And for conservative Republicans who decline to cut their conscience to fit this year’s fashions? They won’t be in the wilderness, exactly, but political life for them is about to become more uncomfortable.
Some of Trump’s potential agenda items — replacing the Affordable Care Act, repudiating the Iran nuclear deal, filling the vacant Supreme Court seat with a Scalia-caliber judge, lowering the sky-high corporate income tax rate — movement conservatives will enthusiastically support. But much of what Trump campaigned on is anathema to them. If the incoming president is serious about killing the families of suspected terrorists, deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, weakening First Amendment protections for the press, cozying up to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and imposing ruinous trade barriers, it will be incumbent on GOP conservatives to fight him.
The pull of partisan loyalty has always been hard for elected officials to resist. It has grown exponentially harder in our hyperpolarized environment — and the ascent of a new president with a vengeance reflex will make it harder still. Republican conservatives will need all the backbone they can muster when the leader of their party pushes them to support his anticonservative nostrums.
It would be wonderful if Trump, having captured the highest office in the land, resolves to abandon the smash-mouth style for which he is known and makes a point of listening to and learning from those who disagree with him. That would be a decided improvement over the last eight years of Obama’s my-way-or-the-highway superciliousness.
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