How Trump Killed Conservatism

The “Make America Great Again” movement is the beating heart of the GOP, the dominant political party in America—which makes MAGA the most important political movement in the world. And that is why some recent developments within the MAGA movement are so disquieting.

Earlier this month, the College Republicans of America, one of oldest youth organizations affiliated with the Republican Party, hired Kai Schwemmer as the group’s political director. Schwemmer has past ties to the white supremacist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes and his Groyper movement, a loose network of white-nationalist activists and internet trolls who gravitate around online influencers, primarily Fuentes.

College Republicans of America President Martin Bertao defended the hire on X, writing that he had reflected on the decision and chose “to apologize … to absolutely NOBODY,” adding, “CRA will never back down to the WOKE mob!” For his part, Schwemmer told Fox News Digital that he and the College Republicans are “done feeding into the ‘eat your own’ cancel culture paradigm of division that only seeks to advantage the left.” Schwemmer is hardly an isolated case. Last year, Politico reported on leaked Telegram chats spanning seven months from leaders of Young Republican chapters in several states—chairs, vice chairs, and committee members exchanging racist and anti-Semitic messages. While some figures in the GOP criticized the comments, Vice President Vance came to the defense of the Young Republicans, saying that the “reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys.” Vance added, “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, that’s what kids do.” Several of the worst offenders were in their 30s. A few months later the Miami Herald revealed that leaked chats from a Republican group at Florida International University showed participants using racial slurs, repeatedly expressing a desire to violently attack Black people, and describing women as “whores.” The text messages contained jokes about gas chambers, slavery, and rape. There was also plenty of praise for Adolf Hitler. Such praise appeared so regularly that at one point, the group was renamed “Nazi Heaven.” These incidents are evidence of the normalization of white-supremacist and neo-Nazi rhetoric among younger Republican activists. Among the older generations, a ferocious, intra-MAGA civil war is being waged between high-profile media and political personalities, including people such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Matt Walsh on one side and Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin on the other. There’s also Laura Loomer versus Elon Musk, and Musk versus Steve Bannon, and Bannon versus Dinesh D’Souza, and D’Souza versus Carlson. On and on it goes, with no end in sight. The most recent bitter recriminations center on the Iran war and Israel. Consider an exchange between two former friends and Fox News colleagues, Mark Levin and Megyn Kelly. Levin, a popular radio-talk-show host who strongly supports both the Iran war and Israel, took to social media last Sunday to describe Kelly, a critic of both the war and of Israel, as an “emotionally unhinged, lewd, and petulant wreck” who is “utterly toxic.” Kelly, who hosts one of the most-listened-to podcasts in America, responded by calling him “Micropenis Mark Levin,” and by claiming, “He tweets about me obsessively in the crudest, nastiest terms possible. Literally more than some stalkers I’ve had arrested. He doesn’t like it when women like me fight back. Bc of his micropenis.” Levin soon fired back. “Busy Sunday morning for Megyn Kelly,” he wrote. “She wakes up and has ‘micropenis’ on her mind. Suffice to say, if it talks like a harlot, and posts like a harlot, it’s … well, you know the rest. Shalom!” Then Donald Trump weighed in, posting a defense of Levin on Truth Social, calling him “a truly Great American Patriot” who is “far smarter than those who criticize him.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, however, sided with Kelly. “I wholeheartedly support Megyn Kelly telling the world that Mark Levin has a micropenis,” she wrote. “It’s the most deserved insult and I don’t care if it’s vulgar.” The MAGA movement, like other radical political movements before it, is eating its own. In January 2016 I was a lifelong Republican, having served in the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations. Yet that month I wrote in The New York Times that Republicans should not vote for Trump under any circumstances, even if his opponent was Hillary Clinton. I described him as a “virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness.” But I went beyond that. Trump’s nomination, I said, would threaten the future of the Republican Party, because although Clinton might defeat it at the polls, only Trump could redefine it. I added this:

Mr. Trump’s presence in the 2016 race has already had pernicious effects, but they’re nothing compared with what would happen if he were the Republican standard-bearer. The nominee, after all, is the leader of the party; he gives it shape and definition. If Mr. Trump heads the Republican Party, it will no longer be a conservative party; it will be an angry, bigoted, populist one. Mr. Trump would represent a dramatic break with and a fundamental assault on the party’s best traditions.

