President’s fiercest foes might well be within his own Republican party
TONIGHT, Donald Trump performs live at the Congress theatre, Washington DC. The president will talk ‘bigly’ and greatly. Some lawmakers will applaud. Others may boo. But who will do which?
The Democratic Party’s opposition to Mr Trump is predictable yet impotent. Far more interesting is the verdict of the congressional Republican Party, which is slowly waking up to the possibility that president Trump is no more a conservative than ‘La La Land’ is the best picture. It’s time for conservatives to take a stand.
The fightback against Trump has to be led by the right because the left is useless. An alien visiting Earth would be forgiven for thinking that Hollywood was the Democratic Party and the Oscars its nominating convention.
Actors make beautiful activists but to paraphrase Billy Crystal, nothing says “in touch with the common man” like millionaires handing each other statues made of gold. Yet the Democrats must rely on the coastal elites to speak for them because the party has been almost eliminated everywhere else.
The liberals didn’t just lose the presidency last year, they also lost the House of Representatives and the Senate. Since 2009, the Democrats have haemorrhaged more than 800 seats in state legislatures. Things are so bad that their response to Mr Trump’s speech will be delivered by Steve Beshear, a 72-year-old ex-governor of Kentucky who hardly anyone has heard of. Barbara Streisand, we can only assume, was unavailable.
On paper, Mr Trump has every right to condescend to Congress like a king. Except that he didn’t personally win the legislative majority over the Democrats. He inherited it. It started back in 2010, when the Republicans took the House. And Mr Trump’s own contribution to the revolution of 2016 was astonishing but narrow. Never forget: he lost the popular vote. House Republicans polled slightly ahead of him. They have a right to be heard.
The Republican Party is the historic vehicle for dozens of movements – classical liberals, libertarians, Christian traditionalists, etc – and Trumpism is very a recent addition. So recent that it was only at last week’s gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that a coherent attempt was made to define it.
Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, said that its goals were “deconstruction of the administrative state” in order to pave the way for economic nationalism.
Mr Trump confirmed: “The core conviction of our movement is that we are a nation that will put its own citizens first.” Both men were cheered.
And yet when he first spoke at CPAC in 2011, Mr Trump was a sideshow; he didn’t even bother to show up in 2016. Why? Because CPAC hitherto reflected the classical liberal wing of American conservatism. Its goal was to shrink and even abolish government; Mr Trump’s is to put it on the side of his voters. Sure, he wants to get rid of those bits of the government that he regards as killing jobs or employing too many pansy-poet liberals: the “administrative state”. But he will actually empower those bits of the state that he likes. Heck, Mr Trump would bring back torture if he could. In that spirit, the president is expected to call tonight for tax reform while insisting that middle-class welfare programmes go untouched. As the Republicans slash government income, he will ask them to raise defence spending; paid for by cuts to budgets he hates – such as environmental protection – and possibly a levy on imports. The state will not shrink; its priorities will simply change.
Most Republican congressmen will go along with this. Not because they agree with the president that he is the best president ever, but because they sense time is short. Mr Trump is not beloved. The Republicans might lose the next round of congressional elections. Best, then, to get as much done in the next few months as possible – and maybe send some goodies to the voters back home. The surrender of CPAC to Mr Trump is a reminder that even fundamentalists will bend the knee to a man with money and power.
But there are congressmen with guts. The breadth of the right may overwhelm the president. Fiscal conservatives, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, are not thrilled about upholding the most expensive and constitutionally dubious aspects of Obamacare. Libertarians don’t like lavish spending or empowering the security apparatus. Neo-cons fear subversion by Russia.
Several representatives have attended town hall meetings where they’ve been screamed at by constituents, accused of empowering a racist.
Former president George W Bush has implicitly criticised Trump’s handling of the press.
If Republicans feel this strongly about the president’s shortcomings, they can squeeze him in the Senate, where his majority is two.Will there be conservative dissent under Mr Trump? There has to be. Otherwise it’s a betrayal of conscience. A betrayal of all those speeches praising Ronald Reagan and his incarnate deity, the rugged individual.
A betrayal of your liberty liturgies, my Republican friends, your pieties about freedom. It’s truth time. Did you mean it when you said you would vanquish government and, by restoring free will, recover America’s lost virtue? We shall see, we shall see. (© Daily Telegraph
London)