Trump is “like a couch, bears the impression of the last person who sat on him.”
Ann Coulter, far right commentator, and former supporter of Donald Trump.
The entire time that Donald Trump has been in the news as a political figure, I've had a hard time figuring him out. I can tell what most political figures stand for, claim to stand for, and whether they are sincere or not.
And they are certainly not all sincere, as the gaggle of Republican office holders who remain from the pre Trump days now buying all in to Trump demonstrate.
But Trump's hard to figure.
I think I've come to the conclusion that Ann Coulter, whom I generally really dislike, is quite correct. As Coulter, no matter what you think of her, actually believes what she says, she grew disgusted with Trump really early, determining basically that he was a phony.
I can't tell if Trump is, or was, even smart.1
That's hard to judge at a distance. Two Republican Presidents who were really smart were often sort of assumed, while in office, not to be. One was Ronald Reagan, and the other was Dwight Eisenhower, both of whom had perfected the art of acting like they weren't all that sharp in order to use it to their advantage.
Eisenhower, as one of his biographers Carlo D'Este noted, had learned in the Army that it was often better to not appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed but to hang back, taking in the opinions, and trust, of others. By the Second World War it was obvious to all that he was in fact extremely intelligence, but part of the manifestation of that was that once he was President, he reengaged the act to his advantage. If you ever hear a recording of Eisenhower in a private speech, such as when Kennedy called him up to get advice on Indo China, it's a shock. He doesn't even seem like the same person.
That same shock has been noted by people who spoke to Reagan privately. Reagan perfected as an actor an "ah shucks" one of the crowd personality, but in reality he was extremely intelligent. People who came in to discuss a topic with him were often stunned that his grasp of it was vast, while the public, particularly the American left, wondered if he was a doddling old fool right from the onset. His mental decline by the end of his second term was obvious, but it wasn't there from the first. It served him well, however, as it was possible to believe on something like the Iran Contra Scandal that maybe he didn't really know it was happening.
Trump, on the other hand, seems to me to genuinely not have all that sharp of an intellect. That would explain some of the outrageous and stupid things he says, of which there are a plethora. Being a wealthy man his entire life, he's gotten through life being able to say stupid outrageous things and not draw rebuke from those around him, and in turn be encouraged in his own belief that he's really smart. Just as the political and economic class of current China tends to assume that everyone at the top is really smart, as they've been weeded out that way, Trump probably believes he's a genius as everyone has always told him he's a real smart guy.
If Trump doesn't have a great intellect, what he does have is another type of intelligence. He's a good salesman.
I wouldn't say a great salesman, as he's had a lot of business failures and his enterprises have been bankrupt more than once. But he is a good salesman. He knows how to sell. And like good salesmen, he can sell what he's selling. He doesn't have to believe it.
Over the years I've known several people who were good salesmen, some of whom were really intelligent. Their hallmark, however, was the ability to sell. They'd often move between one sales job and another. If you know them well enough, you'd sometimes find that they really didn't have all that great of interest in what they were selling, whether that was cars, houses, basketballs or whatever. Sometimes they personally had a massive disinterest in the product they were selling. It was the selling that they were interested in.
I strongly suspect Trump is like that.
At some point, for some reason, Trump decided to enter politics and his selling sense was that rank and file rust belt and lower middle class Americans were unhappy and disgruntled, with some very good reasons existing for that, so he sold them what basically amounted to snake oil in 2016. Once in, he needed people to run the government and they came in and did it, defeating his wildest and most dangerous ideas. People didn't buy the snake oil in sufficient quantities in 2020, so now he's turned to a new improved product.
Populist Outrage.
Populist Outrage is a dangerous cocktail in the US right now. It includes everything from the New Apostolic Movement to the Hawk Tuah Girl, all one brew. You literally have Mike Johnson quoting the Bible and some TikTok Tart describing spitting on male sex organs all in the same group. But snake oil cures what ails ya, and people are buying.
J. D. Vance, on the other hand, is the real deal.
I really haven't followed Vance until now and while his book Hillbilly Elegy sounded interesting when it was released, I didn't read it and I'm not going to. When it was released, what the general reaction was, wat that it was a well written elegy to his roots, and to the hillbilly class, now in desperate straits, from somebody who had rising up out of that class into affluence. That might in part be right, but like McMurtry's contemporarily set novels, they were not only reflecting the people he came out of, but were also a more intellectual reflection of their virtues in spite of their vices.
