Winter 2020—Trumpism and Morality: Why Conservatives Can And Should Vote For The President

In the last few weeks, my mind has been driven time and time again to dwell upon the subject of eroding morality in our current cultural climate. I completed my undergraduate degree at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, a privately-funded religious institution of higher learning that has always maintained the highest standards of expected behavioral norms from its students. Recently, I received word from a close relative that BYU has rewritten portions of its honor code for expected student behavior. In this honor code revision, BYU removed language explicitly referring to homosexual behaviors as activities BYU students are forbidden from engaging in. After doing a little bit of my own research to confirm that this was all indeed true, I was disappointed and more than a little disgusted by all the social media posts I discovered of social justice warrior activists who descended upon BYU’s campus in the wake of the revised honor code in order to take pictures of themselves overtly participating in homosexual kissing, hand-holding, dating, protest rallying, and posing with rainbow-festooned statues of Brigham Young, the school’s namesake.

The declining moral values of our country have been on my mind for almost as long as I can remember being politically aware, but in the past few weeks especially, other people in my life have proactively presented the subject to me as something about which they’d like to hear my thoughts and opinions. Specifically, many people have asked me how I, as a conservative who has gradually come to enthusiastically endorse the Donald Trump presidency and reelection bid, feel about morality’s place in our current society and in our ongoing, rather contentious political discourse.

In this particular blog post, I would like to attempt to explain how my sense of morality lines up with and actually fits in with the political phenomenon coming to be known as Trumpism. I would especially like to have a go at explaining why and how someone like me can, should, and does choose to throw my electoral support behind a presidential candidate as morally flawed and insufficiently personally virtuous as Donald Trump.

The first issue that must be addressed when discussing this topic is the understanding of just where the greatest threat to America’s moral values is coming from. For people who view Trumpism as morally incompatible with everything decent people are allegedly supposed to value simply because its primary messenger, Donald Trump himself, is a deeply flawed individual, I would like to express my heartfelt and respectful opinion that such thinking is shortsighted and misses the true threat to traditional American cultural values coming from the political left.

When Donald Trump first announced his run for the White House, we all knew exactly who we were dealing with in terms of Trump’s personal history of immorality, bawdiness, and rhetorical cruelty in pursuit of crass showmanship. We were all familiar with his background as a flashy but oftentimes blustering New York business tycoon and media mogul who seemingly cared far more about appearances than actual principled substance of message. We were well acquainted with the many lewd stories of his affairs and sexual improprieties, about his insensitive remarks about women…remarks, I would hasten to add, ultimately helped to seal my own personal decision to not vote for Donald Trump in 2016.

My decision to not vote for Trump in 2016 came about through my own careful analysis of the Donald Trump I knew well (the New York billionaire playboy and seemingly shallow entertainment tycoon) and the Donald Trump I did NOT know well at all (the political herald of a new wave of allegedly conservative rage against the leftists’ progressive status quo of the Obama years). It was very, very hard for me to accept that Donald Trump, of all people, was capable of leading American conservatism back into its place in the sun. After all, I had never truly bought into the notion that Trump was ever really a political creature in the way of candidates like Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, and my favorite Republican primary candidate of 2016, Ted Cruz. Ultimately, when I chose to not vote for Donald Trump in 2016, I did so because I wasn’t sure I could trust him to actually be a conservative leader once he got into office. The choice to vote for someone else (no, I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton!) was finally a sure thing for me after I heard about how much disturbing pleasure Donald Trump takes in using his celebrity status as an excuse to grab women by the “p***y.”

