Suicide by Trump

Here is the narrative that so many on the right – including many of my fellow conservative Christians – have, over the last few years, talked themselves into believing:

Yes, Donald Trump is a man of low moral character, but sometimes such a man is precisely what you need in order to get the job done.  And Trump has done more to advance our cause than any previous leader on the American right.  Indeed, he will likely take his place among the great men of history, one who saved the United States and the West itself from the mortal dangers threatening them from within and without.  In fact, it may not be too much to say that divine providence has sent him to us for this purpose.  After all, scripture tells us that God often works through greatly flawed men, as in the case of Samson, or King David.

Well, if I can speak with a crude frankness of the kind that delights the president’s admirers, this is a load of cringe-makingly delusional horseshit to rival the idiocies of the woke left.  And if one good thing comes out of the catastrophe of this week’s election, it will be that Trump’s supporters at long last see this and come back to reality.  Unfortunately, the reality is that, not only is Trump no savior of the right, but we will be lucky if he has not destroyed it.  The right’s gamble on a second Trump administration may prove to have been politically suicidal.

As Florida governor Ron DeSantis has grimly warned, the Democrats’ crushing victory on Tuesday could be “close to an extinction-level event” for the Republican Party.  In his judgment, “considering such a massive House margin, it is very unlikely Republicans will recapture the Congress in 2028,” and they “might not have a shot at Senate control until 2032.”  The party lost Senate seats in once reliably red states such as Kansas, South Carolina, Ohio and Iowa.  Even the GOP’s once seemingly invincible stronghold of Texas has now gone Democratic from top to bottom.  Democrats now also control most governorships.

In 2024, the GOP had dramatically increased its share of the youth vote and the minority vote, gains essential to its remaining competitive in the long term.  But now those gains have been lost, and since these voters are likely to feel burned by their brief flirtation with the GOP, it is hard to see how they can be recovered.  With Democratic control of the Senate, even a Republican president will be unlikely to be able to appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court to replace the aging Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas if they were to retire or die in the next few years.  And of course, there is now a high probability that the GOP will lose the presidency in any case in 2028.

And all of this happened despite the fact that the Democrats themselves remain extremely unpopular.  That is how low Trump has brought the GOP in just the two years since the party seemed to have swept all before it.

Affordability, corruption, and war

The immediate causes of voter anger are the affordability crisis and the policies that have exacerbated it, together with the appalling level of corruption associated with the Trump administration.  A large majority of voters think Trump’s trade policy has hurt the economy, and it was after the so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs were announced that his approval rating began to sink.  More damaging still has been the highly unpopular Iran war, which has dramatically driven up not only fuel prices but (since those prices have a ripple effect on everything else) the cost of living in general. 

Nor is it merely that voters dislike the policies themselves.  It’s that Trump has betrayed them, by doing exactly the opposite of what he promised he would do.  Fatigue over the ever increasing cost of living was the main reason voters ousted the Democrats in 2024 and decided to give Trump another chance.  Trump said he would deal with the problem beginning on day one, but instead he has with stubborn persistence pursued tariff measures and a war that were certain to make things even worse.  Adding insult to this injury, he repeatedly dismissed the whole affordability issue as a “hoax,” arrogantly expecting voters to ignore what their own eyes were telling them every time they visited a grocery store or a fast food restaurant.  And to rub it in further, his family and political allies have cashed in while the rest of the country suffers.  What is surprising is not that so many of his voters turned against him, but that they didn’t show up at the polls with pitchforks.

Trump also promised to keep the U.S. out of another forever war in the Middle East, but instead has embroiled us in a quagmire in Iran with no end in sight.  He has alleged that George W. Bush lied the country into the war in Iraq, and said that Bush ought to have been impeached for doing so.  But Trump himself repeatedly tells lies about the Iran war that are so preposterous that none but his most brain-dead devotees could possibly believe them – claiming, for example, that the U.S. has destroyed Iran’s military (which nevertheless somehow still keeps fighting), that the U.S. controls the strait of Hormuz (which we nevertheless somehow have to keep begging Iran to open), or that we have already won the war (which nevertheless somehow still drags on).  At the start of the war, Trump asserted, without evidence, that Iran was “two weeks” away from having a nuclear weapon – despite the fact that U.S intelligence services were agreed that Iran was not developing such a weapon, and despite the fact that the White House had just a few months earlier insisted that “Iran’s nuclear facilities have been obliterated – and suggestions otherwise are fake news.”

