F*ck Silence

by Joe Walsh

  The President of the United States would be an officer elected by the people for FOUR years; the king of Great Britain is a perpetual and HEREDITARY prince. The one would be amenable to personal punishment and disgrace; the person of the other is sacred and inviolable. The one would have a QUALIFIED negative upon the acts of the legislative body; the other has an ABSOLUTE negative. The one would have a right to command the military and naval forces of the nation; the other, in addition to this right, possesses that of DECLARING war, and of RAISING and REGULATING fleets and armies by his own authority. The one would have a concurrent power with a branch of the legislature in the formation of treaties; the other is the SOLE POSSESSOR of the power of making treaties. The one would have a like concurrent authority in appointing to offices; the other is the sole author of all appointments. The one can confer no privileges whatever; the other can make denizens of aliens, noblemen of commoners; can erect corporations with all the rights incident to corporate bodies. The one can prescribe no rules concerning the commerce or currency of the nation; the other is in several respects the arbiter of commerce, and in this capacity can establish markets and fairs, can regulate weights and measures, can lay embargoes for a limited time, can coin money, can authorize or prohibit the circulation of foreign coin. The one has no particle of spiritual jurisdiction; the other is the supreme head and governor of the national church! What answer shall we give to those who would persuade us that things so unlike resemble each other? The same that ought to be given to those who tell us that a government, the whole power of which would be in the hands of the elective and periodical servants of the people, is an aristocracy, a monarchy, and a despotism.

  For most of US history, presidents have fit the description of them that Hamilton laid out. Trump has not. Let’s go line by line. He has joked repeatedly about being “a perpetual,” as Hamilton put it, saying after Xi Jinping made himself president for life, “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”15 Not only has Trump not been “amenable to personal punishment and disgrace,” he’s continually evaded both. Kings have “an absolute negative” of the acts of the legislature, Hamilton wrote, whereas presidents do not—but that’s not how Trump sees the president’s emergency powers. Presidents have a “concurrent authority in appointing to offices” with the Senate, you say? Trump has trampled on the part of that responsibility shared with the Senate to help surround himself with bootlickers. And not to put too fine a point on it, but presidents are supposed to possess “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction.” Yet Trump favorably quoted from a conspiracy theorist a comment that “the Jewish people in Israel love him . . . like he’s the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God.”16 Trump himself one day looked to the heavens and said “I am the Chosen One”17—apparently sent to Earth to make the United States’ commerce with China fairer.

  We’ve been told by Trump supporters over and over again not to take him so literally about such things, since they’re likely to be asides or jokes. In certain circumstances, that’s probably true. But Trump has not earned the right to be trusted in such a way. He may not really think he’s a literal godsend. He may not really believe that Article II of the Constitution gives him the right to do “whatever I want.” But when he behaves in an unhinged manner around the clock, it’s difficult to imagine him regarding himself as anything less than a supreme leader, who is immune from the rules and regulations that check everyone else in society. All men and women of good conscience who care about seeing our democracy through to the next generation have to do everything in our power to make sure someone like Trump can’t get away with such conduct. If we don’t, it’ll be our undoing. And no number of conservative judges will be able to stop it.

  Chapter 8

  Fixing Conservatism

  Until about January 20, 2017, the term “Republican in name only” (RINO) described members of the GOP who wavered on the party platform. I’ll admit that the goalposts of that “platform” moved depending on the day; what counted as a conservative position one moment could be insufficiently conservative the next (such as when Republicans fought for Obamacare repeal). But in general, you were a RINO if you were a Republican member of Congress who voted for bloated spending deals, “open borders,” or legislation that betrayed a core right-of-center principle. The point is that the label had at least something to do with government policy.

  As of January 21 that year, the test for being a RINO shrank to one question: Do you pledge your undying support to our king, or don’t you? I wish I were exaggerating. But there’s no exaggerating the force of a cult’s pull. Let’s remember what Trump said during the 2016 campaign: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”1 Truly, I want to spend a minute taking that possibility seriously. We tend to grimly accept his comment at face value without diving into what “not losing any voters” would actually look like, what contortions are necessary to make Trump committing a crime, to put it in simpler and more realistic words—say, obstructing justice!—come off as defensible behavior. This, my friends, is how we truly uncover the way Trump has bastardized conservatism. Because each time he has trashed norms and tested legal limits, he’s been putting the spirit of his Fifth Avenue theory into practice. Each of these actions on the Trump agenda has required dismissing yet another principle—and these precedents have become scaly barnacles glomming onto the rotting hull that is conservative politics.