Vance is genuinely fairly remarkable. He came out of a real blue collar, hillbilly background and became very well educated. What was missed is that as he moved along, through education and influence, he became something other than what American liberals simply assume that education does. He didn't become an educated liberal, looking back on his drug fueled hillbilly ancestors, but rather became an educated National Conservative intellectual.
He's not a populist, and isn't even ballpark close to one.
For good or ill, he's more in the nature of a Beloocian. I.e, if you brought Hilaire Belloc back today, made him an American, and had him run for office, you'd get J.D. Vance.
That's why he comes across to many on the left, and not a few on the right, as "weird". All along he's been saying the things that National Conservatives and Illiberal Democrats have been saying. If he sounds like a Christian Nationalist, that's because all National Conservatives are Christian Nationalist, even if they aren't observant, whereas not all Christian Nationalist are National Conservatives by any means.
Vance has a lot more in common with Viktor Orbán,, Giorgia Meloni, Philippe Pétain, and Francisco Franco than he does with Trump or Mike Johnson.
We've dealt with National Conservatism here before, but we didn't address is how smart they've really been since 2020. Unlike the goofball hordes that go to Trump rallies wearing absurd red, white and blue costumes. It's actually fairly deep, and it early on set out it goals in print, as we've noted here:
1. National Independence. We wish to see a world of independent nations. Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance. Each has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people. We endorse a policy of rearmament by independent self-governing nations and of defensive alliances whose purpose is to deter imperialist aggression.
2. Rejection of Imperialism and Globalism. We support a system of free cooperation and competition among nation-states, working together through trade treaties, defensive alliances, and other common projects that respect the independence of their members. But we oppose transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies—a trend that pretends to high moral legitimacy even as it weakens representative government, sows public alienation and distrust, and strengthens the influence of autocratic regimes. Accordingly, we reject imperialism in its various contemporary forms: We condemn the imperialism of China, Russia, and other authoritarian powers. But we also oppose the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence, and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image.
3. National Government. The independent nation-state is instituted to establish a more perfect union among the diverse communities, parties, and regions of a given nation, to provide for their common defense and justice among them, and to secure the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for this time and for future generations. We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers. We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values. We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes.
5. The Rule of Law. We believe in the rule of law. By this we mean that citizens and foreigners alike, and both the government and the people, must accept and abide by the laws of the nation. In America, this means accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance. All agree that the repair and improvement of national legal traditions and institutions is at times necessary. But necessary change must take place through the law. This is how we preserve our national traditions and our nation itself. Rioting, looting, and other unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end.
6. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-taking by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.
7. Public Research. At a time when China is rapidly overtaking America and the Western nations in fields crucial for security and defense, a Cold War-type program modeled on DARPA, the “moon-shot,” and SDI is needed to focus large-scale public resources on scientific and technological research with military applications, on restoring and upgrading national manufacturing capacity, and on education in the physical sciences and engineering. On the other hand, we recognize that most universities are at this point partisan and globalist in orientation and vehemently opposed to nationalist and conservative ideas. Such institutions do not deserve taxpayer support unless they rededicate themselves to the national interest. Education policy should serve manifest national needs.
8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.
9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.
10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.
And its been further developed since then, although Dinneen2 and Reno3 do not seem to be leading the charge any longer, nor is Rod Dreher4 , who for a while just urged societal retreat. Now Kevin Roberts5. , head of the Heritage Society, is, and he's taking the movement into a concrete action oriented direction. He's written a book, Dawn's Early Light, on that very topic. It's Amazon write up states:
America is on the brink of destruction. A corrupt and incompetent elite has uprooted our way of life and is brainwashing the next generation. Many so-called conservatives are as culpable as their progressive counterparts.
In this ambitious and provocative book, Heritage Foundation President Dr. Kevin Roberts announces the arrival of a New Conservative Movement. His message is simple: Global elites — your time is up.
Dawn’s Early Light blazes a promising path for the American people to take back their country. Chapter by chapter, it identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save: Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, to name a few.