Nor is it just that these policies are unpopular, ill-advised, and defended in a dishonest way.  They are also illegal and immoral.  The Iran war is manifestly unconstitutional, and clearly violates the conditions of just war doctrine.  As the Supreme Court ruled, Trump clearly exceeded his authority as president in imposing his draconian tariff policies.  And it is seriously wrong to impose extra economic burdens on working families who are already struggling when there is no overriding necessity to do so, especially when you promised to bring them relief.  Clearly, there was no such necessity.  Iran was not an imminent threat to the United States, and the conflict is no less a “war of choice” than the Iraq war was.  The tariff policy, even if it had been carefully thought out – which it was not – could have had good effects only in the distant future, whereas the harm to working families caused by the affordability crisis is immediate.  Trump claims to represent economic populism and an America First foreign policy, but his utter lack of concern about high prices is contrary to the former and his war in Iran is contrary to the latter.

Frivolous, incompetent, and immoral

In the wake of Tuesday’s electoral disaster, many of Trump’s supporters (though, depressingly, far from all) are at long last willing to admit that he was wrong about the affordability crisis and the war.  But they routinely assure us that, in general, his second administration has been a success and accomplished great things.  The reality, though, is that it has accomplished very little of substance, has done much that is pointless at best or seriously immoral at worst, and has also done enormous damage even to the good causes it has tried to further.

To be sure, Trump did end the chaos at the border and has put DEI and other woke foolishness on the defensive.  That is important, and so are smaller things like reinstituting the Mexico City policy that blocks the use of federal funds for the promotion of abortion by NGOs.  But these measures can easily be undone by a future Democratic president.  There is little in the way of real achievements beyond these, especially achievements that would be hard to undo.

Note first that an enormous amount of time and energy has been wasted on initiatives and controversies that do little or no good but are pursued simply to stroke Trump’s gargantuan ego – the fight to rename the Kennedy Center in his honor, proposing unnecessary and expensive monuments and renovations, redecorating the White House with tacky bric-a-brac and vulgar displays that tout Trump’s alleged achievements and badmouth his predecessors, needlessly turning the renovation of the Reflecting Pool into a partisan issue, renaming bodies of water, and so on.  With so much of substance that needs to be done, and done in the short time afforded by election cycles, this is tantamount to Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

The more important things Trump has done he has largely done through executive orders that a future left-wing president can reverse, rather than through the process of working with Congress to craft and pass legislation, which is much harder but also achieves much more durable policy outcomes.  Like so many of Trump’s policy failings, this reflects his character flaws, in particular his short attention span and narcissistic preference for autocratic over cooperative action.  For two years he had a GOP Congress reluctant to resist his will, with which he could have built a legislative legacy, and he wasted the opportunity.

His narcissism has also led him to appoint people notable more for their sycophancy than for qualifications or competence, which has ensured that policy is implemented badly.  The case of Kristi Noem is one notorious example, and played a role in the backlash against Trump’s immigration policies – which have in any event done little to reverse the massive influx of illegal immigrants that occurred during the Biden administration.  By some estimates, over 6 million people entered the country illegally under Biden, but the Trump administration has deported less than a million.

There is also Trump’s lack of any consistent principle, which leads to policy decisions that work at cross-purposes.  DOGE was a good idea in theory, but implemented in a ham-fisted manner.  What is worse, though, is that it was all for naught, because the little savings that it yielded were massively offset by the approximately $4 trillion addition to the national debt resulting from Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill.”  Here too Trump has done the opposite of what he said he would do. 

Further relevant character flaws include a taste for stunts over serious policy proposals, and an overestimation of his own knowledge and competence.  Both played a role in the Liberation Day tariff scheme, the details of which exhibited no rhyme or reason and changed whenever Trump’s whims changed.  Even someone who thinks (as I do) that tariffs can, when targeted and well thought out, be a useful tool of economic policy, should have been alarmed by Trump’s actions.  For they have almost certainly discredited the very idea of tariffs in the public mind for the foreseeable future.

