I voted for Trump. And I regret it
I would urge anyone who once supported Donald Trump to cease defending him, writes
Isupported the president in dozens of articles, radio and TV appearances. I won’t do it any longer.
When Donald Trump first announced his presidential campaign, I, like most people, thought it would be a short-lived publicity stunt. A month later, though, I happened to catch one of his political rallies on television. I was riveted.
I supported the Republican in dozens of articles, radio and TV appearances, even as conservative friends and colleagues said I had to be kidding. As early as September 2015, I wrote that Trump was “the most serious candidate in the race”. Critics of the protrump blog and then the nonprofit journal that I founded accused us of attempting to “understand Trump better than he understands himself ”. I hoped that was the case. I saw the decline in this country – its weak economy and frayed social fabric – and I thought Trump’s willingness to move past partisan stalemates could begin a process of renewal.
It is now clear that my optimism was unfounded. I can’t stand by this disgraceful administration any longer, and I would urge anyone who once supported him as I did to stop defending the 45th president.
Far from making America great again, Trump has betrayed the foundations of our common citizenship. And his actions are jeopardising any prospect of enacting an agenda that might restore the promise of American life.
What, you may wonder, especially in the wake of Charlottesville, Virginia, did I possibly see in this candidate?
Although crude and meandering for almost all of the primary campaign, Trump eschewed strict ideologies and directly addressed themes that the more conventional candidates of both parties preferred to ignore. Rather than recite paeans to American enterprise, he acknowledged that the “information economy” has delivered little wage or productivity growth. He was willing to criticise the bipartisan consensus on trade and pointed out the devastating effects of deindustrialisation felt in many communities. He forthrightly addressed the foreign policy failures of both parties, such as the debacles in Iraq and Libya, and rejected the utopian rhetoric of “democracy promotion”. He talked about the issue of widening income inequality – almost unheard of for a Republican candidate – and didn’t pretend that simply cutting taxes or shrinking government would solve the problem.
He criticised corporations for offshoring jobs, attacked financialindustry executives for avoiding taxes and bemoaned America’s reliance on economic bubbles over the last few decades. He blasted the Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz campaigns for insincerely mouthing focus-grouped platitudes while catering to their largest donors – and he was right. Voters loved that he was willing to buck conventional wisdom and the establishment.
He flouted GOP orthodoxy on entitlements, infrastructure spending and, at times, even health care and “culture war” issues like funding Planned Parenthood. His statements on immigration were often needlessly inflammatory, but he correctly diagnosed that our current system makes little sense for most Americans, as well as many immigrants, and seems designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of working people.
Yes, Trump’s policy positions were poorly defined, but these days, most candidates’ positions are. He was never going to fulfill all of his over-the-top promises, but we believed that his administration might achieve some meaningful successes.
chaos and incoherence, I have given Trump the benefit of the doubt. “No, I don’t really think he is a racist,” As one of the few people in the media somewhat sympathetic to Trump, I am often asked to comment on his surprise victory, or more recently on the gusher of news pouring out of this White House. For months, despite increasing I have told sceptical audiences. “Yes, he says some stupid things, but none of it really matters; he’s not really that incompetent.” Or: “They’ve made some mistakes, but it’s still early.”
It’s no longer early. Not only has the president failed to make the course corrections necessary to save his administration, but his increasingly appalling conduct will continue to repel anyone who might once have been inclined to work with him.
From the very start of his run, one of the most serious charges against Trump was that he panders to racists. Many of his supporters, myself included, managed to convince ourselves that his more outrageous comments – such as the Judge Gonzalo Curiel controversy or his initial hesitance to disavow David Duke’s endorsement – were merely Bidenesque gaffes committed during the heat of a campaign. It is now clear that we were deluding ourselves. Either Trump is genuinely sympathetic to the Duke types, or he is so obtuse as to be utterly incapable of learning from his worst mistakes. Either way, he continues to prove his harshest critics right.
Trump once boasted that he could shoot someone in the street and not lose voters. Well, someone was just killed in the street by a white supremacist in Charlottesville. His refusal this weekend to specifically and immediately denounce the groups responsible for this intolerable violence was both morally disgusting and monumentally stupid. Rather than advance a vision of national unity that he claims to represent, his indefensible equivocation can only inflame the most vicious forces of division within the United States. Even those concerned about the overzealous enforcement of political correctness can hardly think that apologising for neonazis is a sensible alternative.
Those of us who supported Trump were never so naïve as to expect that he would transform himself into a model of presidential decorum upon taking office. But our calculation was that a few cringeinducing tweets were an acceptable tradeoff for a successful governing agenda.
Yet after more than 200 days in office, Trump’s behaviour grows only more reprehensible, his only talent appears to be creating grotesque media frenzies — just as all his critics said.
Those who found some admirable things in the hazy outlines of Trump’s campaign – a trade policy focused on national industrial development; a less quixotic foreign policy; less ideological approaches to infrastructure, health care and entitlements – will have to salvage that agenda from the wreckage of his presidency.
On that, I’m not ready to give up.
Julius Krein