Andrew Sciascia: A Tale of Two Trumps

By A. J. Sciascia January 19, 2019 at 1:12pm

In my most recent Op-Ed, I took aim at Senator Mitt Romney for his audacious and outright cowardly Washington Post swipe at President Donald Trump.

Taking issue not only with the counterproductive nature of Romney’s grandstanding but also with his clear attempt to play the American people for fools, the piece painted an honest picture of Romney’s political history:

From his failed 1994 Senate campaign to the present day, Romney has never been a traditional conservative. He has been an opportunist of ever-changing ideals and values, doing only what was expedient.

Romney’s hit-piece was the thinly-veiled attempt of a self-conscious man to distance himself from his unscrupulous past by slandering one of higher status and much lesser popularity.

In closing I had said, “President Trump was not the man most ardent conservatives initially chose, but he has proven himself to be a man of stronger convictions, deeper loyalties and surer values in just two years than Romney has in his entire political career.”

As was to be expected, ardent Trump supporters reached out with high praises. Leftists, now falling head-over-heels for Romney, raved angrily that I would not know the measure of character, achievement or a respectable conservative if I was staring it in the face.

What I had not expected, however, was just how contentious a number of conservative readers would find the assertion.

A handful of right-wingers, apparently more principled than myself, came out of the woodwork referring to the piece as Trump-Republican tripe. These readers held that President Trump was doing irreparable damage to conservative values and interests in the United States and that anyone who believed differently had been deceived.

The truth, however, is quite the contrary.

Those among us who still believe that President Trump is not “one of us,” or that he has all but hamstrung the conservative movement, are the same people who fall for close-up magic — they simply are not paying close enough attention.

I Was #NeverTrump

Is this to say that I was not, like many devout conservatives, entirely beside myself at the close of the 2016 Republican National Convention?

Absolutely not.

A young, idealistic conservative preparing to cast my first ballot, I had held out hope that a true constitutionalist, well-aligned with my core values would secure the nomination; and eventually the presidency.

As November inched closer, a fractured Republican party seemed doomed to watch as the new base and the displaced establishment, unwilling to reconcile their differences, put on a painful revival of the election of 1964 — only Trump was twice as unapologetic as Goldwater and 100 times more polarizing.

Like the Ben Shapiros and Jonah Goldbergs of the world, I would have no part of it. I was #NeverTrump

“Of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing”

It was not until Nov. 7, 2016 — the eve of the election — that my will to blank the ballot was truly tested.

Convinced to attend one of Trump’s final rallies of the campaign, I found myself in a packed auditorium in Manchester, New Hampshire, shaken by the words of then-Governor Mike Pence.

If this man who enthusiastically introduced himself as “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order” could put differences aside and proudly support Donald Trump, even after the disgusting “Access Hollywood” tape, what was stopping me?

The next morning, I stepped into the booth and reluctantly voted a straight ticket.

And truth be told, it was not until very recently that I began taking the same amount of pride in my vote as then-Governor Pence had taken in stumping for Trump in 2016.

Campaign Trump was a political outsider with whom red-blooded conservatives shared next to nothing in the way of policy and a petty, narcissistic adulterer to boot. He was a populist who had hijacked the Republican platform by reaping a grand crop of middle-American discontent so thoughtlessly sown by the neoconservative establishment of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Trump’s campaign persona has reared its ugly head far more times during this administration than I could ever find acceptable. Just this past weekend he made an appearance when the president went on a lengthy Twitter tear in the wee hours of the night.

But that monstrous version of Trump rarely, if ever, bleeds into the way the 45th president of the United States governs. Campaign Trump is a figure that may best be described by Shakespeare’s Macbeth — “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

A more discriminating audience — one willing and able to push aside the curtain of controversy that is Campaign Trump — is certain to find another, far more conservative, Trump pulling the strings.

Mr. Conservative

Now, I am not the type to claim that Donald Trump has been methodically poring over a three-dimensional chess board since the beginning. The claim is beyond preposterous.

But whether by design or simply dumb luck, the president has benefitted from the controversy he inevitably creates each time he logs into Twitter or gets in front of a microphone in the same way that a talented close-up magician benefits from misdirection.

While the left-wing media has hyper-focused on every controversial thing Trump has said or done, the president has quietly instituted an agenda more conservative than we on the right could ever have dreamed.

In just two years, America has seen extensive tax cuts, record economic development and workforce participation, decreased government regulation, distance from toxic international deliberative bodies, a presidential promise to veto any legislation further endangering the unborn and two originalist judges elevated to the Supreme Court.

If all this is not enough evidence to conclusively support President Trump’s record of conservative governance, look only to the way he conducted himself during Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation proceedings.

Where Republicans of old would have done what was expedient and pulled the nomination for the sake of an easier confirmation battle, Trump doubled down and stood firmly behind a man accused, without a shred of evidence, of the most heinous crimes imaginable.

In that one moment, Trump showcased more character and more loyalty to the values American conservatives hold sacred than most men do in a lifetime.

That Donald J. Trump has, in three short years, presented conservatives with two contradictory personas is without question. But, so long as great men are remembered for their achievements, Campaign Trump is all but certain to fall in the footnotes of a history that may well present the 45th president as Mr. Conservative.

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