As to foreign policy, Trump is right to insist that our NATO allies pay more for their own defense, and that the United States should not let itself get drawn into conflicts like the one between Russia and Ukraine to an extent that is contrary to our own interests.  But to these reasonable points he has annexed unreasonable and indeed gravely immoral words and actions.  While one can criticize U.S. and NATO policy in the lead-up to the invasion of Ukraine, the fact remains that Russia is the aggressor and its actions are in no way defensible by the criteria of just war doctrine.  For the Trump administration to blame Zelensky for the war and characterize Putin as a “humanitarian” is outrageous.  Trump has also repeatedly needlessly antagonized our friends and thereby damaged our alliances – then complained when, to no reasonable person’s surprise, they proved reluctant to assist us in our conflict in Iran.  In the case of Greenland, he applied gravely immoral pressure tactics to get his way.

Trump’s military action in Venezuela was another violation of just war conditions, and in the months since it has become increasingly clear that the motivation had little to do with liberating the Venezuelan people and primarily to do with strong-arming the Venezuelan government to cede oil rights to the U.S.  This is simply extortion, as immoral when nations do it as when individuals do it.  Whereas George W. Bush was falsely accused by his critics of fighting a “war for oil,” Trump has been shockingly frank about doing exactly that himself.

In general, while the Trump administration is right to resist the globalist consensus, it has promoted in its place the opposite extreme error of a thuggish jingoism and mercantilism.  This second error is, no less than the first, at odds with the natural law tradition’s middle ground position of insisting on solidarity between sovereign nations, which should neither be absorbed into a one-world blob nor try to lord it over one another in a Hobbesian state of nature.  By championing a chauvinistic distortion of love of country, the Trump administration has done grave harm to the cause of true patriotism and provided aid and comfort to globalists, who will falsely argue that Trump’s excesses are the inevitable cost of abandoning their agenda.

A similar thuggishness has characterized Trump’s domestic policy.  Trump is right to complain of the lawfare that Democrats deployed against him.  But instead of working to de-politicize the law, he has chosen to politicize it in a different direction, pursuing vindictive and frivolous actions against political enemies such as James Comey, Jerome Powell, and Cassidy Hutchinson.  This is both immoral and politically foolish.  While there are of course those on the left who would deploy lawfare themselves if they had the chance, the thing to do is to discredit and marginalize them, by keeping the law scrupulously depoliticized and thereby appealing to voters who want the death spiral of partisan recrimination to stop.  That is the politically prudent approach, as well as the just one.

Both in its pursuit of lawfare and its attempts to push executive power beyond its proper constitutional limits, the Trump administration has gravely endangered the rule of law.  This is contrary to the health of the polity and flatly immoral, because the natural law enjoins us to obey human law when it is consistent with the natural law.  It is also self-defeating, because it tends to normalize abuses that will thereby become easier for the left to deploy against the right when the left is in power.

Too many conservative Christians, despite lamenting the general moral decay of modern society, have been strangely unconcerned about these grave corruptions of political morality.  They appear to have fallen into what Elizabeth Anscombe called the “consequentialist” mentality of rationalizing bad actions on the grounds that they will yield desired results – precisely what St. Paul condemned as the attitude that we may do evil that good may come of it (Romans 3:8).  Where once they reluctantly put up with Trump’s crude division of the world into winners and losers, many of them now seem to embrace it, and want at all costs to be on the winning side and to enjoy payback against political foes who for so long had the upper hand.

The most shocking manifestation of this political amorality is the way so many of Trump’s Christian supporters have turned a blind eye to his betrayals of the pro-life cause.  Before the 2024 election, Trump rammed through a GOP party platform that removed most of its traditional pro-life language.  He actively opposed state-level measures to restrict abortion.  He pledged to support IVF, a process which results in the destruction of more embryos than abortion does.  He pledged to keep abortion pills accessible, even though they are responsible for the majority of abortions.  And during the two years since he was elected, he has kept that promise.  He has said that pro-lifers need to be more “flexible” about the Hyde Amendment, which blocks most federal funding of abortions. 

As Peter Laffin has argued, Trump has given us “the most anti-life Republican administration in history.”  He has essentially made the GOP into a second, less extreme pro-choice party.  The standard retort of the president’s defenders is to say that he had to do this, because the pro-life position is too politically unpopular today to try to advance.  But there are two problems with this response.  The first is that Trump and his supporters have been quite willing to pursue other policies despite their unpopularity, such as the Iran war and tariffs.  That they have been willing to swim against the tide on these other issues, but not where protection of the unborn is concerned, reveals where their true priorities lie.

