Against Trump

12508834_1058375694214780_5210959481061052207_nNot that this will do any good, but I have joined a chorus of conservatives making our cases against Trump in the next issue of National Review, released tonight. My contribution is as follows:

After Obama — after three generations of liberalism only slightly interrupted by the Reagan years — the conservative president we desperately need requires a paradoxical combination of boldness and restraint. The president will need to be bold in challenging the runaway power and reach of his own branch, against the fury of the bureaucracy itself, its client groups, and the media. This boldness is necessary to restore the restraint that a republican executive should have in our constitutional order.

Trump exhibits no awareness of this supreme constitutional task. His facially worthy challenge to political correctness is not a sufficient governing platform. Worse, his inclination to understand our problems as being managerial rather than political suggests he might well set back the conservative cause if he is elected, if not make the problems of runaway executive power even worse. Restraint is clearly not in his vocabulary or his character.

I’ll write a longer treatment here of what we need from the next president at some point soon.

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