Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Opinion The Never Trump Delusion

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review and a contributing editor with Politico Magazine.

Donald Trump is a dominant presence in our public life, although one that his adversaries have trouble accepting and processing.

The Left is still looking for scapegoats for his 2016 election victory, and the coterie of his critics among writers and activists on the Right—loosely referred to as Never Trump—often sound like they are in denial.


I’m friends with many of these Never Trumpers, admire most of them, and have often been numbered among them.

It’s true—obviously—that Trump has significant downsides. It’d be nice in a he said/she said between a porn star and the president to be able to believe the president. It’d be good if the president weren’t repellent to suburban women and millennials, perhaps doing long-term damage to the GOP. It’d be much better if the president didn’t run his administration like a reality TV show run by a mercurial and cruel executive producer. A cult of personality is especially problematic when the personality is that of Donald J. Trump.

Indeed, most of the fears of how Trump would conduct himself in office have been realized (everyone would have thought Jeb Bush was crazy if he had predicted a President Trump would fire a high-level Cabinet official via Twitter, and not even using direct message). Yet it doesn’t follow that we should buy into the fantasy either that Trump is going to disappear into thin air, or that Trumpism can be blithely dismissed so the party can return to what some Never Trumpers believe constituted the status quo ante.

A serious primary challenge is not in the offing, if anything like the current situation obtains. Trump has an 80 percent approval among Republicans and an ironclad hold on the base. For that to change, it would probably take a smoking gun revelation in the Mueller probe or some other jaw-dropping scandal, plus a significant political betrayal (say, nominating a moderate Supreme Court justice).

And if Trump crashes and burns, it is doubtful the 2020 nomination would be worth having. If he somehow left office before January 2021, it would have meant there was some disaster that fractured and dispirited the party. If he were beaten in a primary, the GOP would likely be in a similar state and festooned with a deeply wounded incumbent president. Neither would bode well.

This means that Trump’s welfare is inextricably caught up with the party’s. Every point his approval rating ticks up means fewer House seats lost in the midterms. It’s quite possible that in 2020 his prospects will be the difference between Republicans controlling one or more of the elected branches in Washington, or unified Democratic control.

The hold Trump has on the party has a lot to do with his mesmerizing circus act and having the right enemies. But it’s more than that.

Surprisingly, he’s been loyal to the constituent parts of his coalition. On judges, social conservative and anti-abortion causes, and gun rights (with the occasional rhetorical wobble), he’s been solid. His desperation to get anything he can call a wall on the southern border speaks to his genuine desire to deliver on one of his signature promises. The same is true of his bout of tariffs this year.

The last two items speak to Trump’s heterodoxy, although the president isn’t as ideologically aberrant as Never Trumpers would have it.

Republicans have never won on the strength of a textbook libertarian economics denuded of any populist appeal, or an idealistic foreign policy devoid of a hard-headed focus on the national interest and a Jacksonian element (if the Iraq War had been sold at the inception as entirely a democratizing enterprise, it would never have gained sufficient political support).

In his 1965 New York mayoral campaign, Bill Buckley found his constituency among outer borough Archie Bunker-type voters, a preview of Reagan Democrats; if Donald Trump’s father, Fred, voted in that race it’s easy to imagine him pulling the lever for Buckley.

Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have been the powerful conservative figure he was in the late-1970s if he hadn’t pounded away at the premier populist-nationalism issue of the time, resistance to giving back the Panama Canal to Panama. “We bought it. We built it. We paid for it. It’s ours.”

Even George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis in 1992 not as a WASPy establishmentarian, but on the strength of the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance and crime, especially the emotive Willie Horton case.

We can argue about what role populism and nationalism should have in conservative politics, but that they have a place, and always have, is undeniable.

With Trump, the danger was that the populism would overwhelm the conservatism. But there have been no populist judges, regulation or tax policy. His presidency has been a crude shotgun marriage between the off-the-shelf GOP agenda and his own impulses on immigration and trade, when, ideally, there would have been a more fully thought-out and integrated conservative populism.

Trump is not seriously engaged enough to drive this himself, while congressional Republicans lack interest in immigration restriction and are opposed to Trump on trade. But make no mistake: On immigration and China trade, Trump is closer to the national Republican consensus than his conservative detractors.

A realistic attitude to Trump involves acknowledging both his flaws and how he usefully points the way beyond a tired Reagan nostalgia. By all means, criticize him when he’s wrong. But don’t pretend that he’s just going away, or that he’s a wild outlier in the contemporary GOP.