The second problem is that it is one thing to tell pro-lifers that they cannot expect to gain much in the way of new ground, but quite another to demand of them that they give up ground they already had.  And that is exactly what Trump wants them to do.  The pro-life movement once had one of the two major political parties officially committed to its basic principle that “the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed.”  Now it no longer does.  Out of the one side of his mouth, Trump emphasizes to pro-lifers that they now have the freedom to pursue their cause at the state level.  But when they actually tried to do so in 2024, he actively opposed their efforts.  There used to be a restriction on abortion pills that required those using them to get them in person rather than through the mail.  The Biden administration lifted this restriction, and the Trump administration has not restored it.  Trump’s allowing abortion pills to be sent through the mail across state lines is another move that undermines state-level attempts to restrict abortion.

In many ways, then, Trump has not only failed to deliver much in the way of substantive and lasting achievements, but has governed in a manner contrary to fundamental moral principles to which conservative Christians and others on the right are committed, or used to be committed.  To the extent that they have acquiesced to this, they have sold their moral heritage for a mess of pottage.

The personality cult

It’s not just their moral integrity that the most fervent of Trump’s supporters have compromised.  It’s their intellectual integrity too.  Again and again, they will vehemently oppose policies until Trump comes to adopt them.  Then, suddenly they are enthusiastically in favor of them, with no evident awareness of the obvious self-contradiction.

Hence, they will condemn state-owned enterprises and government handouts as “socialist” – until Trump has the federal government buy stakes in private companies, and promises $5000 to every American if the GOP wins the midterm election.  They will shrilly demand that the Epstein files be released, and accuse the Democrats of covering them up.  Then, when Trump makes it clear that he wants the issue to be dropped, they will shrilly demand that people stop talking about the Epstein files, and condemn the Democrats for wanting them released.  They accuse previous Republican leaders of being RINOs for not being more aggressive against abortion.  But when Trump betrays them on abortion, they excuse this as a necessary concession to political reality.  They loudly insist they will never again be fooled into supporting a military quagmire in the Middle East, then cheer on Trump as he gets us into a military quagmire in the Middle East.  They are appalled at corruption under Biden but shrug at corruption under Trump.  They will bitterly accuse Bush of lying about Iraq and complain that Obama lied about his Affordable Care Act, but positively delight in the stream of obvious bullshit that pours forth from Trump every day.  They are outraged by a blasphemous parody of the Last Supper at the Paris Olympics, but forgiving when Trump blasphemously portrays himself as Christ.  When Trump says the most awful things about others (such as badmouthing Rob Reiner the day after he was murdered by his own son), they will dismiss all criticism of his remarks as pearl clutching over mere “mean tweets.”  But they are in high dudgeon when anyone dares to mock Trump.  And so on, and on and on.

Trump alone is said by them to have the courage to say what previous leaders on the right would not say, and the will to do what previous leaders would not do.  He is the “man in the arena,” bravely fighting for us while others only ever snipe from the sidelines.  That he survived several assassination attempts is treated as evidence of divine protection.  No matter how many lies he tells or how many times he violates the rule of law, his supporters will pretend that the worst one could say about him is that he’s a little rough around the edges, and insist that critics are just being unreasonably snobbish.  Indeed, criticism of Trump, no matter how carefully reasoned, is routinely dismissed as “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” revealing a defect in the critic rather than any fault in Trump.  Evidence that shows something Trump has said to be false is dismissed as “fake news.”  When events don’t go the way Trump says they will go or ought to go, conspiracies are posited to explain the failure – it was a Democrat plot, or a RINO betrayal, or the machinations of the Deep State.  Those who break with Trump, no matter how close they were to him or how loyal to the causes he has championed, are bitterly condemned as traitors, never to be listened to again.  

