'Soft spot for despots': How conservative intellectuals set the stage for Trump

Never Trump conservatives often attack President Donald Trump and the far-right MAGA movement as a toxic departure from the conservatism of the past and a betrayal of what President Ronald Reagan and Arizona Senators Barry Goldwater and John McCain represented. And they will applaud National Review founder William F. Buckley for distancing himself from the far-right conspiracy theorists of the John Birch Society.

But in an opinion column published on May 14, liberal New York Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie argues that Trumpism didn't really start with Donald Trump and his MAGA movement — and that the right's dark side was there all along.

Bouie takes a close look at the second Trump Administration, stressing that its policies aren't new ideas for the American right.

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"Of the endless torrent of illegal, unconstitutional — and anti-constitutional — actions flowing from the Trump Administration," Bouie observes, "there are three that stand out for their contempt for the rule of law. There is the president’s ongoing assault on the right to due process, seen in his administration's refusal to facilitate the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who was arrested in Baltimore in March and removed to a prison in El Salvador…. The second incident is the suggestion, by the White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, that the president might suspend habeas corpus to keep federal courts from releasing the (Trump) Administration's detainees — thus blocking its efforts to remove, among others, some lawful residents from the country…. The last, and by comparison relatively minor, instance of constitutional subversion by this administration is the president's plan to accept a $400 million luxury aircraft to temporarily replace Air Force One, provided to the United States by the royal family of Qatar."

But no matter how many dangerous lines Trump crosses, Bouie argues, much of the American right refuses to stand up to him.

"The Republican Party is, with only a few quibbles and some occasionally timid disagreement, united in support of Donald Trump," Bouie warns. "Conservative intellectuals have spent the last decade spinning endless excuses for the president and his allies. They treat his tyrannical aspirations as little more than a curiosity, or even a justified response to some imagined revolutionary movement of the political and cultural left. Both the MAGA cheerleaders of the Claremont Institute and the Trump rationalizers in the nation’s premier publications agree: Nothing Trump has done, or wants to do, is beyond the pale…. This attitude, while shocking in its moral and ethical decadence, is not all that surprising. As the writer and editor Jacob Heilbrunn shows in 'America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators,' the conservative movement has always had a soft spot for despots of various stripes."

Bouie continues, "The political and intellectual antecedents of the Trump movement, stretching all the way back to the early 20th Century, have often had nothing but praise for those despotic rulers who extinguished the freedom of the many for the liberty of the few, from Gen. Francisco Franco in Spain and Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile to, at this moment, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Viktor Orban in Hungary…. There is no 'Trumpified' conservative movement. There never was. There is only the conservative movement that was, we can see now, waiting for its Donald Trump."

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Jamelle Bouie's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).