MAGA Isn’t Serious… or Conservative
Photo by Kches16414, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
I’ve said for years that Trump was no conservative. He proved me right once again over the weekend in an interview with Kristen Welker on NBC.
In the interview, Trump shed his conservative mask and abandoned another of the traditionally Republican positions that the former Democrat adopted to run for president. After being touted as an uberconservative fighter, The Former Guy is now seeking to become a deal maker who can unite both sides. After watching Trump deepen partisan divides since 2016, pardon me for being skeptical.
The subject at hand was abortion, a Republican sacred cow. After noting that many Republicans “speak very inarticulately about this subject,” Trump called for compromise with a ban at a specific number of weeks. He did not specify where he would place the cutoff.
“We’re going to agree to a number of weeks or months or however you want to define it,” Trump said. “And both sides are going to come together and both sides — both sides, and this is a big statement — both sides will come together. And for the first time in 52 years, you’ll have an issue that we can put behind us.”
Sounds easy. Why didn’t anyone else think of that?
Well, part of the reason is that nailing down where the cutoff should be has proven impossible. Another part is that extremists on both sides don’t want to compromise. That includes the Republicans who backed Trump for years because he was a pro-life hardliner. Or so they thought.
Now Trump calls six-week bans “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.“ Trump said a 15-week ban is “a number that people are talking about right now,” but then denied he would sign such a bill. Does he want higher or lower numbers? Who knows?
Trump’s flip back to a more pro-choice position comes just over a decade after his conversion to a pro-life stance in 2011as he began to position himself for a presidential run. Now, sensing the political winds have shifted, he flips back as he campaigns in a different election.
Trump has flip-flopped numerous times before. Some of his most egregious policy changes have involved the holy trinity of the modern Republican Party: Abortion, guns, and immigration. During the 2016 campaign, Trump “softened” his immigration policy and expressed an openness to a pathway to legalization for illegals. This shift was also followed by a quick shift back. Trump also flip flopped on whether high or low numbers of immigration arrests at the border were a good thing. He took credit for both.
But Trump’s biggest flip flop was on guns. Trump infamously ordered his Justice Department to unilaterally ban bump stocks, a ban that was blocked by a federal court earlier this year. Trump also waffled on background checks, red flag laws, and “assault rifle” bans while maintaining his NRA endorsement. Try that as a Democrat who had just enacted an executive gun ban! Just ask New Mexico’s Gov. Grisham!
None of this ever mattered a whit to his supporters. That’s because Trump’s supporters claim to be conservative but in reality follow Trump because of his personality.
“I think they’re all going to like me,” Trump said of his abortion proposal. “I think both sides are going to like me.”
And that’s true of of Trump’s MAGA base. They’ll accept his new position as some sort of 4-D chess master plan. And that’s true of his next position when he flip flops back too.
And speaking of unserious faux conservatives (or “fauxservatives™” to coin a phrase). Lauren Boebert was ejected from a live-action presentation of “Beetlejuice” at a Denver theater over the weekend. The incident was caught on video which showed the Colorado congresswoman and her date groping each other in public. Boebert was allegedly also vaping in her seat near a pregnant woman.
“Do you know who I am?” Boebert reportedly asked as she was thrown out.
That sort of behavior sounds… swampy… for lack of a better term.
To make matters even more awkward, Boebert’s date reportedly owns a bar that frequently hosts drag shows, which have been major Republican bogeyman. Boebert has been very critical homosexuals, drag shows, and “groomers,” but I guess her new strategy is “make love [in public{ not [culture] war.”
Isn’t combating elites who think they are above the law what a big part of the MAGA movement was supposed to be about? For that matter, isn’t morality and stopping public displays of lewdness a big part of the current Republican talking points? Boebert, like Nancy Mace of South Carolina who recently regaled a prayer breakfast with tales of sleeping with her fiancé, is an unmarried and self-professed Christian who paints herself as a defender of the faith and morality.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, last week we received word that we were losing one of the good ones when 76-year-old Mitt Romney announced his retirement at the end of this term. I was a reluctant supporter of Romney in 2012 because I didn’t consider him conservative enough.
I was wrong.
Romney may be a moderate but he turned out to be one of the most stalwart conservatives in the party. I watched with dismay over the past few years as, one by one, the people that I had admired as conservatives jettisoned their principles to get on the Trump train.
Comparing those who followed Trump, the closet liberal and waffler, to people like Romney, who were derided as RINOs, it seems that those who claimed to be conservative superpatriots were often the ones whose principles shifted most quickly.
Who turned out to be the real RINOs?
But it turns out that Republicans don’t mind RINOs. They don’t really want a conservative, a constitutionalist, or a fighter. It doesn’t matter if Trump flips on core issues and then flips back again. Republicans want Trump, whatever he happens to be at the moment.
There is no longer a conservative party because Republicans didn’t want their party to be conservative. There are only differing degrees of liberalism, craziness and corruption, and Republicans aren’t necessarily on the best end of the scale.