Naturally, not everyone who voted for Trump is like this.  But that the mentality is extremely common is obvious to anyone who has followed recent U.S. politics.  Nothing like this cult of personality has surrounded any other political figure in living memory.  Reagan and Obama inspired a devotion in their followers that could sometimes be excessive and uncritical, but it did not reach the level of fanaticism and imperviousness to reason that characterizes the hard core of MAGA.  The closest recent parallel is to be found, not in another personality cult, but in the woke ideological cult that looks at the world through its own, very different fanatical lens.  Indeed, part of the reason for the Trump cult’s glue-like attachment to him is that he has successfully sold himself as the only bulwark we have against the woke cult.  The one fanaticism has spawned an equal and opposite fanaticism.

This mindset is gravely disordered in itself, and verges on idolatry in those who have come to think of Trump as some sort of divine instrument, opposition to whom is diabolical.  It is also politically suicidal.  The hard core of MAGA has for two years lived in a fantasy world in which Trump won the 2024 election in a “landslide” and had a mandate for a radical realignment that will usher in a “Golden Age.”  They could not see what was blindingly obvious to everyone outside the cult – that the actual, mundane reality is that he won a close election against an extremely weak candidate, mainly because voters wanted lower prices.  And these voters were furious at him for failing to deliver and would punish him for it in the midterms.  The cult could not believe this, dismissing the evidence as “fake polls” and convinced that the only way the Democrats could possibly win was through election fraud.  Though Trump’s admirers like to think of themselves as political realists who alone know what it takes to win, the personality cult’s detachment from reality in fact greased the skids for its electoral defeat.

Pride goes before a fall

There is a single thread unifying all of the problems set out above, and it is Trump’s unparalleled, indeed preternatural, degree of egomania.  The man is a black hole of narcissism, which most people either rocket away from in disgust, or get sucked into until they begin to share in his worship of himself.  His followers routinely treat this as a mere foible, and glibly note that, after all, politicians tend to have large egos.  But this is like saying that there is nothing remarkable about Hugh Hefner, since all men have libidos. 

The reality is that Trump is to the deadly sin of pride what Hefner is to the deadly sin of lust, or what Bernie Madoff is to the deadly sin of greed.  And the concomitant of pride is vainglory, which is the vice of habitually seeking to call attention to one’s own imagined excellence.  In St. Thomas Aquinas’s analysis of these sins, the marks of a prideful and vainglorious man are an unwillingness to submit himself to any higher authority (which would include prevailing laws and norms); habitual braggadocio and bombastic speech; exaggeration and lying about his achievements; being obnoxiously quarrelsome; stubborn attachment to his own opinions in the face of all evidence and superior counterarguments; and a taste for doing things that are shocking and unexpected. 

This is essentially a description of Trump’s entire public life.  And it is the root of all of the Trump administration’s failures of governance – the preference for loyal sycophants over men of competence, the obsession with vanity projects to the detriment of the public good, the relentless bullshitting, the persistent flouting of moral norms and legal constraints, the audacious but poorly thought out policy decisions, the vindictiveness, the self-serving corruption, the willingness to abandon any cause when it is in Trump’s self-interest to do so, and so on.

Nor is Trump shy about his domination by the vices of pride and vainglory.  As I showed in a previous article, he has for decades frankly and consistently acknowledged that what he is all about is magnifying himself, dominating others, and screwing over those who oppose him or even merely resist his demand that they aid him in his ambitions.  It doesn’t go any deeper than that.  There is no Great Man of History riding in on horseback to save the West, no four-dimensional chess moves lying behind his erratic actions and betrayals.  There is only the grubby, self-dealing con game of a glorified used car salesman.  The MAGA faithful have deluded themselves that “He is fighting for us!” but the reality is that he only ever fights for himself.  They think they are using him to advance their causes, but in reality he is using them to advance his own.  That’s all.

Pride is, in Christian theology, the most diabolical of sins and the root of all other sin.  In the classical tradition of political thought from Plato onward, narcissistic self-absorption is the characteristic vice of the tyrant.  It is astounding that so many Christians, and so many conservatives formed in the tradition of classical political thought, could have talked themselves into believing that being utterly dominated by such vice is a tolerable defect in a leader.  It is a deception worthy of Screwtape.  But that is where we are.  The classical tradition warns that hubris invites nemesis, and scripture warns that “pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18).  Tuesday’s election results were a dramatic confirmation of these warnings.  And they may portend even greater calamity for the right if it does not wake up from the spell this man has cast over it.