The End of Reagan-Era Republicanism

As often noted on this blog, I grew up in a Republican family and was a GOP activist, serving on the Republican Party City Committee for Virginia Beach (I incorporated that body as Virginia State Corporation Commission records confirm) for eight years in the 1990's.  That political party is dead and gone and what now exists is party headed by the equivalent of a crime boss, racism is once again overt, bigotry. hate and division are the stock in trade of the GOP when it's not pursuing its reverse Robin Hood agenda, and accountability for those in power is gone.  Former Prince Andrew of the United Kingdom has been arrested in connection with Epstein related matter, yet here in the USA the Department of Justice instead of seeking to prosecute Epstein's coconspirators and accomplices is running a coverup operation to protect the Felon and other members of the elite. Looking back at Bill Clinton's impeachment, one has to wonder at the quaintness of a time when the GOP argued that personal, private conduct supposedly mattered. Now, corruption is on open view, the Felon's FCC chair is threatening media outlets for carrying news segments or shows that are not to the Felon's liking, and the Felon stands accused of sexual assault by numerous women.  The era of Reagan and arguably true conservatism is truly dead and gone as a very long piece with two Never Trumpers in The Atlantic underscores.  Here are highlights:

On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with a warning about [the Felon's] President Trump’s escalating efforts to bend American institutions to his will. David explains how episodes including the Justice Department’s attempted prosecution of members of Congress, the political pressure on the Federal Reserve, and the campaign-style appeals delivered at Fort Bragg represent a systematic attempt to erode the guardrails of American democracy.

Then, David is joined by Mona Charen, a contributor at The Bulwark and longtime conservative commentator. Together, they reflect on their shared political evolution—from their early days as Reagan-era conservatives to their break with today’s Republican Party. They discuss what they believe they got right and what they got wrong, how Trump transformed the conservative movement, and why the version of conservatism they once believed in may be gone.

One of the defining characteristics of the Trump years has been the determination of [the Felon] President [Donald] Trump and the people around him to turn into instruments of presidential will federal agencies that were always thought of as more or less independent and apolitical. The Department of Justice, well, it’s part of the administration, for sure, and the attorney general is an appointee of the president. But there had always been a belief that the actions of the Department of Justice, especially the criminal-enforcement actions, were not dictated for political reasons by the president.

Well, that idea has just gone up in smoke in the Trump years. This has been the most nakedly political Department of Justice perhaps since [President] Warren Harding’s in the 1920s and maybe the most in history because of the recent event where Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia—supposedly acting on her own but obviously acting at the command of Attorney General [Pam] Bondi, who was acting, obviously, at the command of Donald Trump—when the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia actually tried to indict six members of Congress, four of them members of the House of Representatives, two of them United States senators, for making a video urging U.S. military personnel to obey lawful orders and not to obey illegal orders, which you would think is something that would be as basic as telling the president of the United States not to take bribes. How could such a statement be controversial unless the president was taking bribes and unless the military was contemplating illegal orders? So they took offense for that reason, and they tried to prosecute members of Congress.

Now, the speech of members of Congress is protected not only by the First Amendment, like as yours and mine is, but by the speech and debate clause of the Constitution, which puts very severe limits on the ability of anybody to punish a member of Congress for something that the member of Congress said. And yet the Department of Justice tried just that. Happily, a grand jury completely rejected the charges—there was reportedly not a single member of the grand jury who took this seriously; it was unanimous rejection, an unparalleled humiliation for the Trump Justice Department. But the litigation of other attacks on those members of Congress continues.

At the same time, we saw in this past weekend a really shocking event, where President Trump traveled to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. . . . . President Trump appeared onstage with the Republican candidate for Senate and urged military personnel to vote for that candidate.

The military is, of course, the most important apolitical institution. Presidents address the military all the time, but they are not supposed to make political speeches, rally speeches, to ask the military to vote a certain way. That’s unheard of. That’s shocking. It’s the prelude to authoritarian rule.