It was only after the election of 2016, and after President Trump started leading our country, that I started to slowly realize that I had missed the Trump revolution. And believe me: I came to deeply regret it. As Donald Trump’s first years in office slowly crept by, I found myself less and less embarrassed by his stylistic eccentricities and downright childishness, and more and more impressed by his very real and very substantive—indeed, his very conservative—policy achievements. I came to realize, almost against my own prideful self-assurance that I had been right about him from the start, that Donald Trump had truly embraced his new role as leader of a new conservative movement in our country, a movement that has channeled a generation or two of pent-up frustrations at what many of us had been told for years would never change: that abortion is a dead topic for political discussion, that a woman’s right to choose to terminate the life of her unborn children is unquestionable and undeniable; that traditional definitions of gender identity are inappropriate and oppressive, and that Martin Luther King Jr.’s creed that we should simply be color-blind about how we judge each other by “the content of our characters” and not by “the color of our skins” is nothing more than an excuse for white supremacist racism; that the traditional institution of marriage between men and women was unfairly limiting and bigoted against love in its many varied and allegedly beautiful manifestations; that globalism was inevitable, and that allowing other countries to take advantage of America’s good will and generosity was simply par for the course; that big government proactively managing our lives was not only inevitable but also desirable, as it was the only way in which citizens in a complex modern world could ever possibly hope to have their needs and life aspirations sufficiently taken care of; that religious freedom could not be allowed to excuse hatred or even opinions that certain minority groups found offensive or even insensitive, and that freedom of speech was an old-fashioned and outdated idea that deserved far more governmental oversight and regulation in the pursuit of stamping out historical white male aggression; that to hope for any politician to seriously take on the problem of mass illegal immigration across our southern border was foolish and naïve at best, darkly racist and xenophobic at worst; that tribal politics of racial, sexual, and gender identity were the preeminent identifiers of personal identity, and that any calls for uniting around patriotism, nationalism, or American exceptionalism were simply throwbacks to the Nazi party rallies of the 1930s; that climate change was the new social gospel we all had to force our lives to revolve around, that unless we embraced the doomsday scenarios of Al Gore and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we were little better than science deniers who deserved to be thrown in jail per the recommendations of none other than Bill Nye the Science Guy.

I know it’s hard for some people to accept that some of us think this way, but all of these things are moral issues for us conservatives. In the preceding paragraph, I mentioned just a few of the status quo bromides that I and millions of other Americans have been living with since at least the early 1990s. I don’t expect to convince any ideological leftists of just how angry we conservatives have become through the years as we’ve watched politicians from both major political parties accept and perpetuate these assumptions. Many of the aforementioned issues used to belong to nothing more than fringe elements of left-wing progressivism. However, with eight years of Barack Obama in the White House, many conservatives have watched their worlds crumble around them as the kookiness of radical leftism’s worst ideas have gradually become mainstreamed in the American Democratic Party. For those of us who went into the election of 2016 utterly convinced beyond all doubt that Hillary Clinton would win and continue the left’s assault on America’s moral character, this was unthinkably depressing.

And then…along came Trump.

Donald Trump is no white knight riding to the country’s rescue on a gleaming stallion down from the moral high ground of overwhelming virtue and purifying morality. Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was a visionary leader who was largely out-of-step with the rest of the political class’s way of thinking for most of his career as a political leader. Despite this, he persevered and convinced the rest of the country to follow where he boldly chose to lead. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is more of a pragmatic product of our times than many of us might originally care to admit. Trump is not a visionary, at least in terms of ideology. Instead, Trump is something that may be even far more suited to our contentious political climate than a “unifying” Ronald Reagan would have been.

Donald Trump is a rhetorical brawler who absolutely feeds off of the dirt and smut of political warfare. He fights for one reason and one reason only: to win. He doesn’t care how ugly the fight gets in order for him to win, and he doesn’t care how vicious and even cruel he appears in the course of the fight against his political enemies. Donald Trump is also not much in the way of being a traditional conservative ideologue, and this actually suits him well in convincing Americans from all walks of life and all political persuasions to support his agenda. Donald Trump is a pragmatist, and even his most ardent opponents fail to connect with reality when they accuse him of being a radical right-winger; indeed, many of Donald Trump’s policy preferences are totally in step with both Republican and Democratic doctrines of the early and mid-1990s. Most importantly, Donald Trump is an effective executive stopgap to leftism’s most radical assaults on America’s cultural morality even as he is a morally compromised individual himself. To reference pop culture: in several very important moral battlefronts, Donald Trump has become the avenger many of us distraught over eight years of Barack Obama have been looking for.

Again, as hard as it is for liberals or leftists to accept, many of us conservatives greatly appreciate the totally unexpected help Donald Trump has provided in rolling back the American left’s assault on our country in a variety of issues that yes, to us, are deeply moral.

