I hold the opposite view. When I look at Donald Trump’s campaign, I note how hard he has worked to remain true to the dogmas of the conservative catechism. I was there in 2011 when he told CPAC that he was pro-life, a position that he has not renounced in the years since. He has been stalwart in his defense of Second Amendment rights. His fiscal policy is informed by Stephen Moore and Larry Kudlow, the high priests of supply-side. His speech to AIPAC last spring was unabashedly pro-Israel. He opposes the Iran deal.
Are there more important issues to conservatives than life, guns, taxes, and Israel? One might say immigration. But here, too, how did Trump fail the “usual litmus tests”? The conservative grassroots, and many Republican elected officials, have been against amnesty for a decade. Trump’s deviation from the norm wasn’t in the position he held but in the way he talked about it.
Where Trump departed most noticeably from the Republican orthodoxy was on the issues of trade, entitlements, and foreign policy. But these cleavages were not with Republican or conservative voters. They were with D.C. conservatives who agree with economists in the net benefits of trade, the costs of unfunded liabilities, and the necessity of intervention in Iraq and Syria. But who really makes dogma—the priesthood or the laity? Trump didn’t flunk the trade and foreign policy litmus tests as much as reveal that the answers everyone had thought were right were, in the voter’s eyes, wrong.
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