The Twisted Road Pro-Trump Conservatives Must Travel

By Robert Wenzel

Walter Block emails a link to a Boyd Cathey essay:

https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/02/february-11-2018-my-corner-coming-civil.html

I won't reproduce the entire essay here, you can visit the link to see it for yourself, but I believe the essay reveals the problems that conservatives and libertarians face when cheering on the Trump presidency. Mind you, I am not saying that Trump is bad on every issue---just most of them. The danger comes when supporting Trump the President without attaching one of the few things he is good on.

So let us take a look at some key points in the Cathey pro-Trump essay:

He writes:

[E]nter Donald J. Trump who defeated sixteen “establishment” conservatives, literally sweeping them into the dustbin of history...

To make this case, he has moved Rand Paul into the camp of  “establishment” conservatives. This is typical distortion by Trump-supporters.

Cathey then attempts to contrast Trump from neo-conservatives by stating:

And in foreign policy, unlike the older “America First” Right, they [neoconservatives] were zealous globalists who wished to send American boys to fight (and die) in every forsaken desert oasis and jungle on the globe to make “world safe for [American-style] democracy.”

Does Cathey not think Trump is doing this? There are more troops in Afghanistan than when President Obama left office. There are escalated US military activities in Yemen. And the US sits on the border of Turkey supporting the Kurds. He is escalating military presence in Asia. Drone attacks have escalated to record levels under Trump. And Trump is about to expand the rules of engagement for nuclear weapons.

The neo-conservatives are horrific but they have nothing on Trump when it comes to horror.

Cathey knows one should vomit at Trump forein military activities:

I would be the first to declare that there are some things about this presidency that unsettle me, that I find objectionable—the just-enacted budget, with its billions of new spending on social and welfare programs, is just one such example. And, as I wrote last April, the American incursion in Syria violates campaign promises and could well get us mired in another...

But he dismisses all this with this:

But the greater issue here—one about which I continue to remind myself—is that Trump’s enemies are my…our…enemies. 

But Trump is also the enemy! He is a dumb statist with an infatuation with the military. Does Cathey really think conservative principles are so weak that they can't stand on their own? That he, therefore has to choose between left-wing goons or right-wing goons? Well, what about, "to hell with all the goons, left and right?" How are the young going to be made aware of old-school conservativism and libertarianism, if such eloquent writers such as Cathey bow and support Trump simply because he attacks the establishment horror show when he only desires to bring in his own horror show?

Cathey writes:

 And what has happened since November 2016 has been a result of you-know-what hitting that proverbial fan, so to speak—the frantic and hysterical reaction of the Deep State elites...

But this is only half the story. Trump is being run by generals, that is, men who have climbed up the ladder of the killing machine.  The battle is not about eliminating the Deep State, it is a battle as to who runs the Deep State, the intelligence community or the military. If anything, the intelligence community doesn't seem to get anything straight, they somehow failed even in getting Hillary Clinton elected. The military isn't any more competent but they sure have a lot of weapons to blow things up.

A case, therefore, can be made that a short-term victory by the intelligence wing of the Deep State is preferable than the current in-control Trump military wing.

Trump's anti-establishment pose has gotten some conservatives to somehow think they have one of their men on top---or at least a man against the Deep State. They are wrong, they are getting sucked in by a more brutal wing of the Deep State. I wonder if they will stand and salute as Trump's military parade marches through Washington D.C.

For true old-school conservatives and libertarians, there is essentially nothing good in the left or from Trump. We must attack and attack all of them.

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of  EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. The Robert Wenzel podcast is on  iphone and stitcher.