Just yesterday, I listened to a female coworker of mine explain why no matter what Donald Trump says or does on any number of issues, she has made the nearly irrevocable moral decision to vote for Donald Trump because, as she put it, she has “no choice” but to vote for a man who understands that unborn fetuses have a right to life, a right to the government’s protection from abortion. To her, morality is what drives her to vote for and not against Donald Trump. The same could be applied to a whole host of other divisive contemporary debates. Whenever conservatives cheer at Donald Trump’s emphasis on putting U.S. interests ahead of other countries and their preferences, we are not cheering for racism or xenophobia. We are instead acknowledging the immorality of accepting without protest an inevitably rising communist China that lies and cheats and steals its way to power, of allowing Europe and Mexico to consistently take advantage of us in military alliances or trade deals while simultaneously working with Vladimir Putin’s Russia or sending impoverished citizens to our country via the lawbreaking channels of illegal immigration. Whenever conservatives applaud Donald Trump’s efforts to protect free speech and freedom of religious worship on college campuses, we are mindful of what Democratic candidates like Beto O’Rourke have worked so hard to convince us of: that it increasingly feels like the Democratic Party has declared war on religious groups. By attacking their tax-exempt statuses, by insisting that they be punished for teaching against same-sex marriage, and by vigorously having abortions "shouted" at them as expressions of women’s rights, America’s conservative churches are feeling driven—even morally impelled—to vote for Donald Trump. And when conservatives approve of President Trump’s calls for an end to sanctuary cities, increased social benefits for illegal immigrants, and illicit border crossings, we are simply affirming our moral rights as citizens to insist that laws are obeyed and that lawbreakers are punished…especially if those lawbreakers are violent criminals who have assaulted or murdered American citizens.

None of this is to say that Donald Trump is a true social, religious, or cultural conservative. None of this is to imply that he is the perfect champion. After all, I believe there is truth in the notion that Donald Trump was the most pro-homosexual president to ever assume office in the White House. And, of course, Donald Trump’s own personal history is filled with a legion of morally compromising happenings that rightly give Trumpism’s critics a lot of ammo in terms of accusing us conservatives of hypocrisy. I actually believe that if we are not careful about our language, we conservatives can easily fall into hypocrisy by criticizing the past moral indiscretions of, say, a Bill Clinton, while falling silent about Trump’s liasons with, say, a Stormy Daniels.

Luckily, one of the purposes of this blog is to help clarify my own language about these important topics. I would like to take yet another clarifying opportunity to make myself clear: while morally imperfect and deeply flawed as an individual, Donald Trump and Trumpism itself are still morally viable and superior alternatives to what the American left is currently offering out country.

Many good and moral people pose us Trump supporters rather probing questions about how we can live with ourselves while campaigning and voting for a president of the United States who cruelly belittles his political enemies, makes light of his past immoralities, and behaves in a manner that can only be described as embarrassingly crude and more than a little overtly misrepresentative of facts and reality. The most direct response is simple: considering the political agenda of the Democratic Party alternative, what other choice can a truly good and moral people make other than to enthusiastically support President Trump? As we move into this historic election year of 2020, it has become disturbingly obvious to many of us on the political right that the American Democratic Party has made it its goal to destroy our First Amendment right to free speech, our Second Amendment right “to keep and bear Arms,” and the republican process of electing the president through the Electoral College.

The American left has not only targeted these specific aspects of our constitutional republican form of government, it has also practically declared war on the idea of government as originally envisioned by the Founding Fathers themselves. Men like George Washington, John Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison never intended for the government of the United States of America to have unlimited power or potential in terms of running the lives of the citizens under its jurisdiction. A quick look at the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of the Bill of Rights will reveal that while the Founding Fathers intended for American citizens to enjoy nearly unlimited degrees of freedom and opportunity, they most certainly did not intend for the federal government to consider its own governing prerogatives anywhere near as endlessly expansive. James Madison himself provided a great deal of clarifying perspective when he taught us that “the powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce...The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.”