All these need to be dissolved if the American way of life is to be passed down to future generations.
The good news is, we’re going to win.
The Swamp is so drunk on power that the elites don't realize the ground is moving beneath their feet. In Washington, they wear foreign flags on their lapels, but they don’t protect our border. They wave around the Constitution, but they don’t respect its wisdom. They appeal to Reagan, but Reagan would never put up with this non-sense.
Their decadence will be their downfall. A new day is here.
The forward to that book was written by one J. D. Vance.
That, National Conservatism in its most proactive form, is what J. D. Vance stands for.
Vance's biography really demonstrates this. He didn't go from hillbilly poverty to populism. He went from hillbilly poverty into the Marine Corps, and then into university where he met budding National Conservative type intellects and developed into one. Along the way somewhere, he converted into Catholicism, which is the oldest and original Christian religion, and which has a deep sense of the existential and a profound tradition. While its far from the case that all Catholics are National Conservatives or Illiberal Democrats, or anything like that, it is fair to say that observant Catholics are horrified by the cultural decay of the west and its unliking from an existential sense in a manner and way which protestants, including those in the New Apostolic Movement, are not, which is not to say that they are not.6
So what's with all this "cat lady" and pro natalism stuff?
It ties right into the overall world view of much of National Conservatism in its recent most radical form, and indeed in some ways is an evolution away from its original intellectual corps.
It's an undercurrent in conservatism, but there's definitely a strain of it which is genuinely intellectual that emphasizes, perhaps hyper emphasizes, traditionalism in a very definite sense, including traditional male and female roles to an extremely strong degree. They're not romanticizing the 1950s, or indeed, romanticizing anything at all, but looking back, way back, to a time and way of thinking in which this was not questioned in any fashion. Indeed, in the corners of the Internet where they hang out, you can find them discussing the social norms of the Middle Ages in comparison to those of the present, and they're serious about it. I need not and indeed don't have the bandwidth to go into all of that now, but it touches on a lot of topics, not all of which I'm not completely sympathetic to.
So is this "weird"?
Well at least some of Project 2025 is downright weird, as for example the proposal to create "Freedom Cities" in "unoccupied" portions of the public domain in the west. That is, well, Bat Shit Crazy. And its hard not to listen to the Dr. Taylor Marshall7 and the Simone and Malcolm Collins8 of the world and not thing, "well, that's weird".
Other stuff is more in the nature, however, of Bellocian Traditionalism and by any measure, it's certainly no weirder than the tranvestite genital organ obsessed "woke" view of much of the left, which indeed is deeply weird. And here's where, in fact, much of instinctive populism and National Conservatism meets. The MAGA crowed don't have the faintest clue who Hilaire Belloc is, or even grasp that it doesn't matter what your local Evangelical Free pastor said, divorce and remarriage is barred by Christianity, but they do grasp that in the natural order of things the Hawk Tuah girl may be gross, but she's not gender confused and something odd is going on here that needs to be addressed.
Put another way, some if it is scary James Watt Weird 9 while some of it probably seems "weird" to you if the Mantilla Girls seem weird. If they don't, it may make you uncomfortable depending on where on the social conservatism scale you fit, but its not really weird. The fact that much of modern America and all of the left find it all weird is because of how far to the left hit needle has moved in the past forty years.
Trump, on the other hand, can be really weird.
The National Conservatives, unlike the populists, are pretty deep, and pretty smart. Very smart, in fact. And they've realized what the red, white and blue populist crowds have not. Trump doesn't' really stand for anything.
They do.
They also know that they can't get a National Conservative elected into the Oval Office.
But what they've gambled on was two things. One was that the populists are too dim, and Trump too lazy, to draft his own agenda. They did that for him, through Project 2025. They bet they can get a start on a National Conservative revolution, and that's how the chief of the Heritage Foundation has put it, through a lazy Trump.
They've placed a bet on a certainty, that being that Trump won't last an entire four year term. He'll die within the next four years, assuming that old age and advancing intellectual decline doesn't get him before the election, and they gambled that they could get a Chief Executive into office who was one of their own through the Vice Presidency.
That figure is J. D. Vance. And up until Joe Biden dropping out of the race, it looked like the bet was going to pay off for sure.
