Will Conservatives Rally Behind Trump?

W. James Antle III

Politics, United States

Trump leaves many Republicans cold—but so have previous presidential candidates.

It was an odd feeling watching the conservative despair that greeted Ted Cruz’s decision to end his presidential campaign after yet another landslide loss to Donald Trump.

While some of my comrades were despondent to see a constitutional conservative’s White House bid come to a close, the real source of displeasure was Trump as the near-certain Republican nominee.

Why so strange? I’ve been a conservative all my adult life and a partisan Republican since childhood. I voted to re-election Ronald Reagan in our elementary school’s straw poll in suburban Massachusetts (he won and actually carried the Bay State in November).

That legally meaningless gesture was the only time I happily voted for a Republican presidential candidate. I don’t regret my first real presidential vote for Bob Dole, though I knew he wouldn’t win (the fact that he didn’t gave me even fewer reasons to regret it). But George W. Bush was a doozy.

In 2000, I had planned to support Pat Buchanan’s lonely Reform Party presidential bid all year long. But the Bush-Gore race was so close and the third-party business was such a circus. The Texas governor said all—well, some—of the right things about exit strategies, the futility of nation-building and above all a “humble foreign policy.”

So George W. Bush it was. Less than four years later, we were at war with Iraq. The Iraq war tested my loyalty to the Republican Party and even the conservative movement like nothing had before. By about 2006, when the war was clearly a fiasco but pointing this out to many Republicans was like calling for the enacting of Bernie Sanders’ full economic program, I felt my party had gone mad.

John McCain was valiant as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and quite decent in our one extended personal interaction (I helped chauffeur him around when he visited my college campus in the late 1990s). But I found him singing about bombing Iran and proposing a foreign policy that suggested he wasn’t entirely kidding utterly horrifying. He also cared even less about constitutionally limited government at home than George W. Bush, whose compassionate conservatism blew a hole in the federal budget.