Unfortunately, the massive administrative and bureaucratic state that now makes up the bloated federal Leviathan that currently dictates so much of what does or does not happen in our private lives is only continuing to be eagerly maintained and fed by the modern Democratic Party. The Constitution of the United States of America says nothing about politicians forcing schools to allow boys to take showers in school bathrooms traditionally reserved for biological females, nor does it say anything about the bureaucratic state dictating to American families the alleged costs and benefits of health care insurance. The Constitution outlines the rules for a government that respects individual liberties, the separation of governmental branches into distinct areas of responsibility and authority, and the principles of federalism that provide for each state in the union to be its own localistic laboratory of republicanism. Thomas Jefferson warned us that the Constitution was written in support of the aforementioned principles of good government precisely because “the generalizing and concentrating [of] all cares and powers into one [governing] body” is what “has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun.”

The Democratic Party of 2020 has made it its mission to generalize and concentrate all of our cares into the governing body of the administrative state, a twisted and unrelenting bureaucracy that apparently relegates to itself the right to ban your private speech through college “safe spaces,” to strip you of the right to protect yourself, your loved ones, and your property through responsible gun ownership, to centralize electoral power in the big cities at the expense of rural America and the traditional republican manner of electing the president, and, in general, to further the progressive leftism of an increasingly morally insane “social justice” agenda that hardly masks an excruciatingly disgusting brand of tribal identity politics.

The politics of tribal identity have, in recent years, been taking on an increasingly sinister role in our already class-conscious society. Progressives and their policies usually provide unfair and dependence-inducing favors for the poor and unfair and corruption-inducing favors for the super-rich, all of which often come at the expense of the middle class, the traditional moral bedrock of civilizations and societies. In the past, the overwhelming electoral power of the middle class has often been enough to prevent the progressives from achieving some of their most radical and dangerous goals. However, we now live in a day and age where playing by the rules doesn’t count for much anymore, and our government uses the tax code to punish those who work hard. The middle class, along with its moderating morality, is losing its voice.

Progressivism is also gaining an increasingly strong foothold in the public education systems of our country. Today, in public schools across America, children are put into failing institutions that seek to replace the positive roles of parents, treat students as equals with the teacher, and foster lower standards and destroy the students’ impulses to compete and work hard. Many progressives are doing everything they can to eliminate school choice, home schooling, or any other educational system, principle, or practice that exists outside the stewardship of the state. Again, this is because progressivism is centered upon the notion that we, the people, do not know what’s best for our children; only the “experts” can adequately raise our children for us. After all, in the infamous words of Hillary Clinton, “it takes a village.” How is this not a moral prescription of its own?

Only a virtuous and moral nation is capable of freedom. In the end, all our problems come down to who we are as a people, and in recent years, the American people have fallen prey to too many temptations and fallacies that destroy republics like the one we have built here in the United States. We have more material abundance and technological advancement than at any other time in human history, and yet our people have lost sight of the basic concepts of family, civic participation, civil public discussion, service, respect, law and order, and public virtue and morality. Good families require good parents. Good communities require good neighbors. Good government requires good citizens. Yet we seem to have lost our grips on those things that used to make us good. At this time of need for values such as goodness, virtue, and modesty, religion is increasingly being targeted as a barrier instead of being embraced as an enabler. Nowadays, good people of religious backgrounds are seen as freaks, societal misfits, and primitive and backwards-thinking outcasts. This perception must be ended because without true religion, the American experiment in republican government will fail.

Ben Franklin once said: “Here is my creed: I believe in one God, the Creator of the universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is in doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion.”

Ben Franklin and the other Founders understood that religion is what ensures a healthy republic because it binds people together in ways that government and coercive force never can.

In other words, morality is what binds a healthy republic together.

Progressives don’t like religion or morality because these things unite individuals and families all while supplanting the power of the state and the supposed “greater good” of collectivist thinking. Progressives are usually careful, however, to never attack religion so openly; they often speak about the “greater good” and service to that good as the ultimate religious expression, thereby coopting religion into their version of the “social gospel.” It’s a dangerous logic to follow, and the American people must cease heeding its call. True religion—based upon a simple belief in God—must not be replaced by the social gospel of big government progressives because the real result will be the watering down and dilution of all the fundamental principles that religion has contributed to making America the great country that it was always meant to be. True religion encourages men to practice self-restraint; self-restraint is not in the progressives’ best interest, and you will be hard pressed to find any progressive that believes in restraining the power of government.

