It’s Trump’s Revolution

His supporters wanted a bulwark against liberalism. But his failed presidency is pushing the country to the left.

By Ross DouthatJune 13, 2020

President Trump posing with a Bible outside Saint John’s Church in Washington on June 1.

President Trump posing with a Bible outside Saint John’s Church in Washington on June 1.Doug Mills/The New York Times

In 1804, the Corsican upstart Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself as France’s emperor. His mother, born Letizia Ramolino, did not attend the coronation. Informed of her son’s self-elevation, she is said to have remarked coolly: “Let’s hope it lasts.”

In conversations with conservative friends about the Trump presidency these last three years, I often found myself thinking about Mother Bonaparte. Before Donald Trump’s election I made a lot of dire predictions about how his mix of demagogy and incompetence would interact with real world threats: I envisioned economic turmoil, foreign policy crises, sustained domestic unrest. Having lived through the failed end of the last Republican presidency, I assumed Trump’s administration would be a second, swifter failure, with dire consequences for both the country and the right.

In 2017, 2018, 2019, those predictions didn’t come to pass. Trump was bad in many ways, but the consequences weren’t what I anticipated. The economy surged; the world was relatively stable; the country was mad online but otherwise relatively calm. And as the Democrats shifted leftward and Trump delivered on his promised judicial appointments, many conservatives who had shared my apprehensions would tell me that, simply as a shield against the left, the president was doing enough to merit their support in 2020.

To which I often murmured something like, “let’s hope it lasts.”

It hasn’t. Now we are in the retreat-from-Moscow phase of the Trump presidency, with crises arriving all together — pandemic, recession, mass protests — and the president incapable of coping. If the election were held today, the result could easily resemble 2008, the closest thing to a landslide our divided system has recently produced. Meanwhile across corporate and journalistic and academic America, a 1968-ish spirit is pulling liberalism toward an uncertain destination, with what remains of conservatism turtled for safety or extinct.

In this environment, few conservatives outside the MAGA core would declare Trump’s presidency a ringing success. But many will stand by him out of a sense of self-protection, hoping a miracle keeps him in the White House as a firewall against whatever post-2020 liberalism might become.

This is a natural impulse, but they should consider another possibility: That so long as he remains in office, Trump will be an accelerant of the right’s erasure, an agent of its marginalization and defeat, no matter how many of his appointees occupy the federal bench.

In situations of crisis or grave difficulty, Trump displays three qualities, three spirits, that all redound against the movement that he leads. His spirit of authoritarianism creates a sense of perpetual crisis among his opponents, uniting left-wingers and liberals despite their differences. His spirit of chaos, the sense that nothing is planned or under control, turns moderates and normies against him. And finally his spirit of incompetence means that conservatives get far less out of his administration than they would from a genuine imperial president, a man of iron rather than of pasteboard.

You can see the convergence of these spirits in the disaster at Lafayette Park, where an authoritarian instinct led to a chaotic and violent police intervention, a massive media freakout, blowback from the military — and left the president with an impious photo op and control of six blocks around the White House to show for it.

That last image, the president as a dictator of an island and impotent beyond it, seems like a foretaste of what would await conservatives if Trump somehow slipped through to a second term. Maybe he would get to replace another Supreme Court justice — maybe. (In a Democratic Senate, not.) But everything else the right needs would slip further out of reach.

Conservatism needs a response to the current movement for social justice that answers just claims and rejects destructive ones. Trump delivers a conservatism of Confederate war memorials that vindicates the left.

Conservatism needs new ideas about how to use power, a better theory of the relationship between state, economy and culture than the decadent Reaganism that Trump half-overthrew. Trump offers only a daily lesson in how to let power go to waste.

Conservatism needs a way to either claim more space in America’s existing elite institutions, or else a path to building new ones. Trump offers a retreat to the fortresses of OANN, TPUSA, QAnon.

Above all, conservatism, now a worldview for old people and contrarians in a country trending leftward, needs a mix of converts and sympathizers to be something other than a rump. Trump did win some converts in 2016, but he has spent four years making far more enemies, and their numbers are growing every day.

