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The Pessimist’s Case Against – and For – Donald Trump

Am I a pusillanimous pussyfooter? You be the judge.
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I want to endorse the bulk of this Ross Douthat blog post about how even people who hate the status quo need to recognize how Donald Trump could make things much worse:

I would invite the Trump-curious to think about the two signal crises of the Bush years, 9/11 and the financial crisis, and imagine each one with Donald Trump installed as president of the United States.

In the first instance, you can imagine a better outcome than the one we had: Perhaps Trump’s (alleged) skepticism about the Iraq War and zeal for “winning” would have manifested itself in a more restrained and tightly-focused post-9/11 response, perhaps we would have caught or killed Bin Laden sooner and brought our troops home in a victory parade, perhaps phrases like “Abu Ghraib” and “waterboarding” would have never entered our national lexicon.

But remembering the post-9/11 atmosphere (and, indeed, my own psychic state at the time), it also seems very easy to imagine a response that was much, much worse — more reckless, more bloodthirsty, more extra-constitutional, and ultimately more disastrous for our military, the innocent, the world.

Recall, especially, that for all the talk at the time and after about Bush’s fascism, etc., the Bush administration spent a lot of time trying to tamp down backlash at home (mosque visits, yes; internment camps, no) and working within institutional frameworks that imposed some limits on its actions. Both of its wars (unlike our Obama-era adventures) were debated and approved by Congress, a great deal of time was spent trying to work through the United Nations, the invasion of Iraq was a coalition effort even if it was only of the “willing,” High Cheneyism was pressed by one faction of the executive branch but resisted by others, and so on.

None of this prevented the war from being a mistake and then a debacle, and if you’re preparing an indictment of the American governing class the fact that so many centrists and reasonable liberals went along with the Bush administration’s case for war can be invoked in a case for disruption, a case for #TrumpNow. (As can the fact that many #NeverTrump voices on the right seem not to have reckoned fully with what Bushism wrought.)

But it’s also pretty easy, especially given some of the precedents created by President Obama’s foreign forays and drone wars, to imagine how a future American president might respond to a 9/11-style attack by ignoring institutional restraints entirely, and simply lashing out with blood and fire. Especially if that American president had, I dunno, explicitly campaigned on promises to “kill them and take the oil,” to murder terrorist families, to disfavor and discriminate against Muslims as a class during a time of terror, etc. Which is why, in the end, a rigorous case for Trump needs to be very comfortable with that possibility (as some of his supporters are!), comfortable with fire and blood as an alternative to George W. Bush’s far-too-timid crawl to war and overlawyered “enhanced interrogations,” rather than assuming because Bush’s foreign policy went bad a far higher degree of recklessness and folly isn’t possible.

Then regarding the financial crisis — well, there my take is a lot shorter. No doubt the Bush administration (and the Clinton administration before it) made mistakes that made the crisis worse when it came; no doubt the Washington-New York response was imperfect and created all kinds of problems down the road. But to believe that the aftermath of Lehman’s collapse couldn’t have been much bleaker with a more feckless and volatile president at the helm and a more hackish cast around him, that the Bush administration’s response was the worst of all possible options rather than among the least-bad, requires ignoring a lot of very dark economic history that we were lucky not to actually revisit. There is some chance that America and the world would have been better off had Donald Trump been president on 9/11 rather than Bush. But the chances that we would have been better off in 2008, 2009 and 2010 (and into the present) drop very low indeed.

I’ll leave off there, while noting that I’ve made an earlier version of this argument that touches on the immigration issue as well. Again, we’ll have plenty of time to wrestle with these questions over the next six months. But in the pessimist community generally, and the world of dissident, anti-Bush conservatives especially, this strikes me as the core problem that need to be reckoned with by anyone who wants to make a strong case for supporting Donald Trump for the sake of #disrupting our decadent elite. It’s not enough to note that things are bad now, that our bipartisan leaders — and especially the Republican Party’s leaders — have often marched with folly. You need to address head-on the ways in which a President Trump seems like a man whose instincts, inclinations and explicit promises could make that march of folly ever so much swifter, ever so much worse.

I agree with all of this. One of Donald Trump’s earliest and most vocal supporters on the right is Ann Coulter, and we all remember how she responded to the attacks on 9-11. If I were betting how a President Trump would have responded, I would guess something like that – or, alternatively, that he would have responded with that kind of rhetorical bluster while doing nothing productive to respond to the attacks. Similarly, with Trump nattering on about repudiating the national debt when there is no crisis at present, and no plausible crisis in response to which repudiating our debt would bring anything but national catastrophe, I feel highly confident that a President Trump’s response to the financial crisis would either have precipitated a deep and lasting depression, or that at best it would have looked at least as crony-capitalist as the bailouts we got.

But I here’s the thing: I feel fairly confident that much of the current leadership of the GOP would also do worse than Bush on these same tests. Marco Rubio, whom Douthat boosted throughout the primaries, inspires in me absolutely no confidence on either score. Neither does Ted Cruz, Trump’s most successful primary competition. Neither represents as radical a gamble with our nation’s governance as Trump would, but both did represent an increasing radicalism since the Bush years, and in some of the same directions.

Now, I’m not much for Leninist “the worser, the better” type of thinking. I wanted the GOP to have a real debate about its priorities and principles, to move in some degree to repudiate the party’s turn toward radicalism, and to nominate somebody who looked like a plausibly responsible steward of the Republic. But it was clear from very early on that this wasn’t going to happen – that, in fact, the party was determined to have even less of an open debate about the party’s future than they had in 2008 or 2012. Take a look at the depressing evolution of Rand Paul as he prepared to seek the Presidency if you doubt that.

Enter Donald Trump (whom Rand Paul is now supporting, by the way). He’s manifestly unqualified to be President. But precisely because answering the question, “Why Not Trump?” was a painful exercise that exposed the deep flaws and weaknesses of both the establishment and its hard-right institutional opposition, he was uniquely qualified to destroy the GOP in the process of running for President, either by bolting the party in pique to run a third party campaign, or by winning the nomination and leading a decapitated party to a huge, historic defeat.

If you still basically believe in some version of what the GOP has stood for since the mid-1990s, then Donald Trump is an unmitigated disaster. And if you are mostly looking for a responsible hand on the tiller, then Hillary Clinton is clearly your candidate, even if you disagree with her on a host of issues – clearly superior to Trump, but also clearly superior to the most plausible Trump alternatives whom the GOP might have offered up. But if you are “Trump-curious” because you want the GOP to repudiate its post-Reagan identity not in favor of moderation but in favor of a new, more populist/nationalist direction, then you can hope that Donald Trump will be something like Barry Goldwater: the right man to lose with. (Doubly so given the close correspondence between Hillary Clinton and Lyndon Johnson.)

Of course, Barry Goldwater was a mensch. Donald Trump, not so much. Barry Goldwater was a man of ideas. Donald Trump, not so much. Barry Goldwater was the head of an organized and disciplined political faction. Donald Trump, not so much. It’s very plausible that those most interested in the ways that Trump promises to break with the historic GOP will be the most disappointed of all by what he leaves behind, whether he wins or not.

These are all reasons to maintain a healthy critical distance from the Trump phenomenon. But even those who fear that Trump will leave nothing but destruction in his wake, and who hope that the destruction stops with the GOP and does not extend to the country as a whole, may yet have to concede, as they contemplate the wreckage: the judgments of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.

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