Now, fortunately, again, as with the rejection of the attempt to indict members of Congress for what they said, the attempt to mobilize the troops as political actors, that also looks to have fallen flat. Reporters who were present noted that the soldiers, who maybe were warned by their commanding officers, made a point of clapping for the president’s appearance, clapping when the president talked about raising their pay—well, that’s traditional—but keeping very quiet when the president made his pitch that they should vote for the president’s preferred candidate for United States Senate. But in both cases, these are mere instances of failure, not stories of the successful pushback by institutions.

One of the most important independent institutions in the United States government is the Federal Reserve. . . . [the Felon] Trump has tried to put pressure on Powell to cut interest rates by bringing up all incredible things or by preparing to bring—it’s not filed yet—a criminal investigation of Powell for some series of nonsense charges. Now, the charges aren’t filed, but the [Felon] president has been huffing and puffing and the Department of Justice has been subpoenaing Powell as if these actions were ready.

But Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is outgoing, has said, I am not going to consider any nominee by the president, meritorious or not, unless we end these full prosecutions, these sinister prosecutions, that Trump has instituted against one Federal Reserve governor already, Lisa Cook, and is threatening against another, Jerome Powell, because they wouldn’t cut interest rates as fast as he wanted. Until these prosecutions are at an end, no consideration of any nominee whatsoever. And because of the closely balanced nature of the Senate and the rules of the Senate, Tillis may be able to make this stick.

So the punishment for Trump’s attempt to pervert the Federal Reserve may be getting more of what he doesn’t like, which would be a fit irony. But the best outcome: End this nonsense. Ideally, replace Bondi with an attorney general with some integrity, but failing even that, just end these shameless prosecutions, end these shameless acts of intimidation, drop the cases, close them, and then let the Senate consider the Warsh nomination on its merits, such as they are.

And I was a conservative columnist and speaker and all of that—pundit. But with the rise of Trump, I saw the destruction of pretty much everything that— . . . he was also the antithesis of what I regarded as conservative virtues. So for example, he encouraged people to believe that he personally, through force of will, could solve huge problems that face us as a country. I thought that was the antithesis of everything that conservatism believed; it was Caesarism.

And then, of course, all of his various heresies, like his attacks on free trade and his racism, which, again, I thought was the fulfillment of every fever dream of the left that thought conservatives were all racists underneath, that if you scratched them, you’d find that they were really racist. And here, along comes Trump, who confirms this. So I resented that as well.

[National Review editor] Jonah Goldberg put it best many, years ago where he had an article where he said it was watching people that he knew and believed he understood gradually become Trumpy was like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where people, they just were absorbed into this thing. And so I watched one after another, and for a long time, it was a subject of grief for me that I watched these people that I respected bend the knee. It was an ongoing process that took years, and during that time, unfortunately, I lost many friends.

Trump is now running roughshod over law and has allies aplenty in the MAGA movement who are ready—in his first term, he was trying to do it pretty much by himself; now he has eager allies. They’re destroying our system of justice and civil liberties in this country, and they’re destroying our international posture. And maybe I should mention, as that’s another thing I still believe in, I still believe the United States should be the leader of the free world, should have alliances, should stand up for countries that are invaded by aggressive neighbors, rather than finding common cause with their oppressors.

I hope that there will come a time when there’s enough recognition across party lines that we’ve gone off the rails that there will be an openness to a true accounting. There are people who are committing real crimes, including the president of the United States right now. The blowing up people in boats who you just suspect may be drug traffickers is a prime example. But it’s gonna take time and a huge amount of persuasion, and more than the persuasion, it’s gonna take more experience of the awfulness for the American people to get to the point where they’re ready for an accounting.

What Trump is doing to poison the social conversation here at home, to allow in these voices, to really mainstream people like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, that is deeply frightening. That’s where we live. (Laughs.) And it is opening the door to the kind of—there’s a lot of left-wing anti-Semitism, but frankly, the right-wing variety still scares me a little more because it is truly Nazi-like in its ferocity against Jews. . . . But the world has changed. The conservatism that I signed up for is completely gone. There’s no coherent set of ideas that is held by a movement, far less a party, now that is recognizable.