Vance has been willing to play the part, while never disavowing what he's always stood for. He's sort of a National Conservatives Manchurian Candidate, with the National Conservatives waiting for age, disease, or senility to take out a sitting Donald Trump. Trump, too shallow to really bother to care about it, was willing to go along with a seemingly fawning J. D. Vance, probably never realizing that Trump's merely a temporary vehicle for them to get into office, and start their revolution.
Now those plans seem to have been disrupted, maybe.
The problem, in part, is that they wrote a 900 page book.
Project 2025 was designed to be, as noted, a blueprint for a lazy President. But once you publish a book, people start reading it, and they start asking questions about the people who wrote it. Particularly if one of those authors has written a second book about his pending National Conservative revolution.
Now, when people are distracted due to mental fog and don't touch it, that's not much of a problem. But once they do, if any of it is outside of the mainstream at all, and a lot of Project 2025 is, and if any of it is weird, which some of Project 2025 is, attention will start being paid in spades.
And that may very well spell the end of there being a chance that National Conservatives shall remake the nation via an electoral revolution. Too confident in themselves, they seem to have shot their bolt. Americans are now uncomfortable with the direction they want to take the country, which is in a direction the country's never really gone before.
Footnotes
* This thread was started several days ago, and its really worth noting that a lot of things have developed since I first started posting it, including a huge amount of attention on J. D. Vance, and discontent in Republican ranks regarding him.
**It'll be hard not to note all the references to various Catholic figures in National Conservatism, which may lead to the impression that National Conservatism is a Catholic thing. It isn't. Indeed, one of the primary figures in Illiberal Democracy is Viktor Orban, who is a Presbyterian.
What's probably notable here is that the deep intellectual history of Catholicism and Apostolic Christianity in general has lead some of those who realize how shallow modern Western Culture is into the Church. That doesn't make it a movement of the Church, and as some Catholics have feared, these movements pose a risk to Catholicism at least in the US, where it is a minority religion. Indeed, it's likely that some members of the New Apostolic Movement, thin theology that they have, do not even recognize Catholics as Christians when in fact they are the first Christians.
1. I'm hugely reluctant to opine on somebody's intelligence remotely, but at this point, it's hard not to. Some of the things Trump says are amazingly dumb. So much so that it raises a lot of questions regarding a wide variety of topics.
It's notable that Trump fairly frequently brings up his own intelligence, which is something intelligent people rarely do.
2. Patrick Dineen is a professor at Notre Dame who has written on Illiberal Democracy and National Conservatism favorably.
3. R. R. Reno is the editor of First Things, and a convert from the Episcopal Church to Catholicism. He's also on the Dineen end of things, but not as pessimistic about democracy as Dineen is.
4. Rod Dreher is a writer who wrote The Byzantine Option. He's moved to Hungary. Dreher was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism, and then converted to Orthodoxy.
5. Kevin Roberts is the main intellectual figure behind The Heritage Foundation and has a Wyoming connection, in that he was at one time the head of Wyoming Catholic College.
6. It's worth noting here that members of this movement and those on the fringe of it, sometimes the very fringe, have seen some notable conversions to Catholicism in recent years. These include Candace Owens, Tammy Roberts Peterson, wife of psychologist and author Jordan Peterson, and Eva Vlaardingerbroek.
7. Dr. Taylor Marshall, also a convert to Catholicism, is an extreme traditionalist who has come to engage in conspiracy theories about the Vatican. He's on the fringe right.
8. Simone and Malcolm Collins come across as genuinely weird. Their leaders of a pro natalist organization with Simone having indicated that she intends to have children until, basically, her uterus blows out. The Collins are atheist and frankly have somewhat of a scary Social Darwinist view of the world. They therefore fit into the really weird side of pro natalism, where Elon Musk can also be found, who have an incorrect feeling that but for massive procreation, society is going to fail, which is completely incorrect.
Showing, I suppose, how old school Neanderthal I am, Michael Collins looks so anemic, and Simone Collins so unattractive, that the thought of their fitting the bill in a basic way to create a lot of children is surprising.
Watt was Reagan's Secretary of the Interior and basically believed that as Christ was returning very soon, there was no reason not to use natural resources with a mind towards conserving them.
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