Moving past the comically un-self-aware headline, this is a useful distillation of a story I think a lot of Republicans who’ve made their peace with Trump tell themselves.
Viz: The Trump administration is plugging ahead on a bunch of conventional conservative policy priorities (tax cuts, deregulation, judges), which is what a hard-headed pragmatist cares about, and complaints are too focused on relatively unimportant matters of tone & aesthetics.
The policy half of that story only works if you’re pretty selective about the policies you deign to notice. But the “just tone” half is wilfully obtuse about stuff smart conservatives used to understand especially clearly.
To wit: that institutional cultures and norms are often as or more important than black letter policies; that healthy ones evolve slowly & with difficulty; that they’re fragile & hard to restore when destroyed.
You have to jettison the best parts of traditional conservative thought to think it’s a trivial aesthetic matter whether a policy platform comes wrapped in an ethos of populist leader worship, xenophobia, denigration of press, and contempt for stabilizing institutions.
Essentially it comes down to whether you think we’re still in the domain of “normal politics” with an unusually vulgar rhetorical overlay, or whether you see Trump as seriously threatening norms that reside at a level much more fundamental than debates over optimal tax rates.
Once upon a time I might have expected conservatives to be more attuned to deeper-than-policy political threats. Some have been. Those in denial could stand to reread their own canon.
