I concluded this week’s Campaign Stops column, written amid near-total Republican disarray, by wondering if reform-minded and populist-friendly conservatives should stop rooting against Donald Trump and hoping for a successful co-optation of the legitimate portions of his message, and instead just accept that the Trump phenomenon is going to carry all before it in this cycle — welcoming it as one part creative destruction, one part judgment issued from on high.
Now let me explain why I still think the answer is no, why I can’t just win the victory over myself and learn to love Big Donald. Here I’ll draw on an argument between two liberals, ruminating on how the possibility of a Trump nomination should be regarded on the left. On the one hand, Jonathan Chait has made the case that his fellow liberals should cheer Trump on, not only because he’s unlikely to win a general election but also because it wouldn’t be so bad if he did, since he’d be a much more ideologically-unsettled figure than a President Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, and thus more likely to cut deals with Democrats and generally govern from some kind of center. As a hopeful example, he invokes as a Trumpian forerunner Arnold Schwarzenegger, another misogynist celebrity demagogue who ended up as “a highly effective governor” because all he cared about was his popularity, which made him much more willing to work across party lines.
Then for a counterpoint, there’s Ezra Klein, who concedes that we can’t know what a Trump White House would mean for public policy, but argues that liberals (and everyone else) should find him “terrifying” nonetheless, for reasons that have less to do with the specifics of what he might stand for than with how unbound he is from normal conventions and restraints:
Trump’s other gift … is his complete lack of shame. It’s easy to underestimate how important shame is in American politics. But shame is our most powerful restraint on politicians who would find success through demagoguery. Most people feel shame when they’re exposed as liars, when they’re seen as uninformed, when their behavior is thought cruel, when respected figures in their party condemn their actions, when experts dismiss their proposals, when they are mocked and booed and protested.
Trump doesn’t. He has the reality television star’s ability to operate entirely without shame, and that permits him to operate entirely without restraint. It is the single scariest facet of his personality. It is the one that allows him to go where others won’t, to say what others can’t, to do what others wouldn’t.
Trump lives by the reality television trope that he’s not here to make friends. But the reason reality television villains always say they’re not there to make friends is because it sets them apart, makes them unpredictable and fun to watch. “I’m not here to make friends” is another way of saying, “I’m not bound by the social conventions of normal people.” The rest of us are here to make friends, and it makes us boring, gentle, kind.
This, more than his ideology, is why Trump genuinely scares me. There are places where I think his instincts are an improvement on the Republican field … But those candidates are checked by institutions and incentives that hold no sway over Trump; his temperament is so immature, his narcissism so clear, his political base so unique, his reactions so strange, that I honestly have no idea what he would do — or what he wouldn’t do.
This seems, unfortunately, mostly right. I’m not “terrified” of Trump because fool that I am, I still don’t think he’ll be the Republican nominee. But I don’t think anyone, right or left, should feel sanguine about what he represents, or about the prospect of having someone so unrestrained elected to an office that’s increasingly lacking in effective formal restraints upon its powers.
The Schwarzenegger example does show that a major American state’s government can survive a Trump-like figure at the helm. But first of all the idea that Arnie was “highly effective” because he did some things that liberals like is a little strange, since he spent his second term presiding ineffectually over a period of constant, gridlocked budget crises and left office with approval ratings in the 20s. (At best you could argue that he was a merciful failure as a strongman.) And second, when it comes to celebrity-infused demagoguery Schwarzenegger was Trump-like but also Trump-lite: For all his coarseness he did tone things down, not up, during his campaign and subsequent administration, trying to play at least somewhat by normal political rules. Yes, there was talk of “girlie men” and racially-charged remarks, and he delighted in striking action-hero poses. But there was nothing quite like Trump’s constant doubling down on norm-breaching and taboo-busting, no Schwarzeneggerian equivalent of the promises to ban Muslims and torture the relatives of terrorists …
… and even if there had been, the governorship of California is just not that powerful an office, whereas the presidency of the United States has been growing more powerful and less constrained by traditional norms with every passing administration. One need not pass judgment on individual presidents and their policies to recognize this trend, and to expect it to continue regardless of which party wins in 2016. In that context, a successful man-on-horseback candidacy, in which a president is elected on whose selling point is that he refuses to bow to convention or restraint, is precisely the kind of thing that could expose some of the underlying perils inherent in our system, and accelerate America’s march toward either Caesarism or crisis.
The best case scenario — for the republic, if not for public policy — might be that such a president would simply be a failure, an instant John Tyler-esque lame duck with both parties maneuvering to replace him from day one; the worst case is some sort of constitutional crisis, except with a president far less likely than Richard Nixon to bow to the Beltway consensus and give way.
Now probably a Trump presidency would fall somewhere in between those two possibilities; probably he really would be a little less over-the-top in office than he has been on the trail. (In order to win a general election, clearly, he would need to adapt and become, well, a little more politically correct.) But a Trumpian four years would almost certainly involve a significant degradation of the unwritten restraints on presidential conduct, an acceleration of royalist tendencies that may be built into our system but still deserve to be slowed down, and a blurring of reality-TV and political culture that takes us several leagues further along the road to President Camacho. I don’t think that the nebulous possibility of dealmaking should tempt liberals to welcome this kind of experiment; I don’t think the hope of a more working-class-friendly G.O.P. should tempt conservative reformers to learn to love it either. And the fact that recent presidents have already pushed the envelope in all kinds of troubling ways is not a “what’s the big deal” case for accepting Trumpism: Noting that George W. Bush approved waterboarding (while insisting that we don’t torture) or that Barack Obama launched wars without congressional approval (while denying they were real wars) is not a case for electing a candidate who’s gleeful in his promises to torture with abandon and rob other countries of their oil; rather, it’s a warning of what the office does to men who are restrained by norms and rules and the tribute that executive vice still has to pay to constitutional virtue.
The only case for actively embracing a figure like Trump, it seems to me, is if he were the only candidate willing to address a crisis or challenge that’s so existentially or absolutely important that it’s worth gambling our ragged republican norms to see it successfully resolved. This is the vibe I get from certain immigration restrictionists, from the Ann Coulter-Mickey Kaus cohort to, well, more insalubrious voices on the web. And frankly if America were in Germany’s position right now, and voting Trump was the only alternative to admitting 500,000-1,000,000 Middle Eastern migrants every year in perpetuity and/or tearing the country’s politics apart, I might find the case for the Donald a little more persuasive. But one can oppose Rubio-Schumer and other “comprehensive” immigration reforms (and I’ve written a lot of words in opposition) and still recognize 1) that the problems with America’s immigration policy do not pose an existential threat to the republic and 2) that Trump is about as likely to be a reliable immigration hawk in office as he is to be a reliable anything, which is to say not very. (He’ll boost deportations and build a wall in the first year, sure — but as he’s already promised, it’ll have the biggest, most luxurious door you’ve ever seen.)
Which is why it’s one thing for people dissatisfied with Conservatism, Inc. and the G.O.P. to be anti-anti-Trump — as I’ve been in the past, and will be again if he fades — and urge the party to take his challenge seriously and co-opt some of his gestures and ideas. But it’s quite another to be actively pro-Trump: Welcoming a would-be strongman because he’s pandering to you on a single issue rarely turns out well, and a vote for the rhinoceros is usually just a good way to end up gored.