But overall, the Trump era has exposed a deep fracture among conservatives who for many years may have thought of each other as allies. Trump has been unrelenting in his verbal assault on the Left — Democrats, tech companies, the media, and the “deep state.” During the campaign, his past deviations from conservatism — on healthcare, abortion, guns, property rights, and other issues — became less important due to the cultural battle he was waging, a phenomenon often summarized as “but he fights.”
As he’s kept it up as president, for many conservatives, defending Trump has become a way of fighting back against these corrupt liberal institutions, whereas to criticize Trump (for his words or deeds) is seen as a betrayal. In the face of an all out assault on Trump by the Left, it’s suddenly treated as quaint to lament the return to $1 trillion deficits let alone raise alarms about the longer-term debt crisis that he has only made worse.
The way his defenders see it, from the outset of his presidency, there was a coordinated effort to delegitimize Trump by portraying him as an asset of Vladimir Putin who had conspired with Russia to hack the 2016 election, something that Robert Mueller’s investigation was unable to establish. Now, they see another coordinated effort to remove (or at least badly damage) Trump based on a manufactured scandal. To say that Trump did anything bad with regard to Ukraine, to publicly bristle at his talk about “treason” charges against House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, is to do the Left’s bidding and fail to acknowledge their misdeeds.
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