A philosophical and moral revolution based upon the principles of common sense is required to save this country. It is not an armed revolution of physical violence or insurrection. Rather, it is a revolution against the tyranny of progressive thinking and progressive ideology. The Founding principles of the nation are not outdated, are not unfair or evil, are not inappropriate for the challenges facing our country today. We must wonder what future generations of Americans will say about us. Will they say that we totally failed to see the calamities we were bringing upon ourselves by abandoning the fight against politicians and elitists who slowly took our country away from us? Or will they say that we rose up and unshackled ourselves from the habits and trends of our time—habits and trends that ultimately lead to slavery of the mind and soul? We must stand up for what is right, and we must commit to the truth starting now, even at the cost of sullied reputations…a small price to pay for the idea that is America.

Conservative talk show host and writer Dennis Prager recently expressed his viewpoint that what human beings crave more than anything else is meaning. The moral decline of the United States is having a real influence on individual lives increasingly devoid of meaning. Leftism has been attacking and destroying family, religion, and patriotism for several generations at this point; it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone that so many Americans, especially young people, are turning to new definitions of life meaning. For many young leftists, saving the planet from human-induced climate change is their new religion. For social justice warriors, fighting against the supposed racism and white supremacism of President Trump and his “America First” supporters gives their lives significance. Without the presence of God and the traditional family unit in their lives, young Americans will continue turning to leftism and radical progressivism. These trends have been accelerating ever since I was a little boy.

Ever since the early 1990s, problems have been developing in our country that are direct results of politicians in both major parties selling out our country in favor of a globalist elite culture that, unfortunately, leaves common everyday Americans behind. Donald Trump's rise to prominence as a politician was predicated upon his uniqueness as a candidate and as a messenger for a cause that even I was slow to catch on to. Donald Trump refused to buy into the Democrats' constant prophecies of inevitable American decline due to the alleged evils of capitalism. Instead, Trump said that capitalism was great! He said that any problems our country was experiencing were not due to a lack of greatness on the part of America's political or economic system, but because such systems had been hijacked and exploited by elites who had all but forgotten about putting their country and countrymen first. Donald Trump's message was also different from conservative Republicans, who had been harping for many years on America's cultural and moral decline (I myself am one of those Republicans); instead of focusing on the breakdown of America's moral culture (and let's face it, Trump is hardly in the position to do so given his own moral weaknesses), Trump focused instead on "Making America Great Again"...quite literally teaching that as long as material progress and economic prosperity and opportunity was afforded to ALL groups of Americans, the morality and culture problems would take care of themselves. And I think he was right. Political tribalism is losing its currency because of what Trump is accomplishing, and cultural and moral issues can now be faced with a lot more unity and clarity because fewer and fewer of us are listening to the nonsensical arguments of class jealousy and racial envy.

In arguing for support of Donald Trump and Trumpism as a moral decision, I am not willfully blinding myself to the viler aspects of President Trump’s character and behavior, and I am not saying my personal dislike for the man’s many morally compromising acts has been set aside in favor of cheerleading for “my team’s” electoral victory in 2020. Instead, I am arguing that the Trump administration’s moral influence upon our country has been overwhelmingly more positive than I ever thought possible back in 2016. It has been overwhelmingly more positive than I ever thought back then and more so than I imagine ANY of the current candidates running for president on the Democratic side of the aisle can currently offer our country. In moral terms, I believe that the choice between Trump and candidates like Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and even fake moderates like Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg is abundantly clear…and again, I emphasize that I am thinking in terms of morality. As a moral man who believes the American left is out to confiscate my wealth in the same ways that the ancient Israelite prophet, Samuel, warned about in the Old Testament, why in the world would I ever consider voting for an open socialist like Bernie Sanders?  Why would I do that when Donald Trump is doing such a great job of helping Americans of all backgrounds to get back to work at securing their own economic opportunities and prosperous futures? The same questions and comparisons could be made between Trump and all of the major Democratic candidates for president in 2020, and in each instance, I fervently believe Donald Trump to be the more moral choice.

--Christopher Peterson, February 29^th, 2020