Conservatives on Trump: Don't Blame Us!

[justaprogressive]

As my colleague Bob Kuttner noted earlier this week, Wall Street Journal editorialists have been regularly chastising Donald Trump for his deviations from conservative orthodoxy, which almost nobody defends so faithfully as the Journal’s editorial scribes. But even the Murdoch minions must take second place when it comes to the care and feeding of paleoconservatism’s foundational beliefs. Their fiercer and more literate defender, today and for the past half-century, is George Will.

Both Will and the Journal agree that Trump has trampled one conservative axiom after another: free trade, opposition to entitlements, the freedom of established institutions (elite universities, major corporations, white-shoe law firms) to do as they please, and resistance to the growth of state and, most particularly, presidential powers. The Journal will periodically lump Trump’s misdeeds with what they see as the executive overreach of Democratic presidents since Franklin Roosevelt, though Will locates the original sin in the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. (Neither really traces it back to Lincoln, where it rightly and quite justifiably belongs.)

This past Wednesday, Will delivered the Summa Theologica of the paleocon case against Trump, in a column sure to be remembered as a tour de force of blinkered argumentation. Will termed Trump’s administration “the most progressive in U.S. history,” not merely enumerating Trump’s various heresies, but also ascribing them to progressivism run amok and thereby exonerating conservatism from any responsibility for Trump’s tin-pot presidency.

The Will bill of progressive particulars included Trump’s belief in “government’s ability to anticipate and control the consequences of broad interventions in modern society’s complexities”; “presidential supremacy ensured by using executive orders to marginalize Congress”; and “constructing coalitions of government-dependent factions, as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal did with the elderly (Social Security, 1935), labor (the 1935 National Labor Relations Act favoring unions) and farmers (the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act).” He further classifies as progressivism-gone-wild Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center and his attempts to dictate university curricula.

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-05-30-conservatives-on-trump-dont-blame-us/

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. tRump is neither prog nor con. He's Right Wing Authoritarian and self-centered, selfish. . . . nt

[DBoon]

2. Forgetting all the adoration of Francisco Franco in the pages of National Review

The modern conservative movement has been opposed to democracy since it was founded.

Trump is its natural culmination.