In defense of Trump voters

The second rational argument for voting Trump, advanced most forcefully by Glenn Reynolds, is the structural argument. The structural argument is that, sure, Trump might be as bad as Hillary or even worse but that he’d actually be a much less serious threat to do harm because the vast and nominally non-partisan apparatus of official Washington — the bureaucracy and civil service, the courts, the press — would come together to thwart him at every turn, whereas they would be force multipliers that amplify all of Hillary’s misdeeds and bad policy ideas. Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru have explored in detail in NR how Hillary’s liberalism presents a mortal threat to our democratic institutions, a threat that is all the more insidious because it is incremental, mainstreamed, and normalized by our elites, and painted in bland tones in contrast to Trump’s carnival barking. One of the great frustrations of a lot of Trump supporters is that Trump gets lacerated in the press for saying things bluntly that Democrats have been saying and doing for years, but in the polite language of the legal profession and the Beltway insider. In its extreme version, the structural argument asserts that if Trump is really that bad, he can always just be impeached and removed from office by bipartisan consensus.

Of all the arguments for Trump, this is the one that tempts me the most. Its diagnosis of how D.C. operates is, in fact, a big part of why I argued in the primaries that Trump wouldn’t be effective at “burning it all down.” It doesn’t outweigh the other reasons for opposing him, and indeed it relies on a mechanism that is both dangerous and defeatist for conservatives: the empowerment of an official Washington unified to undermine an elected president on a scale previously unprecedented. We have seen how this game plays out before. Ever since Watergate and Vietnam, the media have used their roles in those controversies to justify a more aggressively partisan and ideological right to decide what the public should be told. Ever since the civil-rights era, liberals have used its necessary expansions of federal power to justify permanent expansions of federal power in every walk of life. Media that have become more openly biased against Trump — because he deserves it — already won’t easily put that genie back in the bottle. The structural argument goes a way toward explaining how some people have reasonably rationalized voting for Trump, but it carries a whirlwind all its own.