  I don’t want to give goofy-ass grifters more attention than they deserve—which is literally any—but there’s a Trump sycophant named Bill Mitchell who hosts an internet radio show whose tagline is “Trust Trump.” Those two words speak volumes about the direction of conservatism under this president. It’s about following Trump wherever he goes. If he goes there . . . well, it’s always a matter of his having the chutzpah to go there like previous swampy politicians didn’t. If he asks foreign powers to investigate his political opponents . . . well, the Biden family does seem shady, right? If he’s investigated by his own government for his campaign’s connections to Russia doing something along those very lines . . . well, it’s that traitorous deep state again! If journalists dig into his own shady connections and pretty obvious financial conflicts of interest . . . well, it’s that enemy of the people, the fake news, again! I swear to you, “conservatism” under Trump looks like a fucking conga line. It’s all about putting your hands on the shoulders of the flunky ahead of you and shuffling your feet forward, wherever the procession leads. And because that is the state of affairs—because conservatism means whatever Trump needs it to—being a conservative often isn’t about anything related to what we call the usual “public discourse.”

  Under Trump, bullying political opponents is conservative.

  Under Trump, pressuring the Department of Justice to impede the business of adversarial media is conservative.

  Under Trump, hanging a picture of the president and his North Korean BFF Kim Jong-un on a wall in the West Wing—seriously, the White House staff did that—is conservative.2

  Under Trump, having zero skepticism of the president—the pinnacle of authority in our political system—and instead accepting his “great and unmatched wisdom” is conservative.3

  Of course, there’s nothing remotely conservative about any of these things, since conservatism is, among other things, about restraint, obedience of law, and trust in experience, not in whims. But “conservative” has a pretty all-encompassing definition right now; it’s satisfied only if you defend the whole Trump package. That’s evident when it comes to the personal conduct and the abuse of powers described above—but it also applies to the substance.

  Under Trump, going around Congress to get money for a border wall, like sneaking into Mommy’s vanity drawer for forty bucks, is conservative.

  Under Trump, overseeing an increase in the national debt of $3 trillion is conservative, because no one really cares about the national debt. />
  Under Trump, ethnonationalism—finding new ways to reject refugees, to dehumanize immigrants of color, to undermine Ronald Reagan’s vision that any law-abiding foreigner could come to the United States and become an American—is conservative.

  Conservatives should remember that these failings bear no resemblance to what it is to be a conservative at all. In fact, some of them are representative of quite the opposite. Former Republican senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire put it this way:

  It is difficult to know what the president’s philosophy is.

  It changes constantly, with the only constant being his self-indulgence.

  A strong case could be made that he has no ideological consistency; his erratic purposes and inconsistent courses would make a weathervane appear steady.

  He has had numerous epithets attached to him by his opponents and by some of the former members of his administration.

  But here is one that has not been mentioned yet: The president seems to have a definite tinge of socialism in his chaotic policy closet.4

  If you think about it, being an ardent protectionist on trade, trying to tell companies which countries they can do business with, letting it rip on the budget, and browbeating the Federal Reserve into making our dollar weaker—“a policy that has deep roots in the socialist movement that has always been a part of the Democratic Party’s policy matrix, starting with William Jennings Bryan more than a century ago . . . [and] has been a minority position even within the Democratic Party,” Gregg wrote—is kinda socialist. Now, does that make Trump a socialist with a capital S? It does not. There’s a lot more to Trump: his views on the tax system, the federal government’s role in health care, and immigration are anathema to the left wing. But if you mix all of this gobbledygook together, it’s tough to get the sense that Trump has a guiding set of principles at all—beyond enhancing his own power, of course. I think we’ve seen enough to conclude that he doesn’t have a core idea in his body. Bear in mind that:

  At first, Trump was registered as a Republican (1987–1999); then he became a member of the Independence Party (1999–2001); then he became a Democrat (2001–2009); then he became a Republican again (2009–2011); then he became an independent (2011–2012); then he became a Republican a third time (2012–today).5

  He proposed a $6 trillion tax hike when he was flirting with running for president on the Reform Party ticket in 2000.6

  He described himself as “very pro-choice” and said he wouldn’t ban partial-birth abortion in 1999, and he was all over the place on the issue in 2016 after coming around to the pro-life position.7

  He called “[o]ur $17T national debt and $1T yearly budget deficits . . . a national security risk of the highest order” in 2012. As president, he’s helped enable the national debt to balloon to $23 trillion.8

  He criticized President Obama for “negotiating with our sworn enemy the Taliban—who facilitated 9/11.”9 He invited Taliban leaders to Camp David for a meeting in 2019.10

  And his views on what was impeachable behavior have—well—evolved over the years. “Are you allowed to impeach a president for gross incompetence?” he tweeted in 2014.11

  Trump is all over the place in these examples, flipping from right to left or left to right. This amply backs my belief that Gregg shares and articulated: “[H]e does not have any core policies, just those ideas that he happens to stumble onto while watching some late night talk show. So it is not possible to hang a title on him that claims he is this or that.”12 I’d add one thing: It’s not possible to do it credibly. The great conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly’s final book before her passing, The Conservative Case for Trump, argued that Trump “could be the most conservative and successful president since Ronald Reagan.”13

