Perhaps the only thing that is worse than Trump’s silence is what he does say. Even if we are generous and assume that the man does not actually believe any of the specific proposals to which he has given his tacit consent, the attitude he is exhibiting is positively Wilsonian in character. In Trump’s world, America will be restored to glory when his handpicked team of experts is permitted to experiment upon the public outside of the usual constitutional limits. Nowhere in his rhetoric will you find any reference to America’s pre-existing cultural and legal traditions, or to the necessary bounds that free men insist be imposed upon the state. There is no talk of “freedom”; no reflexive grounding of ideas in the Declaration and the Federalist Papers; no conceptual explanation or underlying philosophy. There is nothing, except will to power. By his own admission, Trump’s are the politics of doing enthusiastically what works in the moment; of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt; of the administrative state and of bureaucratic expertise; of the Prussians and the French and the Singaporeans. Whatever he might claim before his adoring crowds, Trump is not in fact an antidote to Barack Obama. He is his parallel.

Calvin Coolidge said “no” over and over and over again because he understood that the federal government existed for a handful of specific reasons, and that any action it took outside of its carefully delineated tramlines was inherently suspect. Donald Trump’s only visible constitutional opinion is that someone strong ought to make sure the trams run on time. There’s a word for men like that, and it sure as heck isn’t “conservative.”