Why The Trump Phenomenon Is So Painful
It’s hard to point to another candidacy that evokes such strong feelings from conservatives as that of Donald Trump. We, who have been let down by the party so many times before, are kind of used to not getting our way. So you’d think that, as the party gets set to hand the nomination to an east coast liberal who has no respect at all for the conservative ideology, we’d already be kind of used to it, so it wouldn’t really hurt that bad.
But it does hurt — really, really badly.
Not because we aren’t used to it. Most of us (and by us, I mean people like the fine folks who make up the #NeverTrump movement) weren’t happy that our nominee last time around was Mitt Romney. Still more of us weren’t happy about choosing John McCain as our standard bearer in 2008. Yet, in those instances, we embraced our nominee once the primary process had played itself out, and supported the Republican candidate.
This time, however, is different. There will be none of the “being a good soldier” and supporting the party’s nominee. And while most of that is due to the fact that Trump is so much more removed from the conservative ideology & its values than previous nominees, there’s much more to it. What’s happening now is just too painful.
This was supposed to be our moment.
All the hard work we had put in with little to no payoff, all the less than ideal candidates we had fielded, all the bad decisions our party’s leadership had made, all that was going to end now. We were finally going to get our way this cycle, restore constitutional governance to the republic, and finally have a government based on conservative principles.
It was all set up for us. The election of Obama in 2008 begot the “Tea Party wave” in 2010. The reelection of Obama in 2012 saw a serious approach to 2014, which not only won us the Senate, but meant that the future of the Congress reflected a philosophy of governance more in step with what we believed. All the meanwhile, we kept winning state races, thus gaining the ability to enact (with varying levels of success) conservative policy on the State level.
And then the campaign for the presidency began. The Democrats, with a nonexistent bench, in large part due to our electoral victories throughout the Obama years, could field nobody better than Hillary Clinton & Bernie Sanders. The party infrastructure threw in with Secretary Clinton from the very beginning, and this gave us the golden opportunity of running against an opponent who has never been more than likable enough.
The idea that she has had to run an actual primary campaign to win her party’s base back from a self-professed Democratic Socialist, plus the dumpster fire that is her email server scandal (not to mention the allegations of pay-for-play while she served as Secretary of State,) were a bonus. This election could be won, and would be won if we run a strong, disciplined campaign from a conservative point of view as a position of strength. Not only that, but her weaknesses as her party’s standard bearer made very real our ability to actually win over converts to our ideology from the ranks of those who usually identify more with the left.
A veritable multitude of candidates declared for our party’s nomination, and, predictably, the “establishment” rallied around one candidate — a candidate we really didn’t care for. But here’s the thing, in Jeb being the establishment choice lay another heartening truth — albeit one we chose to ignore. Even if the establishment had gotten their candidate, we’d still have run the most conservative nominee since Ronald Reagan.
Considering all this, and the fact that we had a stable full of young talent running for the presidency, we seemed on the verge of a conservative breakthrough. Imagine the presidency of a Ted Cruz, a Marco Rubio, a Scott Walker, a Bobby Jindal, a Rand Paul, or even a Jeb Bush, all with the most conservative congress we’ve ever had. The ability to nominate real conservative justices to all the federal courts, and the possibility of a true conservative agenda being enacted was just beyond the horizon.
Until Trump happened.
Now, all that has been taken from us. All that we were on the verge of achieving, set back 15, 20 years — perhaps even longer.
No conservative President. Our majority in the Senate will likely disappear, and if our majority in the House will not as well, it will likely be diminished. Say goodbye to the Supreme Court, and many of the liberties we enjoy now, and the ones we were about to regain.
We were so close. And now, we are so far.
There is no question that the movement will need to be rebuilt from the ground up. I don’t know if the Trump phenomenon will end in a rebuilding of the GOP from the inside, with the wing pushing Trump abandoning is with it, or if we will have to abandon the GOP. But one thing is clear — the people involved in creating Trumpism (not the voters who were swept up by it) represent everything we have been fighting all these years. We can’t allow them to claim the mantle of conservatism any longer.
There is an old Jewish teaching, about how at the end of everything’s existence it gathers all its strength and makes a last ditch effort to reassert itself. Typically, a candle, right before the fire runs out of fuel is used as the metaphor. The flame jumps & gets bigger, trying to stay alive before it extinguishes itself.
Time will tell if these are the last breaths of cronyism & non-conservatism which lives in the Republican Party, or whether the last few years was our ideology living out the last moments of its life in the GOP. But either way, we are in for a big change. And the fact that it’s there where we are headed when we thought we were going to the promised land is what makes this one sting so much more than anything ever before.
