The Intelligent Conservative’s Case for Trump

You’re a conservative and a Republican, but (in the phrase of the elder George Bush) you’re “not a nut about it.”

You may suspect some degree of media collusion with the Clinton campaign in the timing of the Access Hollywood tapes. Perhaps applying the legal term “sexual assault” to all of Trump’s boorish ogling and clumsy advances seems to you absurdly over-dramatic. But you have no illusions about Trump the man or candidate: You can see he is ignorant, undisciplined, vain, and dishonest—a loudmouth, a bully, and a grifter. You didn’t support him in the primaries. It would not break your heart if a medical event forced him to step aside in favor of Governor Pence as early as imaginable in his first term.

But …

You remember what elections do. Elections choose governments, and then empower those governments to do certain things and refrain from doing other things. A President Trump will do more of what you want done than a President Hillary Clinton will; and do fewer of the things you wish not to be done. A President Trump will try to lower taxes. A President Hillary Clinton will try to raise them. Trump will lighten financial and environmental regulation. Hillary Clinton will tighten it. Trump will direct government spending in ways you are likely to benefit from. Hillary Clinton will try to redirect money away from you to benefit her supporters instead. You don’t blame the young and the urban from voting to move money from your pocketbook to theirs. But aren’t you equally entitled to vote to protect what you earned and created for yourself and your family? It’s not as if you aren’t paying a lot of taxes already—and seeing much of it vanish God knows where, and to enrich God knows who.

At least for the first two years, President Trump will face a Republican Congress. You have no illusions about that either. You know that Trump cares nothing about conservatism or the Republican Party. He’s poisoned his relationship with the House and Senate leadership. However, he’ll sign their bills! It won’t be dignified. There will be scandals. It’ll never be like Reagan again. But then, you’ll never be 25 again. This is good enough for now.

And after all, there is one thing at least you can be sure President Trump will do. He’ll enforce the immigration laws. Even as the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico subsides, the flow from Central America is quickening. Populations are exploding down there: Guatemala’s population has more than doubled since 1980. A laborer in the countryside earns less than $200 a month, if he can find work at all: Its economy’s been stagnant for more than a decade.

Beyond our hemisphere, the vast and fast-growing populations of the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa are on the move, potentially the biggest migration in the history of humanity. How many millions of them should settle here? And how will America change as it’s repeopled? If anybody’s breaking the rules of democracy here, it’s your opponents, who are importing millions of new voters because they know that if the choice were left only to those Americans born in this country, the Democrats would never be trusted to govern it.