  Trump has tried claiming the label himself. “Remember when I first started running? Because I wasn’t a politician, fortunately. But do you remember I started running and people would say, ‘Are you sure he’s a conservative?’ I think now we’ve proved that I’m a conservative, right?” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2018.14

  Well . . . is he wrong? Because he did appoint Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. He did sign an enormous tax cut package into law. He has undone some of the previous administration’s regulatory regime. How can these achievements be called anything but “conservative” successes? Look—they are. But they’re fortunate successes, not part of some brilliant conservative master plan. For every major right-of-center vow he’s kept, he’s broken or completely ignored another. He’s made deficit spending worse than it was when Obama left office. He’s not overseen the construction of the wall; as of fall 2019, he’d just managed to replace some existing old fence with new fence and build a little new barrier, but not of the “big and beautiful” variety. He totally botched the repeal and replacement of Obamacare, contributing absolutely no knowledge or leadership to the process. Instead of improving the United States’ trade policy overall, he’s screwed it up to the point that his administration has had to bail out farmers with taxpayer money. That is why it’s significant that Trump isn’t a conservative—because ultimately you can’t trust him to deliver conservative victories. The ones that he’s provided seem more like happy accidents than the products of design.

  Think about it this way: if Trump changed his position on issues a, b, c, and d yesterday, he could change his position on issues e, f, g, and h tomorrow—or change his position on issues a, b, c, and d again. His legacy of “flip-flopping” is much more comprehensive than the norm in politics, such as Mitt Romney’s becoming pro-life and John Kerry’s “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it” gaffe. Those are single instances of wavering. Trump has shifted his views about a lot of things a lot of times. It’s because there’s no “there” there. Trying to get him to explain his stances on matters important to conservatives is like asking a fifth grader to stand in front of the class and work a calculus problem on the blackboard. He’s totally out of his depth. That’s a gigantic liability as president, because, as the old belief in DC goes, it takes presidential leadership to make major reforms. For example, it would’ve been awfully helpful to have a president who was at least somewhat interested in federal health care policy taking charge during the Obamacare battles in 2017. Republicans didn’t have one of those.

  Trump claims that they did, naturally. “Nobody is more negative on ObamaCare than Donald Trump. . . . And nobody knows health care better than Donald Trump,” he told George Stephanopoulos before the Iowa caucuses in 2016.15 But as with so many issues, he couldn’t back up his claim; he could back it up barely a fraction. He had one talking point about Obamacare reform: allowing individuals to purchase insurance across state lines, which we can call “getting rid of the lines” for shorthand. Here’s how he employed it in a debate shortly after the Stephanopoulos interview:

  Question: OK, so let’s talk about pre-existing conditions. What the insurance companies say is that the only way that they can cover people is to have a mandate requiring everybody purchase health insurance. Are they wrong?

  Trump: I think they’re wrong 100 percent. What we need—look, the insurance companies take care of the politicians. The insurance companies get what they want. We should have gotten rid of the lines around each state so we can have real competition.

  We thought that was gone, we thought those lines were going to be gone, so something happened at the last moment where Obamacare got approved, and all of that was thrown out the window.

  The reason is some of the people in the audience are insurance people, and insurance lobbyists, and special interests. They got—I’m not going to point to these gentlemen, of course, they’re part of the problem. . . .

  But, we should have gotten rid of the borders, we should have gotten rid of the lines around the state[s] so there’s great competition. The insurance companies are making a fortune on every single thing they do.

  I’m self-funding my campaign. I’m
the only one in either party self-funding my campaign. I’m going to do what’s right. We have to get rid of the lines around the states so that there’s serious, serious competition.

  Question: But, Mr. Trump . . .

  Trump: . . . And, you’re going to see—excuse me. You’re going to see preexisting conditions and everything else be part of it, but the price will be done, and the insurance companies can pay. Right now they’re making a fortune.

  Question: But, just to be specific here, what you’re saying is getting rid of the barriers between states, that is going to solve the problem. . . .

  Trump: That’s going to solve the problem.16

  This is almost incoherent. The question wasn’t terribly clear, but the point is that Obamacare had a provision nicknamed the “individual mandate” that required Americans to have medical insurance or pay a monetary penalty to the government. The question that was posed to Trump is whether the federal government’s having that kind of mandate in law was necessary for insurance companies to be able to afford covering every American shopping for a plan. Trump’s answer, roughly, was no, because the government could allow consumers to shop for insurance across state lines, which would create “great” and “serious” competition. I guess the argument is that competition would lower the price of insurance, making it affordable to more individuals, which would entice more individuals to purchase a policy, making the individual mandate unnecessary. I don’t buy for a second that Trump could make this argument if he was asked, “How exactly would ‘getting rid of the lines’ solve the problem?” But although it’s an interesting idea on the merits, it’s just one isolated idea about an issue that needs a lot of them. It’s like saying that your plan to win a war is to send a carrier group to xyz coordinates. Okay, that’s possibly a good step and we should talk more about it, but what else? Is that it?