It was understood as early as 2015 that Trump wasn’t a conservative. He’s a nationalist in the classic European style. What he’s revealed himself to be is authoritarian in his nationalism.
Policies don’t matter to such a person. Nor does ideology. It is the cult of personality, the elevation of the leader above the law until he becomes the law, that is whole point. And he’s been quite frank about it all along. He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his polling numbers wouldn’t change. When you’re famous you can just grab a woman’s pussy and they let you (“they” being the media and the voters, not the victim of the sexual assault).
So it’s no wonder that his supporters like Ms. Boebert see themselves as thus elevated and privileged. And it’s no wonder that literally today we see pearl-clutching over loss of “decorum and standards” as the dress code in the Senate relaxes to accommodate John Fetterman’s rather casual sartorial style — from the same people who defended President Pussyhandler and tried to wave away that same President instigating violence against Congress in an effort to illegally remain in power on January 6, 2021.
These are not people engaged in the pursuit of power to advance some sort of an agenda based on ideology or some vision of how the world might be made better. They pursue power so they can do the things they want to do for their own benefit.
The “ideology” of MAGA was articulated in 1933 by the similarly authoritarian President of Peru, Oscar Benavides: “To my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law.”Report
Nice hump day shot of fire about tfg.Report
Yeah, clearly my blood pressure was too low. Welp, THAT problem got solved!Report
The segment on abortion is classic Trump, which is to say too stupid to be believed. He not only doesn’t care, he doesn’t even understand the vocabulary. He says that he terminated Roe v. Wade, and that’s not clever wordplay, it’s that he remembers that the word “terminate” has something to do with the topic. You can see him throwing the words “number” and “compromise” at the reporter as if they constitute an answer, and you can see the moment he remembers the word “exceptions” and what he does with that.Report
And yet he’s STILL the runaway front runner for the GOP nomination . . . .Report
It’s not because he’s “conservative”.
It’s for a *HOST* of reasons. But him being “conservative” is not among them. (Closest you *MIGHT* get is that he’s “more conservative than (insert National Democrat here)” but that’s not the same thing.)Report
Yes. And we agree that’s not a good thing.Report
No republican or conservative since 1980 or so wants or believes in conservatism and it does not surprise me that you would waste 1000+ words on something that anyone with three brain cells could surmise on their own. No one “jettisoned their principles” they never were principled. This has been the Republican party since Reagan, only then they didn’t say or do the quiet things out loud. Trump didn’t move the Overton window, he smashed it, and then rubbed the shards of glass in our faces. The worst part is, the so-called “conservatives”, mainly the entire right wing of this country, like and want that and always have.Report
I suspect I agree with this, but it’s possible I’d be agreeing with something other than what you mean. I’d be interested in you fleshing it out more.Report
We hear the term “Long March” customarily to describe how many institutions became liberal, but what is more apt is to use the term to describe the multi-decade process by which those who William F. Buckley called the “kooks” have taken over the conservative movement.
I know, many liberals will tell me that they were there all along, but they were at least forced to the shadows which is an important thing.
Today, however, reactionary authoritarianism is squarely in mainstream conservatism.
Here is the Heritage Foundation laying out their vision for a future Republican White House:
For decades, as the left has continued its march through America’s institutions, conservatives have been outgunned and outmatched when it comes to the art of government.
One reason is because the Republican establishment never moved on from the 1980s. Beltway conservatives still prioritize supply-side economics and a bellicose foreign policy above all else. Belief in small government, strangely enough, has manifested itself in a belief among some conservatives that we should lead by example and not fill all political appointments. Belief in the primacy of the national security state has caused conservative administrations to defer political decisions to the generals and the intelligence community.
The result has been decades of disappointment.
Fortunately, this situation is changing. The conservative movement increasingly knows what time it is in America. More and more of our politicians are willing to use the government to achieve our vision, because the neutrality of “keeping the government out of it” will lose every time to the left’s vast power. The calls for a “new Church Committee” represent a momentous shift in energy; while conservatives used to lament liberal Sen. Frank Church’s original project as a kooky leftist attack against “The Brave Men And Women of Our Intelligence Community,” we’re now the ones agitating for Congress to go after the three-letter agencies.
https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/project-2025
Bolding mine.
Free markets, a strong foreign policy and small government?
Haha, that’s OldThink! Conservatism uses NewThink, which is to “use the government to acheive our vision”.
Remember this is not some fringe group, this is a mainstay of the conservative movement and Republican orthodoxy.
Examples of this in action are Ron DeSantis using the power of the state to punish Disney for criticizng him, and Trump’s promise to purge the government and restock it with loyal cronies.
As we’ve seen, they view all organs of state and society as tools for power, not something valuable in their own right. And violence is very much part of their toolchest.Report
https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-calls-megyn-kelly-nasty-for-interview-that-sparked-conservative-criticism-of-himReport