Donald Trump? Yes, of course it’s a con.
Yes, it’s a con. In the three weeks since Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee the remains of modern American conservatism have decayed at an alarming rate.
Three months ago, most GOP officeholders and conservative opinion leaders understood Trump to be an ignoramus and a boor, a vain reality-television star and a longtime donor to Democrats who had built his candidacy on the kind of progressive populism most of them had spent their careers fighting. Today, many of those same Republican elected officials and prominent conservatives are hailing Trump as the future of their party and the ideological movement it houses and excoriating anti-Trump conservatives who hold to the same position they took just a few weeks ago.
What’s changed? Not Trump.
In the time since he effectively captured the GOP nomination, Trump has doubled down on his slanderous claim, borrowed from the National Enquirer, that Ted Cruz’s father helped Lee Harvey Oswald months before the JFK assassination; refused to apologize for attacking Heidi Cruz’s looks, once again calling her “fair game”; picked a fight with David Cameron, leader of America’s longest-standing ally; distanced himself from his own tax plan; recommitted himself to releasing his tax returns and then declared defiantly that those returns are his private business and would not be released; backed off his proposal to ban temporarily entry to the United States for Muslims and then reiterated his support for such a ban; and, finally, lied on national television about a 1991 audio recording in which he created a fake persona—”John Miller,” a made-up spokesman played by Trump himself—for an interview with a gossip magazine, in order to boast about his virility and his virtue.
Most striking, perhaps, was Trump’s decision last week to abandon the promise at the heart of his unorthodox candidacy: that he would forgo political contributions in order to remain immune to the influence of political money. “I will tell you this,” Trump said last fall. “Nobody’s putting up millions of dollars for me. I’m putting up my own money.” When donors contribute to a political campaign, Trump argued, they buy the candidates who accept their money. “Remember this: They have total control over Jeb and Hillary and everybody else that takes that money.”
Trump maintained that he alone among the candidates was incorruptible because he was “self-funding.” It simply wasn’t possible to put national interests above special interests when you’re accepting major contributions from the representatives of those same interests. Trump claimed that his many years as a donor to Republicans and Democrats gave him unique insight into the problem and that he alone, an outsider who swore off political money, could solve it.
This wasn’t a small issue. Trump gave it prominence in virtually all of his speeches and mentioned it frequently in primary-season debates. In an interview last fall, Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, cited it as the most important distinction between Trump and other candidates in the race.
The first thing is obviously the inside-the-Beltway guys have no control over Donald Trump, and I mean that in a good way. Most of those people are bought and paid for by special interests, by lobbyists, by major donors. Since Mr. Trump is funding his campaign on his own, and he’s not taking donor money, he isn’t beholden to those people and can’t be accountable to those people who want special interests out of the government. He’s going to do what’s right for the country.
That was then. Last week, Trump announced two joint fundraising accounts with the Republican National Committee—the Trump Victory fund and the Trump Make America Great Again Committee—that allow him to raise millions of dollars for his campaign and the party. The maximum contribution of nearly $450,000 will be the highest amount ever solicited by such joint committees.
In addition to the main super-PAC already spending on Trump’s behalf—Great America PAC, run by Ed Rollins—Trump allies have created others. Politico‘s Ken Vogel and Ben Schreckinger report that senior Trump campaign adviser and longtime D.C. lobbyist Paul Manafort has given his blessing to a yet-to-be-named super-PAC to be established by Thomas Barrack, a Manafort client and California billionaire. Doug Watts, a former aide to Trump backer Ben Carson and a recent donor to top California Democrats (including Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown), is up and running with the Committee for American Sovereignty PAC. And Politico reports that Ann Stone, ex-wife of Trump confidant Roger Stone, is in talks to create yet another super-PAC that will target women voters.
Last fall, Trump mocked GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson on Twitter. “Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!” Last week, Trump celebrated Adelson’s commitment to support his candidacy with up to $100 million.
So the candidate who won the Republican nomination as an “outsider” and who claimed to be self-funding to avoid the taint of political money is setting up a sophisticated finance operation that will allow him to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from the very special interests, lobbyists, and major donors he used as foils in the primary.
Yes, of course it’s a con.
It’s possible, likely even, that this aggressive hypocrisy will have a negligible short-term effect on Trump. As he’s said about his own supporters, they’ll back him regardless of what he says or does. But what about the long term? And what about elected Republicans and prominent conservatives, many of them previously skeptical of Trump, who are willing to set aside their concerns and climb aboard the Trump train in the interest of winning?
Texas governor Greg Abbott, who as that state’s attorney general in 2010 opened an investigation of Trump University for fraud and criticized Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims, is not only supporting Trump but criticizing conservatives who don’t. Republicans who won’t back Trump, he said, “are aligning their principles with Hillary Clinton.”
Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist, has twice used her column in recent days to scold conservatives who won’t support Trump, despite having written, just a month ago, that Trump, preoccupied with subjects “small, petty, [and] unworthy,” was “nutty.” She begins her most recent column with a plea for Republicans to exhibit “a kind of heroic fairness” in times like these and, rejecting her own advice, concludes by sharing her suspicion that some conservatives who continue to oppose Trump for reasons of conscience don’t really mean it. (Noonan might have noted that she’s held some of the policy positions that she imagines her anti-Trump villains all share.)
Senator Bob Corker, who praised Trump’s incoherent foreign policy speech and is now reportedly under strong consideration to be his running mate, wants Trump skeptics “to chill.”
With respect, Corker and Noonan and Abbott are confused. There’s no reason to chill when a con man turns his marks, particularly people who know better, into accomplices. There’s no obligation in the name of fairness, heroic or otherwise, to normalize a crazy man because he’s won the support of 5 percent of the voting-eligible public. And, finally, while Abbott is right that the 2016 race has caused many conservatives to abandon their principles in support of a favored candidate, he’s wrong about which conservatives have been willing to do so and wrong about which candidate they’re supporting.