What we are seeing right now in America, an accelerated leftward shift, probably won’t continue at this pace through 2024. But it’s likely to continue in some form so long as Trump is conservatism, and conservatism is Trump — and four more years of trying to use him as a defensive salient is not a strategy of survival, but defeat.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40415050)

So now people are supposed to fear Trump because if he continues people will all go against all their interests and become Communist...,

NYT etc IS the problem of the US. They are fully unhinged at the levels of both Soviet Communists and Goebbels, just screaming their degenerate rage.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40415139)

Normies were starting to flock to BLM back in 2015 with Obama

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40415089)

Remember the mistake libs made of villainizing romney, leading to people like trump?

Just wait for what trump brings.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416606)

and he is now explicitly further left than obama was.

Speaking of poor reasoning skills I really need your input here

http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4188493&mc=42&forum_id=2#40414213

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416708)

Imagine a lib pol saying black people need to kill each other less or stop stigmatizing academic success today. Ljl.

Bernie was left on economic issues and not nearly woke enough for modern libs.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416732)

People are all in in this shit

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416659)

It was a mixed crowd but certainly a decent enough size of wealthy white people that were bored and wanted to do something on a weekend with nice weather.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40419836)

Citation needed

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40415150)

I love libs. I've heard "Trump has accomplished nothing that should make conservatives happy" and "Trump is an insane Nazi that makes it impossible for anyone not to be super lib." Which is it?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416550)

Most people are just normal decent people who on a base level care about their fellow Americans, and a lot of the mwere pissed when they saw trump tear gas a street full of people to take a picture.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40415094)

they were much more appalled by a church being burned

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40415109)

nah ding man. the beaten whites, torched downtowns, "abolish the police" is worse than anything.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40415514)

Lol ok. Surely libs are open to honest debate and would open up slots in the Harvard faculty and CNN primetime lineup if only we can convince them in the marketplace of ideas.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40415165)

The constant social pressure and expectation to comply in the great social media struggle session is affecting "normal" stupid white women.

Also they are low information virtue signalers - they see the headline that a keed got murdered in Atlanta. They don't bother reading that he was 27, getting arrested for the DUI, and stole a taser from a cop after resisting arrest and pointing it at the cop.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416538)

This is not mainstream stuff, but these pigeon heads arent even trying to process the information critically.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416567)

This is not convincing Trump voters not to vote for him.

But it is convincing pussy hat wearing virtue signaling normies to unironically like videos of white people prostrating themselves and washing the feet of black people.

It's using the fascist all of nothing approach - either you are ALL IN ON ANTIRACISM (which includes reparations and feet washing) or you are with Trump and the Nazis.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416580)

This is now the majority of the women on my social media, only a handful of whom are insane SJW libs. But the distaste for trump is allowing BLM and the social media Maoists to manipulate them into parroting SJW narratives, if not throw rocks themselves.

And the lack of any counter or critical analysis makes them thing this IS the way, not extremist insanity - see the Taibbi article.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416600)

I agree that they're retarded also but that's a totally different question.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416616)

But it is convincing Biden voters that there is nothing wrong with defunding the police, washing the feet of black people, and demanding reparations for slavery and the hundreds of unarmed black men killed by police every year (well 9).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416673)

❤❤❤

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416719)

i saw nothing about Kavanaugh or believe all women. BLM is everywhere

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416814)

He is insanely divisive, by design. Not a good way to govern

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416681)

The more unfocused he is the less popular he is.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40416765)

Trump goes out of his way to alienate Dems and say controversial shit to fire up his base. General Mattis is absolutely right about this.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40419580)

Trump is done here

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40423262)

- If the GOP had a more normal leader, the left would still probably be radicalizing.

- HOWEVER, that radicalization would lead to massive electoral successes for the GOP. There is still a significant majority in this country that is not on-board with the Twitter left. Even extremely liberal states are voting for moderate GOP governors (see, e.g., Maryland, Vermont, Massachusetts).

- BUT, the GOP is unable to capitalize on reaction to the radicalization of the left, because Trump is president and he is: (1) uniquely incompetent/unfit/unlikeable as a person; and (2) viewed as just as radical as the Twitter left, except in the opposite direction.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40419840)

Not really because the media, social media + corporations would still be pulling for shitlibs. You would end up with the same issue you have today.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40419872)

To a lot of persuadable voters, Biden v. Trump is approximately the mirror image of something like Romney vs. Rashida Tlaib. Guess who wins in each of those matchups?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4560293&forum_id=2,#40419894)