparently for good, with only a few losses of American soldiers.
The war in Iraq loomed on the horizon, but most Americans then supported it. In Oc- tober 2002, a congres- sional resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq had been overwhelmingly approved — 297-133 in the House, 77-23 in the Senate. Based on the aftermath of the 1991 war that pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, most people — including virtually all of the prospective Democratic presidential candidates — expected the upcoming war to be an easy victory for the United States. On the domestic side, Bush had managed to get congressional approval for the top two items on his agenda: a large tax cut and the No Child Left Behind education bill. His approval rating had declined from the stratospheric heights it reached immediately after 9/11, but it was still a robust 58 percent. And in the 2002 midterm elections, the Republicans had actually gained seats in both the House and the Senate, something no presidential party had achieved since Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. Now flash forward six years. The Iraq War had become highly unpopular, partly because Saddam Hussein didn’t really have an active program for developing weapons of mass destruction, and more because the postwar occupation was carried out with an appalling level of incompetence. Bush critics complained that in focusing on Iraq the administration had taken its eye off Afghanistan, where the Taliban were making a comeback.
No Child Left Behind, passed in late 2001 with large bipartisan majorities, was now widely reviled. From a conservative perspective, it had dramatically increased federal spending and federal regulation of schools, and produced little in the way of results. Most Republicans still defended the Bush tax cuts, but their enthusiasm was tamped down by the size of the federal deficit. Having inherited a $236 billion surplus from President Clinton, by 2004 Bush had turned it into a then-record $412 billion deficit.
A May 2005 Gallup Poll was the last time that 50 percent of the American public approved of his performance as president. During his final year in office, his highest approval rating was a dismal 34 percent.
The result was that Republicans suffered major losses in both the 2006 and 2008 elections, when the Democrats easily reclaimed the White House and posted large majorities in the House and the Senate. By many measures, the Republicans had been reduced to their lowest point in decades.
Will something similar happen to Trump over the next few years? It’s far too early to say with any assurance. In general, the mistakes a president makes don’t start to become obvious until he has been in office for a number of years. Lots of things could go wrong: North Korea, Iran, health care, the economy . . .
So Never Trumpers have no reason to burn their old bumper stickers and hide their heads in shame. And any Republican office-holder who hopes to get re-elected would still be well-advised to keep a decent distance from the president.