What we have seen in the decade since is the realization of those worst fears. To be clear, the MAGA movement’s rancidity isn’t due to only Trump. The impulses now on display within MAGA existed long before he entered politics. But those impulses were, for the most part, confined to the fringes. Republican presidents and other political leaders did what they could to keep it that way. But from the moment Trump announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015, he sought to cultivate and encourage the ugliest passions within the GOP, dousing the embers of hate with kerosene. Among Trump’s most consequential legacies has been his deformation of the temperament and disposition of virtually the entire Republican Party. It has been a remarkable shift to observe: The very qualities that early on made Republicans, including evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, uneasy about Trump are those they have since come to accept and embrace. He rewired their moral circuitry. I don’t mean to suggest the Republican Party pre-Trump was anything close to perfect. Like any political party, it had weaknesses, and its record was mixed. It was hardly the ideal embodiment of conservatism; no political party could be. But under Trump, the GOP has become a profoundly different, and a far more malicious, party. Within the Republican Party, from top to bottom, Trump has made cruelty and transgressiveness cool. And in the process, he killed American conservatism. Trump has overturned many long-standing public-policy commitments of conservatives—supporting free trade, reforming entitlements, supporting foreign assistance to save lives and advance American interests, standing by NATO, and standing against Russian oppression at home and aggression abroad. But the deeper and more lasting damage he has done is to conservatism as a sensibility. One of the most important figures in the history of conservatism is the 18th-century Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, his most famous work, Burke warned about the dangers of a revolutionary zeal aimed at completely redesigning a civilization. Burke rightly feared it would unleash destructive passions and horrifying violence. He believed reason alone was not ennobling. He warned, too, that if “the decent drapery of life” was torn off, barbarism would follow.   A few years later, in Letters on a Regicide Peace, Burke wrote, “Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.”

Burke believed that manners and mores, customs and norms, codes of conduct, and beauty itself made life more humane. Burke had his critics, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, who believed that Burke’s argument on behalf of the beauty of tradition sought to make oppression and inequality tolerable. But Burke’s key insight was that stripping civilizations of their beauty and sense of reverence would lead to spiritual impoverishment and, eventually, to terror. And like his contemporary Adam Smith, Burke believed that the cultivation of human sympathy, including the capacity to feel the pain of others, was essential to a good society. A century and a half after Burke, the influential British philosopher Michael Oakeshott, in his essay “On Being Conservative,” argued that conservatism “was not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition.” To Oakeshott, to be conservative is to be inclined to think and behave in a certain manner. The conservative disposition, Oakeshott said, “breeds attachment and affection.” “The man of this disposition,” he wrote, “understands it to be the business of a government not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed upon, but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down. And all this, not because passion is vice and moderation virtue, but because moderation is indispensable if passionate men are to escape being locked in an encounter of mutual frustration.”    British conservatism is somewhat different than American conservatism; the latter has traditionally been somewhat more forward-leaning, a bit more rights-based and ideological, and focused more on the individual as opposed to the community. But there has been a lot of overlap, including respect for tradition and order, the importance of institutions, the rule of law, and the complexity of human society, along with a wariness of radical change. And both recognize the importance of the education of character, the cultivation of decency, and the taming of the dark passions. MAGA is not just antithetical to conservatism; it is at war with it.

It’s important to acknowledge that many rank-and-file MAGA voters haven’t knowingly rejected the conservatism I’m describing; they voted for Trump and attached themselves to the MAGA movement for a variety of reasons, including economic dislocation and feelings of cultural displacement. But it long ago became clear what they signed up for. At the core of the MAGA project and Trumpism is disruption and destruction, the delegitimization and razing of institutions, and the brutalization of opponents. Its leader, the president, abuses power, hurts the innocent, and mocks the dead before their families have even begun to grieve.   On Saturday, minutes after the death of Robert Mueller was reported, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!” This comes 15 weeks after Trump lashed out at the Hollywood actor and director Rob Reiner—“I wasn’t a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned”—after Reiner and his wife were stabbed to death in their home. The MAGA ethic celebrates dehumanization. It is lawless, crude, and combative. Its entire ecosystem—social media, podcasts, and talk radio—is committed to spreading lies and conspiracy theories, to stoking rage and resentment. The disciples of the MAGA movement define themselves by what they hate much more than by what they love. They pursue culture wars with revolutionary zeal even as they vandalize our civic culture. If a public figure today talked the way conservatives once talked—about the virtue of compassion; about the importance of good character in our leaders and resisting our baser impulses; about the need to encourage courtesy and decency, and refine manners and morals—they would be mocked as woke, as weak, as a “cuck.”   The MAGA movement represents the betrayal of the temperamental tradition of conservatism. And as a result of the disfigurement of the Republican Party, conservatism is politically homeless. That is a terrible loss for the GOP, and a greater loss for America. Even people who don’t identify as conservatives and see blind spots within its tradition can, I think, acknowledge the contributions of conservatism at its best—its embrace of epistemic humility and skepticism of utopian thinking; the importance it places on institutions and civil society; the priority it places on character formation; and its instinct to preserve when others are pushing for radical change. The conservative scholar Yuval Levin says that conservatism begins with a vision of what we love in the world and is driven by the defense of what is best about the world. Trump and the key figures within the MAGA movement rejected conservatism not because they failed to understand conservatism well enough but because they understood it all too well. If conservatism is to ever again find a home in the GOP, it will be because the party decides that what is true and good and beautiful is indeed worth conserving. Right now the Republican Party is light-years away from that, and those who cherish conservatism should say so.