One argument is that Trump doesn’t have a coherent policy agenda—he never intended to be President, and he was always out for himself, and he is now just engaged in doing whatever the people who fawn on him say is the right policy, as well as whatever benefits him or his family.
The second argument is that Trump represents a new kind of conservatism. According to John Burtka, this national conservatism has these policy goals:
In economics, it would aim to strengthen the middle class, reduce income inequality and develop an industrial policy to ensure economic independence from China for essential military supplies.
Policy proposals could include incentivizing investment in capital equipment and research and development; ending tax advantages for shareholder buybacks; federal spending on infrastructure; promoting skilled trades and vocational programs; busting up inefficient monopolies through antitrust enforcement; slowing immigration rates to tighten labor markets and raise wages for the working class; holding universities liable for student loan debt in cases of bankruptcy; and raising tariffs across the board while slashing taxes on the middle class.
As relates to culture, national conservatives would aim to support families by being pro-life for the whole life. Policy ideas might include paid family leave, increasing the child tax credit, federally funded prenatal and maternal care, reducing or eliminating income tax on families with three or more children, and working toward a society in which a mother or father can support a family on a single income. America’s Judeo-Christian roots would be celebrated, and churches and charitable organizations would be given preference in caring for the poor.
In foreign affairs, national conservatives’ goal is to protect the safety, sovereignty and independence of the American people. America’s regime-change wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen would be recognized as imperial hubris, and anyone involved in their promotion exiled from future positions in Republican administrations. Presidents who ignore congressional authorization for war would be impeached, and members of Congress who eschew their constitutional duties would be stripped of committee assignments and “primaried” in the next election. We would command the seas and space, bring the remaining troops home, secure our own borders and rebuild America.
The third argument is that the pro-Trump media is scrambling to defend the deeply incoherent GOP policy agenda, one that can’t be defended rationally because it isn’t rational, and so they’re deliberately deflecting from affirmative policy arguments to “virtue signaling” and fear-mongering about the Other.
The fourth argument is that ideology doesn’t matter, just outcome. It doesn’t matter if Trump is personally racist, corrupt, senile, as long as he is getting a good outcome for the US. I’m going to leave this one aside, since it’s an actively dangerous argument—it is how democracies die. (Also businesses, but that’s a different post.)
Let’s focus on the second, since it’s the only one that claims that Trump’s actions aren’t either coming from his personal sense of perpetual injury/need for reassurance/greed or from his having done whatever the last person who flattered him said he should do.
And I think it’s helpful to spend a moment to notice that even his defenders rarely try to defend his actions as rationally grounded in a coherent policy agenda that is logically connected to defensible goals. Most pro-Trump rhetoric is that what he is doing is good because it hurts libs, the economy is good, and his demagoguery is great because he’s stigginit to the libs by not being politically correct. In other words, most pro-Trump rhetoric is openly irrational and “HAHAHA WE’RE WINNING.”
That’s interesting.
That’s interesting because the argument of many scholars of rhetoric and political science is that support for Trump is not a rational commitment to an affirmative set of political goals connected to set of policies that can be rationally defended as achieving those goals as much as an affective and tribal framing of politics as whether “we” are better than “them.”
Thus, Trump defenders responding to this criticism by saying, “Democrats do it too” supports that interpretation of Trump supporters: that they can’t defend their policy case(s) affirmatively, but think entirely in terms of a zero-sum between their reductive notion of our political options.
That’s why the second argument matters so much: this is claiming to be a coherent statement of principle on the part of Trump conservatism.
So, let’s take it seriously.
How many of those things has Trump actually done?
In other words, the strongest argument for Trump having a coherent political ideology fails on its face.
That’s interesting.