One of the most stunning and yet tediously repetitive features of America’s Donald Trump Experience is the expectation that President Donald Trump is going to become someone else.
People across the political spectrum seem permanently immune to the realization that the country has elected a man who says and does extraordinarily shocking things. With metronomic consistency, they exclaim, “Can you believe what he said? He’s just completely nuts! Where’s my 25th Amendment?”
And then, everyone recovers, reverts to their prevailing view of Trump, and buckles up for the next outrage, which lands with no less unjustifiable surprise.
But it seems Trump may have gone just a bit too far, even for conservatives, with his most recent aggravations of the natural order. Their odiousness, along with the alleged rancid smell of the Iran war, are causing a slow slinking away from a president they perceive as gone stinky.
Trump conjured up and posted on Truth Social an AI image of himself as Jesus healing the sick, then deleted it and claimed he thought it had portrayed him as a doctor—you know, one of those doctors who dress in first-century robes.
He engraved a post onto Truth Social that said Pope Leo XIV, who opposes the Iran war, is “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy,” telling him to “get his act together” and suggesting that he, Trump, was responsible for Leo being chosen pope.
He said “a whole civilization might die tonight” instead of just threatening to bomb Iran.
None of this is great. People have a right to be offended. But they should consider a few things before withdrawing support for Trump.
Conservatives during the presidential primaries in 2016 ceded some of the moral high ground they felt they always held by choosing Trump, a great but imperfect man.
They had a choice closer to moral perfection in Jeb Bush, but they concluded, correctly, that these harrowing times demanded something else. America’s self-destruction seemed too near for a conventional candidate. It was time to get a little rude and go on offense.
We got what we asked for. Over the course of two terms Trump has altered the course of U.S. history, diverting and even reversing leftist agendas that seemed hopelessly unstoppable.
- He revamped the Supreme Court, resulting in myriad decisions favorable to conservatives, most prominently the demolition of Roe v. Wade, something long thought a lost cause.
- He completely plugged up the massive hole in the border—which presupposes that there still was a border—ending the ceaseless waves of illegal immigration into the U.S. that threatened to swamp our culture with something else.
- He changed the entire conversation on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” polite terms for dropping our Judeo-Christian culture into the Memory Hole and replacing it with a Marxian, totalitarian dictatorship commanding obedience to dissolute collectivism and relativism. In high schools, colleges, and the workplace, woke equity is now on the defense.
- He defeated the Islamic State caliphate, and he dawned a new age of Arab-Israeli cooperation with the unprecedented Abraham Accords.
- He withdrew from the Paris climate accords and refocused the country back toward fossil fuels, ensuring Americans’ pockets wouldn’t be picked by European internationalists while China cheerfully burned through its coal.
These are pivotal realignments that eclipse ephemeral measures such as a point added or subtracted to GDP or an increase or decrease in the crime rate, as important as those things are.
I would personally add ending—or at least vastly delaying—Iran’s nuclear ambitions to the list, but that’s exactly what some conservatives don’t agree with. And that’s the point. It’s a disagreement. An argument. Not grounds for divorce.
If you agreed to marry someone who spewed profanities and insulted the neighbors, don’t be surprised if that doesn’t change after the ceremony. And don’t act shocked if he turns the volume up sometimes.
To repeat, we got what we asked for: Trump.
Let’s also remember that much of the outrage Trump mobilizes is pure Madison Avenue, designed preponderantly for effect, manufactured in the vast PR-generating region of his frontal lobe. He’s selling—propaganda for friends, deception for enemies.
Unlike many other presidents, he’s warm to actual human beings whom he has no political use for. He says hello to the janitor. His exaggerations and insults can be unpleasant and outrageous, but there’s a humanity and even an honesty within them.
He does things I don’t like. But he’s prevented many worse things I don’t like.
Trump is a towering figure who will be written about for centuries. Sometimes that indecorous tower—excessively embroidered with Trump gold—reflects sunlight. Sometimes it casts very dark shadows. It sways a bit with the wind, but in the end, it has stood for conservative values more resolutely than any of the smaller edifices easier on the eye, and ear.
We conservatives made our bargain with Trump long ago. Let’s own it.
